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

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.

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

Antoine Pointel fled France for the Calvinist Netherlands in 1685. In Amsterdam he quickly established himself as a successful printer. The Deusiesme recuiel des dances et contre-dances was published in 1688. A translation of its complete title is "Second Anthology of Dances and Contradances appropriate for performance by all manner of instruments. By various authors." Pointel gives his first name as "Antony" on the title page.

Its sixty six numbers (table of contents at the end of this post) place a treble melody on the left-hand page with a bass on the right-hand page. The bass has scant figures and is marked "continuo."

Here is an example -- I have positioned the two parts vertically for readibility.

For reasons unknown, the table of contents as given on its IMSLP page (link) is almost entirely wrong. I have assembled a contents list from the file itself; that is given below. In tomorrow's post, I will begin discussion of the fifteen named menuets scattered throughout the volume.

1. Courante
2. Courante

3. Bouree d'Orange

4. Bouree

5.-12. 8 Menuets

13. Menuet de Galatee
14. Menuet
15. Galliarde “La Patetique”
16. Passepied
17. Passepied de France
18. Passepied nouveaux
19. Plaisir venez sans crainte
20. Qu'a l'envy chacun se presse

21. Rigodon
22. Bouree, Deuxieme Air du Rigodon
23. Carillon La Vigne

24. Dite moy Ianeton

25. Le Trembleurs
26. L’Escossoise
27. L’Argentine
28. La Marche Angloise
29. La Marche des Dragons
30. Les Macabees
31. L’Isabel
32. La Vigne
33. L’Opera
34. La Valentine
35. Les Caprices d’Amour

36. La Vienne
37. Le Jardin de Cupidon
38. La Gigue du Roy
39. Preno Do
40. La Manche Verte
41. Menuet

42. Sawnay
43. La Sophie
44. La Richemont
45. La Cloris
46. La Gaillard Simon
47. La Belle Helleine
48. Rigodon Nouveaux
49. La belle Marie
50. Gigue
51. Gigue nouvelle
52. Chaconne
53. Bouree
54. Passepied
55. Les Dames de Londre

56. Ayr Escossoys
57. Menuet
58. Courante
59. Tricotes
60. Menuet
61. Passepied
62. Entree
63. Menuet
64. Entree nouvelle
65. Menuet
66. Suiet Italien

Menuet series 2-1: Rebecca Harris-Warwick on irregular phrase groups in Lully

After rather a long while I am picking up the menuet historical survey series again. The last post was nearly a year ago, on 17 June 2016: link.

A few days before that, I wrote, in connection with menuets in Lully operas:

A look at these menuets shows -- by negative example -- how closely Caplin's analysis model and terms fits music of the later 18th and early 19th centuries. When ideas are three bars rather than two and clearly demarcated, there is no problem. Six-bar phrases are common enough in 17th century music, and especially in menuets. The difficulty arises at the next level, as these six-bar phrases consisting of two three-bar ideas are often treated as the first strain in a small binary form. In the analyses here, I have in most instances understood the entire piece as a prolonged theme. Since the distinction is based on length, however, that is not entirely satisfactory as a method. (link to post)

Rebecca Harris-Warwick has explored the issue of varying and irregular phrase lengths and groups more thoroughly in a chapter for the volume Lully Studies (citation at the end of this post). She "demonstrates that only a small proportion of Jean-Baptiste Lully's dance music—roughly a quarter of his binary pieces—is based on consistent four- or eight-bar phrases, a point that remains valid even for generic dances such as the minuet, gigue, or gavotte" (from the RILM abstract).

For example, in the category she refers to as "celebratory dances" (marked as and performed as dances), "the affect may be predictable, but the phrase structure of the dances is not." In several examples she cites, "the reigning affect is joy, and nothing suggests that Lully automatically assigns five-bar phrases to shepherds or nine- and eleven-bar phrases to river gods. On the contrary, the same set of characters may perform back-to-back dances with completely different metrical structures" (49). Even in some of the most formal dance types, such as the theatrical entrée, highly flexible phrase designs reign. Two surviving choreographies of this type, "both . . . for a man and a woman[,] draw upon [a characteristically] intricate and technically demanding step vocabulary. Both demonstrate not only that irregular and varied metrical structures pose no impediment to choreography, but also that such structures are perfectly compatible with dances in the noble style. Lully [composed them] as representatives of the art of dance. The art they exhibit is subtle, and varied, not restricted to predictable, square phrases" (54).

In still another example, Harris-Warwick notes that the music for a dance may appear irregular if heard on its own, but it may well gain a strong sense of symmetry when combined with the dance (as in the mirroring patterns commonly found in menuets) (56). The implications for research are obvious: "dance music operates in conjunction with the visual and the kinetic. A study of the phrase structures of Lully's dances needs to take these intersecting systems into account." 

And the historical generalization she derives from all this is as follows: "Lully [was not] alone in this 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).

All this seems consistent with my own assertions in blog posts about Lully menuets (link to the first of three), for example, "Form descriptions of Lully menuets from the operas show the fluidity (and uncertainty) of design analysis based on Caplin's model and terminology. We saw in the vocal and instrumental menuets from Atys and Proserpine that the design can appear to be simultaneously a small form and a prolonged theme, and that in the latter case an initial phrase is followed by two continuation phrases" (link). 

Reference:
Rebecca Harris-Warwick, "The Phrase Structures of Lully's Dance Music." In John Hajdu Heyer, ed., Lully Studies, pp. 32-56. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).

Michael Pamer, Neue brillante Ländler

I have published the first of two posts on Michael Pamer's Neue brillante Ländler (12 volumes, 1827): link. Pamer is widely regarded as the skilled musician who brought the style of the "Linzer Geiger" into dance halls and house balls, though it was his protegés, Lanner and Johann Strauss, sr., who became famous for it.

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.

The 4 "C"s: on second phrases

In my PDF essay Dance and Dance Designs in 18th and Early 19th Century Music (link), I came to the following conclusions about first strains after a study of Beethoven menuets and German dances:

(1) the surprising variety of forms -- or, to put this negatively, the "stereotypical" period is by no means the most common type--although the "weak antecedent" [compound basic idea] plus consequent does appear, in fact more often than any other type--nor is the sentence so common as one might expect; 


(2) the large number of hybrid forms; 
 

(3) the weakness of the functional terminology at capturing a strong sense of contrast between bars 1-4 and 5-8 -- it is evident that the label "continuation" is too broad, but it is, on the other hand, difficult to think what might effectively distinguish a "contrasting phrase" from a continuation. Nevertheless, the idea of immediate and sharp contrast between phrases (and strains) is a particular feature of the waltz, one that is related to a similar tendency in later 18th-century menuets and that persists -- as a contrast of strains -- far into the waltz's later history.  (48)

The first of these has been the focus of posts on this blog over the past month or two. The second is obviously a corollary to the first. The third is the point of interest here. (Material in this post comes in part from my online essay Form Functions in Menuets by Beethoven and Others, 1770-1813:
A Contribution to the History of Design for Dance Musics: link.)

With the caveat that I make no claims about other genres than music for social dance, I have expanded terminology for the second phrase in an 8-bar theme from two items to four:

1. consequent, as in Caplin. This has two subclasses: literal repetition of bars 1-2 as 5-6, and transposed bars 1-2 as 5-6. The transposition is most often by step.
2. continuation, as in Caplin. This subsumes continuation-cadential and cadential as subclasses (which is in any case the way Caplin treats them: harmonically determined variants of the "classic" continuation phrase). For dance music, the two new classes of complement and contrast effectively reduce continuation to the "Op2n1" case (Caplin's first example for the sentence), where the motive of the opening is repeated but fragmented in bars 5-6. I have discarded continuation-cadential and cadential because they are harmonically determined, where I would claim that melodic features are more expressive and determinative in music for social dance (even in Schubert).
3. complement. Use "complement" or "complementary phrase." The most common case uses rhythms and/or melodic figures internal to the first phrase.
4. contrast. Use "contrast" or "contrasting phrase." Figures are pointedly different from anything in the first phrase.

The list assumes a continuum from a strong sense of repetition to a strong sense of contrast or difference. As always, many themes may accept labels easily, others may require interpretation. In the latter case, it is important to preserve the interpretation through comment (as Caplin routinely does), rather than simply apply the label and therefore threaten to conflate the clear and the ambiguous.

The justification for these additions—beyond taxonomic completeness or subtlety—is that dance pieces are miniatures, and qualities that we might give little attention to in the larger-scale environment of a small ternary or sonata movement acquire more importance in the close quarters of a 16 bar menuet or ecossaise. Dances in Mozart's or Schubert's generations were chains of such miniatures, tied together by the continuity of the dance itself, not by some sort of emergent unity of motive, tonality, or expression.

Here, without comment, are "classic" examples of each of the four types listed above.

Consequent (1): Mozart, 12 Menuets, K. 164 (1772), n1 trio

Consequent (2): Beethoven, 12 Menuets, WoO7 (1795), n11

Complement: Beethoven, 12 Menuets, WoO7 (1795), n12

Continuation: Mozart, K. 585, n6

Contrast: Beethoven, 12 Menuets, WoO7 (1795), n7

Guide to the Schubert blog

I have put together a guide to the 200+ entries in my blog Hearing Schubert D779n13: link. Among its sections are several that are also relevant, directly or indirectly, to this blog, particularly Topics 2 & 3 and Appendices 6 & 7. Here is the table of contents:

Introduction 

Topics 1: Analyses of Schubert, Valses sentimentales, n13, Waltz in A Major
Topics 2: Schubert, Playing for Dance, Dance in Vienna 1815-1830
Topics 3: Formal Design and Functions in Music for Social Dance
Topics 4: Responses to Criticism of the Ascending Urlinie 

Appendix 1: Complete list of blog posts, with links
Appendix 2: Complete list of tags (“Labels”)
Appendix 3: Tally of the analyses of D779n13
Appendix 4: Bibliography (that is, an alphabetical list of all literature citations)
Appendix 5: Blog Ascending Cadence Gestures in Tonal Music, complete list of posts, with links
Appendix 6: Blog Dance and Dance Music, 1650-1850, complete list of posts, with links
Appendix 7: Blogs Ascending Cadence Gestures in Tonal Music and Dance and Dance Music, 1650-1850, complete list of tags (“Labels”)