Administrative

17 October 2014: This blog, dormant since March 2014, is being revived. Some posts about dance musics in the period 1650-1850 on my original blog Hearing Schubert D779n13 will be moved here. Posts relating to William Caplin's form theory and its literature will be placed here, as well. A new blog, Ascending Cadence Gestures in Tonal Music, will accommodate other posts concerned with those particular figures but in music not belonging to Schubert's generation. There will inevitably be some overlap: dances and dance songs with those figures will be discussed there, too, unless the only point under consideration is their formal design.

[NOTE: links updated on 6-09-16; see below]    Certain other files available through links are no longer accessible because the server was decommissioned. I am currently working on a solution to make available those PDF documents containing material I have either put together for class use or otherwise gathered from the Hearing Schubert D779n13 blog:

1. Schubert, Dance, and Dancing in Vienna, 1815-1840.  Link to PDF essay.   Additional file: A cotillon in the manner of Schubert (score and audio): Link to Cotillon.
2. Formal functions for phrase, theme, and small forms, following William E. Caplin, Classical Form: A Theory of Formal Functions for the Instrumental Music of Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven (Oxford University Press, 1998), summary and examples with related information and data on dance musics and their performance in the same period.     Link to PDF essay.

Improvised variations in the quadrille

Franz Hünten (aka François Hünten) published a Premier Quadrille de contredanses variées, suivi d'un galop as his Opus 63. The date is about 1834; a facsimile is available on IMSLP, as a digital copy of the facsimile published in an anthology by Garland about twenty years ago.

The work contains the usual five numbers of the quadrille as they were standardized in the early 19th century, plus a specific genre dance appended, as was the custom in published quadrilles at least through mid-century. In this case it's a galop; it might also have been a waltz or, after 1840, a polka.

The interesting feature of Hünten's quadrille is that the alternate strains in all five numbers are varied when repeated but the refrain (first strain) is not. The design of each number is ABACABACA. This provides 72 bars of music for the dance, or 8 for the promenade and 64 for the figures. See the graphic below for incipits of the refrain, B, C, and the variants of B & C.

I suspect that the composer is duplicating a common practice of performers (most often pianists) in house balls and similar dancing occasions (as with the post-Schubertiade dancing of Schubert's friends, for example). The unembellished refrain provides a stable guidepost for the design -- and therefore for the dancing -- while the variations on the alternate strains not only provide additional contrast with the refrain but also reflect what a creative (or bored) pianist very probably did in the course of dancing that could go on for a half hour to an hour at a time.

Air no. 3 in rondeau

To demonstrate how easily designs for social dance music can be (and almost certainly were) manipulated to create different sequences, here is Bacquoy-Guedon's Air no. 3 [see previous post] reconstructed: (1) to expand the opening section to a 16mm theme, a period whose antecedent is the original 8-bar period and whose consequent alters the ending to form a perfect authentic cadence (PAC); (2) to create the five-part rondeau design, ABACA, that is frequently found in French contredanse publications, especially later in the 18th century. My version differs from those of Clarchies in that section C is in the original key, where a trio-like minor-key strain would be more likely. It does, however, introduce some chromaticism (in F-nat5) and is an unusual length (12 bars rather than 8). With all the repeats included, and assuming one second per bar, this rondeau design yields over two minutes of music.

Other examples of this kind of formal manipulation may be found in chapter 2 of my PDF essay Dance Designs in 18th and Early 19th Century Music: link.     [NOTE: link updated 6-09-16]

Menuet history in Bacquoy-Guedon's treatise

Today's post is a complement to the "gavotte history" of eighteenth-century social dance. Already in the court of Louis XIV, a distinction was made between the solo or couple dance of the menuet and the group dance of the contredanse. The first strongly emphasized individual skills and performance, whereas the second emphasized group figures. Under Louis XV, the menuet started to lose favor, becoming a more or less perfunctory beginning to a ball whose main focus was the contredanse. (Richard Semmens, The bals publics at the Paris Opéra in the Eighteenth Century)

In Bacquoy-Guedon's treatise, the musical examples begin with six "Airs, servant pour exerçer à la mesure du minuet." These are followed by six pieces labeled "menuet," the first four of which have minor-key trios. Together, these 12 pieces chart a history of the dance's music from the seventeenth to the mid-eighteenth century. Bacquoy-Guedon's commentary on these examples starts on [p. 29 of the treatise].

The first two menuets use an antiquated 3/2 meter (something one rarely sees even in Lully), and their first strains differ in design: sentence in no. 1 and antecedent-continuation in no. 2. The third and fourth airs have an Italianate motivic density that produces an ambiguous presentation-consequent pair in no. 3 but a straightforward sentence in no. 4.

 The introduction of eighth-note figures in the sixth air makes it stylistically almost indistinguishable from the first menuet. The opening strains of the fifth and sixth airs, menuets 1-4, and their trios, are all cast in the hybrid antecedent-continuation design, strongly suggesting the eighteenth century turn toward a conventionalized design for the menuet.

 Only in the fourth menuet does the sentence re-emerge (or perhaps presentation-consequent, depending on how you interpret bars 5-6). Its trio copies the design, as does menuet no. 5, before the conventional antecedent-continuation design reappears in no. 6.

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.