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).

Menuet series 2-2c: Pointel's Recuiel des Dances (Amsterdam, 1688)

For sake of comparison with the 15 menuets discussed yesterday, here are five other pieces from Antoine Pointel's Recuiel des Dances. These were chosen more or less randomly from several early pages—with somewhat awkward consequences, as we shall see.

The first has an antecedent+continuation design in the first strain, a design I frankly expected to find more often in the menuets, certainly more than 1 out of 15. In this instance the continuation phrase modulates, which is rare enough in the contredanse literature that one suspects the piece is actually "borrowed" from somewhere else. As indeed turns out to be case. Ironically, given the context of this series of posts, "Plaisir" is taken from Lully: the penultimate number in the Prologue to Phaëton (1683), the opening of which is reproduced below Pointel's score (adapted from Nicholas Sceaux's modern notation). The single pick-up note and consistent two-bar groups suggest the bourrée.

"Qu'a L'Envy" turns out to be another borrowing from Lully, this time the chorus in Acis et Galatée, Act II, scene 6 (1686). Clearly a gavotte en rondeau, Pointel's version follows the original closely, deleting only the flute flourishes that punctuate each phrase. In this instance, the first strain—the rondeau theme—is a true 4-bar theme in Lully's opera; there is no repetition, no additional text. In Pointel's version, we assume that the first strain is meant to be repeated, given the sign at the end of the first system.

"Dite Moy Ianeton" is a much simpler tune. At 4+8 it fits the (presumably) older type that has been a focus of discussion in these recent posts: an antecedent-like phrase that would generate a period if one includes its repetition. An assumption of an 8+8 design by musicians and dancers both seems very likely, given that this is obviously a gavotte—in the older notation that begins with beat 1 rather than beat 3. The gavotte was much given to very square designs, and eventually (by 1730, probably earlier) became overwhelmingly the type of the 2/4 contredanse.

Another simple tune, "L'Escossoise" is a jig in three-bar phrases, a rarety that speaks to its age by 1688. Within this constraint, the first strain is a clear antecedent-consequent period.

"L'Argentine" is another jig with a 4+4 period design in the first strain, but with an unusual move to III in the antecedent (see bar 4). The modal touches throughout suggest, again, that this tune is considerably older than its publication by Pointel in 1688.

What did we learn from this survey of random items? Perhaps mainly the fact of the randomness once we leave the confines of the named menuets. That in itself is nothing odd—anthologies from Playford on into the many in the 19th century draw on a wide variety of sources.

We can say that these five additional numbers confirm—indeed, magnify the significance of—the several, not single, options for the first strain: here we have encountered virtually all the possible options, from a true 4-bar theme to the 8-bar period that is barely more than the four bars repeated to a 6-bar period to a "true" 8-bar period with non-tonic close in the antecedent. ("True" here, of course, means the cliché of the period in the later 18th century.)

Gavotte periods from French contredanse sources

In a post on my "Schubert blog" I wrote about the connection between the gavotte, the French contredanse, and the sudden uptick in use of the period theme (term after Caplin) in Viennese music in the 1770s: link to the post.     [NOTE: links updated 6-09-16]

Here are some examples. These are taken from dance instruction manuals or pamphlets available on the Library of Congress website. I have compiled a set of links that makes access to pages with music much easier: these are in an appendix to this PDF essay: link.

The first two pieces come from a [short treatise] published in the early 1780s, in which the author, a dancer named Alexis Bacquoy-Guedon, offers what amounts to a historical account of dance measures. The first piece below is called "Air" but is obviously a gavotte. The second is labeled "Contredanse." Both use the older (that is, seventeenth-century) notation in alla breve time (2/2 meter), treat quarter notes as diminutions, and consistently mark the phrases in the manner of the gavotte. Notice that in both cases the main theme is a clearly marked period, and the contrasting theme is a sentence.

In the early eighteenth century, as part of a broad shift away from the half note to the quarter note as the beat basis, gavottes were sometimes notated in common time (4/4), but the next two dances show a more radical change that was commonplace after mid-century: writing the gavotte in 2/4 time. (See examples in Haydn and Mozart finales in my [article] on the contredanse: such finales are essentially "sped-up" and stylized gavotte-contredanses.) The two scores below come from a [bound collection of contredanses] from the 1760s (probably originally published individually in serial fashion as folios or chapbooks).  Of the four eight-bar strains in [La Mienne], the first three are periods, and the last is a sentence. Properly, bars 9-16 would have to be called a period with a failed consequent because of the half cadence. Both strains of [La Victorieuse] are periods.