Music Appreciation

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• Music Appreciation

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Dance in the 17th Century

• In the 17th century dance
• a fundamental social grace
• a means of training the body for polite society,
  
• as an art increased.
• French monarchy,
• Dance achieved official recognition through the
  establishment in 1661 of the Académie Royale de
  Danse (eight years before a similar academy was
  founded to support opera
• During this period dance technique advanced
  rapidly, and the vocabulary it engendered much
  of it still in use in ballet today radiated
  along with French dances out to the rest of
  Europe.
• French dancing absorbed influences from other
  countries, especially Italy, Spain and, later in
  the century, England.
• Across Europe dance was not only a necessary
  practice for those wishing to demonstrate (or to
  achieve) social standing, but also a fundamental
  element in such politically charged spectacles as
  court balls and ballets. The rhythms of the dance
  even penetrated such genres as sacred music.

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Dance Categories

• Two broad and overlapping categories
• dance music composed to set dancers in motion
  functional dance
• dance music intended for listening. stylized
  dance
• differences can be observed in both
  instrumentation and repertory.
• In France, the primary instrument for
  accompanying dancing was the violin
  Dancing-masters were often violinists who
  composed their own music.
• Outside France dance was sometimes accompanied by
  plucked string instruments the lute in Italy
  and the guitar in Spain. Functional dance music
  was generally performed by consorts primarily
  members of the violin family, but also double
  reeds or, as the century progressed, by the
  emerging orchestra.
• On the other hand, the dance music found in
  suites for solo lute or harpsichord, and later
  for viol, flute or other melody instrument with
  continuo, was composed for listening. As a
  consequence of this distinction, the repertory
  for such ensembles as the 24 Violons du Roi (also
  known as the grands violons), which played for
  balls and ballets, differs in content from the
  solo suites of composers such as Gaultier and
  Chambonnières in France or Froberger in Germany.
  Although such dance types as the courante and
  sarabande appear in both repertories, the various
  types of branle are much more numerous in the
  functional dance literature, whereas the
  allemande became one of the building-blocks of
  the Baroque solo suite.

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Dance Louis XIV

• Preserved much of the music by Lully and his
  predecessors, the king took an interest in having
  the dances from his reign preserved as well.
• During the 1680s at least three different
  systems of choreographic notation were developed
  in France
• for the notation of contredanses, by André Lorin
  
• a schematic staff notation by Jean Favier, which
  preserves the only completely choreographed
  theatrical work from the period,
• a third system invented by Pierre Beauchamp,
  choreographer at the court and the Paris Opéra,
  but exploited commercially by Raoul-Auger
  Feuillet. Feuillet's book Chorégraphie, published
  in 1700, reached a wide audience throughout
  Europe. Not only helping disseminate the French
  style of dance internationally, the system was
  used by other dancing-masters and notators to
  preserve their own.

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Dance Louis XIV

• By the end of the 17th century dance music
  composed for listening had its own conventions
  and was preserved in quite different types of
  sources. Whereas there was some overlap between
  the two repertories in that dances composed for
  the stage were frequently recycled for listening
  the arrangements of Lully's theatrical music
  into trio suites arranged by key being a case in
  point
• The only known instances of a dance composed for
  a solo or chamber suite later appearing on stage
  or in the ballroom occurred when a composer
  borrowed from himself. Rameau, for example,
  reused Les sauvages from his Nouvelles suites
  de pièces de clavecin of 1728 in his opéra-ballet
  Les Indes galantes of 1735, but pieces by
  composers who wrote for the salon, such as
  François Couperin, do not appear in collections
  of practical dance music.

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• The gradual disappearance of the suite did not
  lead to a decline in the composition of dance
  music not only did dance remain an important
  component of theatrical entertainments throughout
  the 18th century, but dance-based movements
  infiltrated almost every genre of instrumental
  music, from the Italian opera overture to the
  solo sonata to the Viennese Classical symphony,
  although their presence was often masked by the
  simple tempo markings used to designate
  movements.
• Several Baroque dance types, such as the
  courante, almost ceased to exist, whereas others,
  such as the gavotte, held on for considerably
  longer, while new dance types emerged,
  particularly from central Europe. On a technical
  level the division between social and theatrical
  dance practices grew wider, but there remained
  some overlap in repertory, and the dance types
  found in instrumental genres were borrowed from
  both the stage and the ballroom. In the emerging
  absolute instrumental music, composers began to
  treat dance as a topos which could draw on both a
  web of cultural associations and muscle memory.

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17301800

• Dancing remained an essential social grace in
  polite society, and, while balls continued to
  take place in courts and private homes, public
  venues also opened many opera houses began to
  host masked balls as a means of increasing their
  revenues and other types of public dance halls
  began to appear as the century progressed.
• The emphasis on the minuet was to become even
  more pronounced in later dance manuals. Although
  the republication of a few of Pécour's danses à
  deux as late as 1780 shows that they had achieved
  the status of classics, such dances were
  performed only at the most ceremonial of balls or
  else studied in dancing lessons for their
  pedagogic value by mid-century social dancing
  was dominated by the minuet and the contredanse.

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17301800

• Dancing remained an essential social grace in
  polite society, and, while balls continued to
  take place in courts and private homes, public
  venues also opened many opera houses began to
  host masked balls as a means of increasing their
  revenues and other types of public dance halls
  began to appear as the century progressed.
• The emphasis on the minuet was to become even
  more pronounced in later dance manuals. Although
  the republication of a few of Pécour's danses à
  deux as late as 1780 shows that they had achieved
  the status of classics, such dances were
  performed only at the most ceremonial of balls or
  else studied in dancing lessons for their
  pedagogic value by mid-century social dancing
  was dominated by the minuet and the contredanse.

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Minuet

• In the ballroom the minuet carried the weight of
  tradition and remained a vehicle for
  demonstrating proper deportment and the
  disciplined use of the body that was seen as
  essential for anyone aspiring to social standing.
• It remained primarily a dance for a single
  couple, while everyone else in attendance
  watched. The minuet outlasted the French
  Revolution
• Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven, among others,
  composed orchestral minuets for the ballroom.
• Moreover, the minuet remained in the theatrical
  repertory and can be found in operas and ballets
  throughout the century. Most prominently, it
  became the third movement of the Viennese
  Classical symphony and string quartet, where it
  was not infrequently subjected to the
  compositional manipulations of the high style
  (e.g. Mozart's Minuetto in canone in the Quintet
  in C minor k406, 1787). Outside France the
  Italianized version of the name (minuetto or
  tempo di minuetto) tended to appear as the
  heading for a movement, but the minuet is not
  always identified as such every time it appears
  a movement headed Rondo, for example, might be
  based on minuet rhythms.

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Allemande

• A term used generically during the late 18th in
  triple metre it was eventually replaced in
  general usage by the names of the two most common
  types, the Ländler (in which couples turned with
  arms interlaced) and the Waltz (in which they
  took swift turns while in a close embrace). It is
  difficult to say just when the term German
  Dance was first used, or when the French word
  Allemande began to refer to the relatively new
  couple-dance rather than to the
  Renaissance-Baroque processional dance that so
  often appeared in Baroque suites.
• French dancing-masters were apparently familiar
  with the German couple-dance early in the 18th
  century, for they included some ländler-like
  movements in the Contredanse (see Feuillets
  Recueil de dances, 1705), although these were
  modified to suit French taste (omitting, for
  example, the seemingly vulgar and inelegant
  embrace). After about 1760, however, the
  independent German Dance became popular it was
  included in published dance manuals, The new,
  socially accepted German Dance of the late 18th
  century consisted of a series of ländler-like
  passes, ending with a tentative (not too close)
  embrace. Tunes were at first in 2/4 or 3/8, the
  former being particularly characteristic of the
  ländler type of German Dance. Guillaume described
  a duple-metre German Dance that resembled the
  waltz, danced with a springing movement, and a
  triple-metre version, sometimes called the
  boiteuse (limping), that consisted of a step
  and hop. The author failed to show exactly how
  the steps fit with accompanying music but the
  movements he described fall most happily on the
  first and third beats of a bar

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Contredance

• One of the attractions of the contredanse was
  that it allowed several couples to dance at one
  time. The contredanse itself had various
  subcategories. The contredanse anglaise, often
  known simply as the anglaise, used a
  traditional English longways formation. The
  contredanse française, which came to be called
  the cotillon, involved two or, more often, four
  couples in a square formation. Both types
  generated huge amounts of material from all over
  Europe, both printed and manuscript dance
  notations with and without music, verbal
  descriptions of figures, and collections of music
  (for a partial list, primarily of French sources,
  see Guilcher, 1969 for illustration see
  Contredanse). Even though contredanses of both
  types involved a limited range of steps compared
  with the court dances, the sequence of figures
  could be quite complex. In his Trattato
  theorico-prattico di ballo (Naples, 1779) the
  Italian dancer Gennaro Magri praised the French
  practice of allowing at a ball only dancers who
  had memorized the steps and figures in advance
  in fact, he stated, the contredanse should not be
  done at all if there was any doubt that its
  performance would not meet a high standard.
  Magri's own contredanses sometimes use large
  groups of dancers one, composed for a mascarade,
  calls for 32 people. Following 1760 the
  contredanse allemande (sometimes, confusingly,
  called simply the allemande) swept Paris
  according to La Cuisse (Répertoire des bals,
  1765) it derived from the exposure the French
  army had to German dancing during the Seven
  Years War. This variation on the contredanse
  française added complex hand holds and passes
  under the arm to the figures of the dance. A
  group performing a contredanse allemande may be
  seen in the engraving Le bal paré (1774), by
  Duclos after Saint Aubin. (Behind-the-back hand
  holds and hands on the hips may be seen as
  markers of a German character in French dance as
  early as 1701.) In the last decade of the century
  yet another regional variant, the écossaise,
  began to appear in ballrooms.

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Dance through Time

• This DVD shows the most influential social dances
  of the French Baroque Court.
• The renowned Minuet is demonstrated with step and
  floor pattern detail.
• The complicated handholds of the Allemande are
  carefully delineated.
• The intricate patterns of the Contredance are
  brought to life by eight dancers.

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Dance Categories

• Functional dance music, two overlapping
  categories theatrical and social.
• Many of the courts in Europe cultivated some form
  of danced entertainment, called variously ballet,
  masque, ballo or intermedio, that involved both
  professional dancers and courtiers. Depending on
  the nature of the occasion and the means
  available, such spectacles could be extremely
  elaborate, with huge numbers of performers,
  elaborate sets and costumes, and even specially
  designed stage machinery. The content was often
  allegorical, with gods and heroes of ancient
  mythology standing in for members of the court,
  but at the same time a work might also contain
  comic or even burlesque elements.

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Middle Ages and early Renaissance

• The Middle Ages
• The key words saltare (saltatio), ballare
  (ballatio, bal, ballo) and choreare (choreatio,
  chorea, choreas ducere), as they were used by the
  church Fathers in either a critical or an
  approving sense.
• The classical Latin definition of saltatio was
  pantomime, that is, representative dance in the
  hands of professional performers. This became to
  jump or to leap and, as the technical term
  entered into the movement repertory of social
  dancing.

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The Middle Ages

• The more formal danse (danza, tantz, hovetantz)
  for couples or groups of three was, at least
  initially, the particular property of the
  nobility.
• The key words for the dance-technical execution
  are to walk (Middle High Ger. gên), to step,
  to slide, to glide (Middle High Ger. slîfen)
  the embellishing schwantzen (to strut
  literally, to wag the tail) is probably the
  medieval ancestor of the 15th-century campeggiare
  (Cornazano) and the pavoneggiare of the 16th
  century (Caroso, Negri), just as these elegant
  processional dances themselves stand at the
  beginning of an uninterrupted series which leads
  on to the classical Burgundian basse danse and
  the more elaborate Italian bassadanza of the 15th
  century, and then to the pavan of the high
  Renaissance.

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The Middle Ages

• The writings of medieval authors are full of
  references to the musical instruments that
  provided the accompaniment for dances.
• Tambourin, drums and bells, pipe and tabor,
  frestels, lutes, psalterion, gìgen (fiddles),
  organetto, bagpipes, shawms and trumpets in
  short, the entire palette of instrumental
  colours, either singly or in a variety of
  combinations, could be and was used to accompany
  dancing.
• Estampie and danse royale, stantipes, ductia and
  nota, saltarello and rotta, well documented in
  medieval musical practice. From all this the
  forms of the instrumental dances emerge clearly
  enough short, repeated sections (puncta) with
  ouvert and clos endings are the rule their
  number can vary from three to seven. There are
  some pairings of saltarello and rotta which are
  early examples of the TanzNachtanz idea.

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The early Renaissance

• The culmination of the old tradition and the
  beginning of an entirely new phase of dance
  history came in the first half of the 15th
  century.
• The dance, which previously had not been much
  more than a loosely organized, companionable and
  entertaining, orally transmitted choreographic
  activity, seems to have become an art practically
  overnight, taught and written about by experts
  who not only compiled the fashionable repertory
  and developed methods of notation but also
  brought to their subject a philosophical attitude
  and aesthetic insights which went far beyond the
  merely pragmatic.
• The Italian dancing-master was a respected member
  of his home court, intimately involved with the
  private life and the public image of his prince,
  a man of status, well paid and much sought-after,
  teacher, performer, choreographer, writer and
  master of ceremonies all in one.

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The early Renaissance

• For the Franco-Flemish
• the basse danse,
• the stately, quietly gliding processional dance
  that enjoyed the favour of court and town well
  into the 16th century.
• Only five steps are used and these, having been
  explained in the introduction, are written in
  tablature R stands for révérence, b for branle,
  ss for two single steps, d for a double step, r
  for reprise (sometimes replaced by c for congé).
  These steps are combined into mesures of

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The early Renaissance

• Each basse danse
• its own tune,
• notated in tenor fashion in uniform blackened
  breves, each of which accommodates one step of
  the tablature
• The rhythmic subdivision of the melodies lay in
  the hands of the musicians, who would add
  improvised upper voices to the tenor and create
  the sonorities that the occasion called for,
  using les instruments haults for outdoor dancing
  and particularly splendid festivities, les
  instruments bas for indoors and intimate
  gatherings

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The early Renaissance

• Italian bassadanza
• The Italian masters delighted in the invention
  of new shapes figures alternate with
  processional passages, linear choreographies
  (alla fila) with others for couples or groups of
  three an entire, newly developed range of
  dance-technical possibilities came into play.

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The early Renaissance

• Italian bassadanza
• Whether the pairing of bassadanza and
  saltarello (Fr. pas de breban Sp. alta danza) is
  hard to say. Although combinations of a slow,
  stepping dance with a lively, jumping dance are
  present in the literature and the music from the
  Middle Ages (tantz-hoppaldei, baixa et alta) to
  the pavanetourdion and pavanegaillarde pairs of
  the 16th century, the Italian dancing-masters
  only rarely mentioned this sequence.

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The early Renaissance

• After 1500 the first traces of a new repertory
• The branle became visible both in the musical
  sources (Petrucci, Attaingnant, A. de Lalaing)
  and in the cheerful dance instruction book
• the characteristic dance of the common people,
  gay, uncomplicated, frivolous at times and all
  those who take part in the dance acquit
  themselves as best they can, each according to
  his age, disposition and agility (Arbeau,
  Orchésographie, 1588, trans. Beaumont, 113).
• Tordiones, gallarda, lantigailla gaya and pavana
  were all mentioned in the university
  dancing-masters book, although he did not yet
  feel altogether secure with these novelties
• Not until 1560, when Lutio Compassos Ballo della
  gagliarda was published in Florence, was the
  galliards prominence asserted in the new dance
  repertory.

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Late Renaissance

• Before 1630.
• From 1550 to about 1630 dance is well documented
  in choreographic and musical sources,
  descriptions of court spectacles, plays, memoirs,
  letters and iconography. These rich resources
  reflect realistically the great popularity of
  dance at that time as both a social and a
  theatrical art. The historian is particularly
  fortunate in the nature and scope of the four
  large published manuals on social dance from the
  second half of the 16th century, a number which
  would remain unequalled until the 18th century.
  Less fortunately, there are still lacunae in the
  documentation of dance as done by professional
  performers despite many references, for example,
  there is no precise choreographic information on
  antyck or grotesque dances, nor on the
  pantomimic or acrobatic techniques of such
  travelling entertainers as the commedia dellarte.

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Late Renaissance

• Dance music of this period is not important
  solely as accompaniment to the dances themselves.
  The specific rhythmic patterns of the most
  popular dance types pervaded much vocal and
  instrumental music that was not necessarily
  intended for dance but was obviously meant to
  evoke it in music ranging from lighthearted
  villanellas, canzonettas, scherzi musicali and
  ballettos to English falas and madrigals, and
  from simple settings for instrumental ensemble to
  virtuoso sets of solo variations, distinctive
  galliard, saltarello, canary and corrente rhythms
  are found evocative dance rhythms and references
  appear also in more ambitious works (e.g.
  Monteverdis Zefiro torno, constructed on the
  licentious ciaccona bass, or Dowlands pavan
  Lachrimae, or Seaven Teares). These rhythms found
  their way also into popular music still familiar
  today, like the national anthems of Britain and
  the USA (clearly a galliard). Furthermore, dance
  appears to have had a strong influence on the
  development of new forms and styles of the late
  Renaissance (15501600).

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Late Renaissance

• The social dances performed at aristocratic
  gatherings included such large group dances as
  processional pavans, circular branles, or
  progressive longways dances for as many as
  will, but especially in southern Europe it was
  the individually choreographed ballettos (the
  direct descendants of the 15th-century Italian
  balli) which dominated such events. Ballettos
  were usually solo couple dances, but trios (e.g.
  Carosos Allegrezze damore), or groups of two or
  three couples dancing

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Late Renaissance

• Popular individual dance types which appeared in
  both the dance manuals and the musical
  collections were
• the allemande (tedesca), branle (brawl, brando),
  canary (canario), courante (corrente), galliard
  (gagliarda), tourdion (tordiglione), volta
  (volte), pavan (pavaniglia, paduana, passo e
  mezzo) and saltarello.
• Some popular types, such as the bergamasca,
  ciaccona and sarabande, are not in the
  Renaissance manuals at all perhaps they were
  still seen as too crude for courtly ladies and
  gentlemen.

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Late Renaissance

• The biggest difference of all between manuals and
  musical collections is that the typical paired
  dances of the musical sources pavangalliard,
  passo e mezzosaltarello, or TanzNachtanz
  (Hupfauff, Proportz or tripla), which continue
  the old dupletriple, slowfast combinations
  seem to be largely absent from the manuals.

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Late Renaissance

• The multi-movement ballettos of the Italian
  manuals do, however, most often begin with these
  combinations.
• Most multi-movement ballettos are essentially
  variation suites, although they begin with the
  slowfast, dupletriple combination
• Multi-movement danced suites may first have
  inspired the grouping of dances into the
  multi-movement musical suites which began to
  appear in the first half of the 17th century.
• Thus, knowledge of how to perform dances from the
  manuals can give valuable insights into the
  relative dance tempos in instrumental suites of
  the 16th and 17th centuries.

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Late Renaissance

• One last point remains to be made about the
  significance of dance music to late-Renaissance
  and later musical form one of the givens at this
  time was that in any dance the symmetry of the
  body was paramount whatever was danced beginning
  with the left foot (whether short step patterns
  or long choreographic combinations of step
  patterns) must be repeated beginning with the
  right. This mandate, of course, required repeated
  (or virtually repeated) music of exactly the same
  length, and it had to be clearly audible to the
  dancers (that is, musically related to the
  left-footed passage) served by the musicians.
  Whether in tiny internal repetitions, two-bar
  units, four-bar phrases or larger combinations,
  the choreographies in the Italian manuals
  particularly adhered to this True Rule of
  symmetry, and the music reinforced it (see
  Caroso). As Caroso explained it, the perfect
  piece of music for dance was made up of multiples
  of two indeed, it was a semibreve made up of two
  minims a binary time value that was now the
  perfect beat, rather than the ternary value of
  heretofore. While such aesthetic symmetry to meet
  the demands of dance was not entirely new (some
  15th-century balli required it at times), the
  rigour of its application now may well have led
  to a new regularity of musical construction.
  Indeed, it is not beyond the realm of possibility
  that the almost iron-clad Vierhebigkeit of
  19th-century music may have derived essentially
  from the needs of 16th-century dance.

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Nido DAmore

• The Video explores the social and technical
  intricacy of Renaissance dance. One dance, Nido
  d'Amore, exposes the techniques for all the major
  dance suites of the era. The refined introduction
  (The Opening) explodes into male virtuoso display
  (The Galliard), builds to mutual ecstasy ( The
  Saltarello), and culminates in a statement of
  strong individualism (The Canary). This suite
  mirrors the episodic changes of courtship.