Pecháček, 12 Ländler (1801)

František Martin Pecháček (1763-1816) was a Bohemian violinist, conductor, and composer who spent his professional career in Vienna as a conductor in the Landstraßer and Kärtnerthor theaters. He was the father of the violin virtuoso Franz Xaver Pecháček.

A prolific composer, Pecháček senior wrote in all contemporary genres, including music for social dance. His 12 Ländler, for an ensemble unusual in the repertoire of the waltz—2 clarinets, 2 horns, and bassoon—were published in 1801.

Like Beethoven's Ländler in WoO11 and WoO15, written at the same time, this set provides an excellent example of the violinistic Ländler in its traditional form—as distinct from the later keyboard Ländler of Schubert and many other composers in the 1820s, who strive to make the Ländler congenial and specific to the piano, holding to the form and characteristic figures but using less common keys often with chromatic twists and exaggerated registral play, the result being to blur the distinction between music for dance and music for recital. A characteristic Pecháček's 12 Ländler do share with later Ländler is their repetitiousness, a marker of their primary role as music for dance, not for performance.

I have reproduced the first clarinet part below, with annotations about themes in the first strains. Of the twelve pieces, the first strains of two are clearly—and two more are probably—presentation + consequent themes, the type with least variation in its units. Five are clearly periods—and two others might be. There is just sufficient difference between basic idea and contrasting idea to identify the opening phrases as antecedents. In the majority of the numbers, the theme's cadential idea is derived from the figure of bars 3-4.

What applies to the first strains also does to the second.

Published parts downloaded from IMSLP.
Wikipedia article on Pecháček: link

A contredanse gigue for the Vestris company

On my Ascending Cadence Gestures blog, I have written a post about a simple contredanse gigue in a collection of dances written by G. B. Noferi for a Vestris family company performing in London; the collection was published in 1781. Link.

Through almost all of the eighteenth century and the first decades of the nineteenth, the two basic types of contredanse music were the gavotte (I wrote about that here: link) in cut time or 2/2 (though after mid-century often in 2/4), and the gigue, written early on in 6/4 but later almost always in 6/8. Strains in published dances were almost always period themes in eight bars -- as in the contredanse gigue in the post linked above.

Here are two additional examples from the Noferi collection. These treat the formal design differently, which would be unlikely in music meant for amateurs but is by no means unusual in numbers for professional dancers. In the first strain of the gavotte, the consequent phrase is transposed and recognizable as a consequent only through the head motive. The second strain combines a contrasting middle (Caplin's term: here a phrase that closes on a half cadence) followed by a reprise of the beginning with a full cadence to end. In every instance, the two-bar units of the gavotte are consistently maintained.

In the gigue, the first strain is a textbook period, the second an equally typical sentence (a two-bar idea followed by a transposed repetition, then by a phrase that breaks up into smaller motives).