In an earlier post (link), I quoted Rebecca Harris-Warwick's historical generalization about dances in Lully operas:
Lully [was not] alone in [his] flexible approach to the construction of dances; seventeenth-century dance music in general exhibits a much freer approach to phrase structures than does the dance music of the eighteenth century, one that embraces irregularity and sees square phrasing as only one possibility among many. The notion that stretching a four-bar phrase into six represents a deliberate distortion of an underlying dance pattern may be tenable in regard to a Haydn minuet, but not to one by Lully. (55-56).
Antoine Pointel's anthology (see yesterday's post for more information) was published in 1688 and provides a good, contemporaneous foil to the repertoire that Harris-Warwick examines. I will begin with the fifteen menuets that can be found among the sixty six numbers in the volume.
In the table below, the first column is the page on which the treble voice appears (a and b signify upper and lower parts of a page). The second column is the number of bars in the piece, where the first number is the first strain and subsequent numbers are the second and any later strains. The third column identifies the design of the first strain, and the fourth column adds qualifying notes.
Page
|
bars
|
first strain
|
Notes
|
4
|
8 + 8
|
Period
|
IAC
|
6a
|
8+8
|
Period
|
IAC; almost 4 bar theme repeated
|
6b
|
8+8
|
Period
|
IAC; almost 4 bar theme repeated
|
8a
|
8+10
|
Period
|
IAC; almost 4 bar theme repeated
|
8b
|
6+12
|
Period
|
IAC
|
10a
|
8+8
|
Period
|
PAC
|
10b
|
8+8
|
Ant-cont
|
Close on V
|
12a
|
8+8+8
|
Period
|
Almost 4 bar theme repeated; final 8 is a reprise (dal segno)
|
12b
|
6+6+6+6+6
|
Period
|
PAC; overall 5-part rondo design
|
14a
|
8+12
|
Period
|
HC; almost 4 bar theme repeated
|
42
|
8+4+8
|
Period
|
Transposed opening for consequent; final 8 is a reprise (dal segno)
|
62
|
8+4+8
|
Period
|
Almost 4 bar theme repeated; antecedent closes on ^1
|
66
|
8+16
|
Period
|
Ends with HC
|
68
|
8+12
|
Period
|
Ends with HC
|
70
|
8+8
|
Period
|
Ends with IAC
|
Clearly, common social dance practices relied heavily on clear-cut and simple designs, even in menuets. It is hardly a surprise; we see much the same thing in Playford's English Dancing Master, which was first published in 1651 and had reached its seventh edition by 1686. Only two of Pointel's fifteen menuets use the alternative six-bar (3+3) pattern in the first strain, and those two follow through on it consistently in the second and later strains.
Playford's collection is dominated by what I call the "4-bar theme," where the first strain consists of a single phrase and we presume to get the effect of a period theme with the repetition. We saw several of these in my earlier Lully menuet posts. The result, as I noted there, is confusion between levels of the design. Here is an example, a dance that first appeared in Playford's 7th edition:
The notation is from Frank Kidson's Old English Country Dances (1890). He calls this "an exceedingly fine and marked air of Charles the Second's time." It reveals nicely the problem of the 4-bar theme, here a clear antecedent phrase except that it ends with a PAC (the after-beat elaborations in bar 4 do help a bit to blunt the effect).
In Pointel's Recuiel, the first strains are written out as periods, but, as the examples below show, the amount of variation between antecedent and consequent is so minimal that the kinship with the 4-bar theme is obvious.
As I have written multiple times already in blog posts and in essays published on Texas Scholar Works, the published versions of these dances were only starting points for performance and dance—I have compared them to lead sheets. A period effect would be increased if the piece is texted -- as did happen with "The 29th of May," for example, but with a good many other tunes in Playford, as well.
