Revised Playford essay available

I have published a heavily revised version of my essay/documentation John Playford Dancing Master: Rising Lines (link to original). The new version is, appropriately, titled John Playford Dancing Master: Rising Lines, Revised and Updated. It can be found on the Texas Scholar Works platform here: link to revision.

Here is the abstract:

This updates and substantially revises two publications of mine on the Texas Scholar Works platform: John Playford Dancing Master: Rising Lines (2010; 2015) and the corresponding section in Rising Lines in Tonal Frameworks of Traditional Tonal Music (2015). The main goal was to provide higher quality graphics, but I have also written a new introduction as well as new analysis and commentary for almost all of the dances.

Lully and Playford

To provide some context for the two previous posts, in which I described the design of menuets from three Lully operas, here is a figure from my PDF essay on dance design (link). This is also Table 1 in my 2006 article on the contredanse and the finales of Haydn and Mozart sonatas and symphonies (link).

A tabulation of design for first strains of music in various editions of Playford's English Dancing Master (all editions after the first: Dancing Master). The first edition was published in 1651, the seventeenth (and last) in 1728.

What I call "4-bar themes" are similar to Lully's first strains that are really phrases, not themes in Caplin's sense. In Playford's first edition, these 4-bar themes predominate (see the second column in the table). Next in line are the sentence and the antecedent-continuation model, confirmation of the importance of both in 17th century music. In the later editions (see the third column), the obvious change is what we might call the rise of the period and a drop in the number of sentences.

Here is one example of a dance whose music starts with a "4-bar theme": Lady Cullen. "Theme" and "section" are the same, if one takes the repeat sign as a section demarcator, in the same way as in almost all later dances. If we include the repeat, then the resulting eight bars (that is, mm. 1-4 twice) are a period (though an awkward one in which the antecedent closes on the tonic). If we regard the entire piece (mm. 1 to 4 + 5 to 8) as a single theme, then it is antecedent-continuation. If we include all repeats (1 to 4 + 1 to 4 + 5 to 8 + 5 to 8), the result is a compound (16-measure) sentence.

"4-bar theme"; antecedent of an antecedent-continuation; (with repeat) period; presentation unit of a 16-measure sentence. Of course, the actual design of Lady Cullen when used for dancing will be this: if L stands for the music, then LLLLLLLL. . . as many times as needed for all to complete the figures (this is a long dance, where the length of the dance depends on the number of people dancing).

All this reminds us (1) that the formal function depends on the level one is considering; (2) that Caplin's model does have an unfortunate repetition of labels at 8-bar and 16-bar levels; (3) that in 17th century music there is a fluid relationship between phrase, section, and theme.

Rising lines in the Playford collections

Although rising cadence figures are by no means unknown before the mid-eighteenth century, I was surprised to find that the volumes of John Playford's [English] Dancing Master were a rich source for music with rising lines. I have created a PDF essay with examples: link to Playford.  [Note: link updated 6-09-16]

And here is a sample, "From Aberdeen":