Menuet series 2-9 (Werner)

This is an entertaining oddity -- though such fanciful collections are by no means uncommon in the 17th and 18th centuries: Gregor Joseph Werner's Neuer und sehr curios- Musicalischer Instrumental-Calender from 1748 (IMSLP link). The suites are organized by month and in each of them the menuet clocks the hours of the day. The months of January and July are represented here, the former with nine hours of daylight and fifteen hours of night, the latter month with the opposite. Needless to say, Werner's dozen menuets offer little for analysis of typical menuet characters--but they do speak to the remarkable flexibility of the genre. One cannot imagine a gavotte (or even a rigaudon or bourée) being treated this way at any point in the century.

(January)

(July)