Decorum of the Minuet, Delirium of the Waltz: A Study of Dance-Music Relations in 3/4 Time

By Eric McKee

An investigation of dance-music relations in two out of the three most influential social dances of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Much music was written for the two most important dances of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the minuet and the waltz. In Decorum of the Minuet, Delirium of the Waltz, Eric McKee argues that to better understand the musical structures and expressive meanings of this dance music, one must be aware of the social contexts and bodily rhythms of the social dances upon which it is based. McKee approaches dance music as a component of a multimedia art form that involves the interaction of physical motion, music, architecture, and dress. Moreover, the activity of attending a ball involves a dynamic network of modalities—sight, sound, bodily awareness, touch, and smell, which can be experienced from the perspectives of a dancer, a spectator, or a musician. McKee considers dance music within a larger system of signifiers and points-of-view that opens new avenues of interpretation.

“McKee’s book . . . fulfils its aim: that of presenting dance-music relations in two out of three of the most popular ballroom dances in several centuries. To my knowledge, there is no other English publication on such intersection of topics—thus it deserves a place in the libraries of music and dance departments.” —Gediminas Karoblis, Dance Research

“I think this is an important book for musicians and dance academics alike, since McKee proposes that to understand the musical structures of the minuet and waltz, “it is helpful to be aware of the bodily rhythms of the dance upon which they are based and the social contexts in which they were performed”. . . . McKee’s holistic approach illuminates the total experiences of all the participants. . . . highly informative on the importance of dancing at every level of society, and its varying social functions, during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.” —Dance Europe

“McKee’s overall orientation is laudable, since functional dance music has largely been ignored by music analysts, and stylized dance music has been treated as if it had minimal connection to the practice of dancing. . . . Despite the amount of close music analysis, McKee’s writing is accessible to a wide range of readers. . . . One hopes that McKee has plans for a future book to follow the mid-century delirium of the waltz to its twentieth-century demise.” —Nineteenth-Century Music Review

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Nov 23, 2011
• ISBN: 9780253028044

Book preview

DECORUM OF THE MINUET, DELIRIUM OF THE WALTZ

MUSICAL MEANING & INTERPRETATION

Robert S. Hatten, editor

A Theory of Musical Narrative

BYRON ALMÉN

Approaches to Meaning in Music

BYRON ALMÉN & EDWARD PEARSALL

Voicing Gender: Castrati, Travesti, and the Second Woman in Early Nineteenth-Century Italian Opera

NAOMI ANDRÉ

The Italian Traditions and Puccini

NICHOLAS BARAGWANATH

Music and the Politics of Negation

JAMES R. CURRIE

Il Trittico, Turandot, and Puccini’s Late Style

ANDREW DAVIS

Neil Young and the Poetics of Energy

WILLIAM ECHARD

Interpreting Musical Gestures, Topics, and Tropes: Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert

ROBERT S. HATTEN

Musical Meaning in Beethoven: Markedness, Correlation, and Interpretation

ROBERT S. HATTEN

Intertextuality in Western Art Music

MICHAEL L. KLEIN

Musical Forces: Motion, Metaphor, and Meaning in Music

STEVE LARSON

Is Language a Music? Writings on Musical Form and Signification

DAVID LIDOV

Pleasure and Meaning in the Classical Symphony

MELANIE LOWE

From Decorum to Delirium: The Interaction of Dance and Music from the Minuet to the Waltz

ERIC MCKEE

The Musical Topic: Hunt, Military, Pastoral

RAYMOND MONELLE

Musical Representations, Subjects, and Objects: The Construction of Musical Thought in Zarlino, Descartes, Rameau, and Weber

JAIRO MORENO

Deepening Musical Performance through Movement: The Theory and Practice of Embodied Interpretation

ALEXANDRA PIERCE

Expressive Forms in Brahms’s Instrumental Music: Structure and Meaning in His Werther Quartet

PETER H. SMITH

Expressive Intersections in Brahms: Essays in Analysis and Meaning

PETER H. SMITH & HEATHER A. PLATT

Music as Philosophy: Adorno and Beethoven’s Late Style

MICHAEL SPITZER

Music and Wonder at the Medici Court: A The 1589 Interludes for La pellegrina

NINA TREADWELL

Reflections on Musical Meaning and Its Representations

LEO TREITLER

Debussy’s Late Style: The Compositions of the Great War

MARIANNE WHEELDON

Decorum of the Minuet, Delirium of the Walts

A STUDY OF DANCE*MUSIC RELATIONS IN ¾ TIME

Eric McKee

INDIANA UNIVERSITY PRESS

Bloomington & Indianapolis

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© 2012 by Eric McKee

All rights reserved

No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photo copying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The Association of American University Presses’ Resolution on Permissions constitutes the only exception to this prohibition.

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences – Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48–1992.

Manufactured in the United States of America

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

McKee, Eric, [date]-

Decorum of the minuet, delirium of the waltz : a study of dance-music relations in ¾ time / Eric McKee.

p. cm. – (Musical meaning and interpretation)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-253-35692-5 (cloth: alk. paper) 1. Waltzes – 18th century – History and criticism. 2. Minuet – 18th century. 3. Waltzes – 19th century – History and criticism. 4. Minuet – 19th century. I. Title.

ML3465.M45 2012

784.18′83509 – dc23

2011021186

1 2 3 4 5 17 16 15 14 13 12

CONTENTS

·

Acknowledgments

·

Introduction

1.

Influences of the Early Eighteenth-Century Ballroom Minuet on the Minuets from J. S. Bach’s French Suites, BWV 812–817

2.

Mozart in the Ballroom: Minuet-Trio Contrast and the Aristocracy in Self-Portrait

3.

The Musical Visions of Joseph Lanner and Johann Strauss Sr.

4.

Dance and the Music of Chopin: Historical Background

5.

The Musical Visions of Chopin

6.

Chopin’s Approach to Waltz Form

·

Notes

·

Bibliography

·

Index

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This book would not have been possible without the kind and generous support of many people. To begin, I am grateful for the constant encouragement of Robert Hatten and for his close reading of my manuscript. His insightful suggestions and comments have improved the book on many levels. The expert team at Indiana University Press has guided me in the process of preparing my manuscript. I am particularly grateful to my copy editor, Mary M. Hill, whose careful reading of my prose saved me from some potentially embarrassing errors. Any mistakes that remain are, of course, entirely my own. The amazing Phil Torbert provided the musical examples, whose preparation was made possible by a grant from the Institute of Arts and Humanities at the Pennsylvania State University. Krzysztof Komarnicki provided many of the Polish translations.

I am grateful for my musicology and theory colleagues at the Pennsylvania State University School of Music for providing a friendly, supportive, and stimulating working environment. A faculty fellowship through Penn State’s Institute of Arts and Humanities provided me a semester’s release to complete much of chapter 3. A fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies allowed a year’s release to gather and develop material for chapter 4. I wish to acknowledge the journal Music Analysis for permission to rework two articles previously published in 2004 and 2008. Some of the material in chapters 4 and 5 originally appeared in an essay published in The Age of Chopin, edited by Halina Goldberg and published by Indiana University Press.

Above all, I am thankful for my family. The loving support of my parents has given me the confidence to pursue a career path that has led to this book, and my children’s boundless energy and sense of wonderment have kept me grounded in a world where anything is possible. The greatest debt of gratitude I owe to my wife, Emily – she is my rock and inspiration.

DECORUM OF THE MINUET, DELIRIUM OF THE WALTZ

INTRODUCTION

M. JOURDAIN: Yet I never learnt music.

MUSIC MASTER: You should learn, Sir, the same as you do dancing. The two arts are very closely allied.

…

DANCING MASTER: Music and dancing. Music and dancing. That is all that is necessary.

MUSIC MASTER: There is nothing so useful to a State as music.

DANCING MASTER: There is nothing so indispensable to mankind as dancing.

MUSIC MASTER: Without music the State would cease to function.

DANCING MASTER: Man can do nothing at all without dancing.

MOLIÈRE, THE WOULD-BE GENTLEMAN

This book investigates dance-music relations in two out of the three most influential social dances of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries: the minuet and the waltz (the contredanse being the other influential dance). I take the position that if one wishes better to understand the musical structures and expressive meanings contained in these dances, it is helpful to be aware of the bodily rhythms of the dances upon which they are based and the social contexts in which they were performed. In doing so, I approach dance music as a component within a multimedia art form, a form that involves the mutual interaction of physical motion, mental attitude, music, architecture, and dress. Moreover, the activity of participating in a ball involves a dynamic network of modalities (sight, sound, bodily awareness, touch, and smell), and these modalities can be experienced from a variety of perspectives (as a dancer, as a spectator, or as a musician). In reconstructing the social multimedia framework of the minuet and waltz, I hope to provide a critical vantage point that yields fresh insight and meaning to the following questions: What did the dancers require of the music, and how did composers of the minuet and waltz respond to the practical needs of the dancers? In what ways did composers go beyond the practical requirements, incorporating into the music the aesthetics and cultural associations of the dance? What are the nature and function of minuet-trio contrast in the Viennese dance minuets of the second half of the eighteenth century? What was social dancing like in Warsaw during the 1820s, when Chopin was coming of age, and to what extent did Chopin participate in social dancing? In what ways did the visual experience of watching waltzers waltz influence the nature of the waltz’s thematic material and its large-scale patterning? And to what extent was Chopin influenced by the ballroom waltzes of Lanner and Strauss Sr.?

The ubiquity and far-reaching influence of social dancing in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries cannot be overestimated. The activity of dancing was a vital part of social life and was without question the most common form of social entertainment, especially during the winter months and carnival season. It pervaded all levels of society and served a broad range of social functions.¹ For the lower classes, dancing provided a diversion from the toils of the day; the upper classes used it as a way of defining themselves individually within their class and collectively apart from the lower classes; and for all levels, the activity of dancing was a vehicle for courtship, ceremonies, and celebrations. It seems that whenever and wherever people got together, there was bound to be dancing. Indeed, as the spoken lines from Molière’s ballet suggest, man could do nothing at all without dancing. Certainly this was proven true at the court of Louis XIV, for whom the ballet was first premiered in 1670. As a means of political and social control, the king required his large and lumbering retinue of lesser aristocrats to participate in an endless stream of royal balls. And a little over a century later, Molière’s lines were famously proven true again by the foreign diplomats and dignitaries assembled at the Congress of Vienna of 1814–15, an affair that prompted the quip le Congrès ne marche pas; il danse (the Congress doesn’t work; it dances).

The movements and bodily attitudes of dance were not restricted to the ballroom, though. In the eighteenth century, for example, dancing masters used the minuet as a model for genteel behavior – on and off the ballroom dance floor – in which all aspects of aristocratic comportment were carefully prescribed, including such basic activities as standing, walking, entering and leaving a room, taking off one’s hat, stepping in and out of a carriage, and, most important, gestures of reverence. As a means of attaining a sense of noble ease and hidden control in social life, Philip Dormer Stanhope, fourth Earl of Chesterfield, in a letter to his son written in 1765, advises: Do everything in minuet-time; speak, think, and move always in that measure – equally free from the dullness of slow, or the hurry or huddle of quick, time (1845, 2:405). To make such contrived movement and attitude appear supremely natural, however, required years of training beginning at a very young age. Only the most privileged would have the time and means to acquire such skills. Thus, the gestures of social dancing were politicized as a means of class identification and class exclusion.²

A broad knowledge of theatrical and ballroom dances, both historical and current, was considered essential for composers and performers alike. The music for each dance type had its own tempo, associated melodic gestures, and patterns of accentual stress, much of which was not notated in the score but part of its performance practice. To effectively compose and perform dance music one thus needed to understand the bodily basis of these musical characteristics. In a discussion on the superior quality of string players in Jean-Baptiste Lully’s orchestra, Georg Muffat, for example, makes the observations that to become acquainted with the proper tempo of the Ballets, what helps the most, other than regular practice with the Lullists, is an understanding of the art of the dance, in which most Lullists are well versed. That is why one should not be amazed at their exact observance of that tempo ([1695] 2001, 42). Johann Philipp Kirnberger, writing some eighty years later, expresses a similar point of view. In the preface to his collection of dances, Recueil d’airs de danse caractéristiques, pour servir de modele aux jeunes compositeurs et d’exercice à ceux qui touchent du clavecin, Kirnberger articulates the value of a wide knowledge of dance types not only for the performance of dance music but also for the performance of nondance genres such as the fugue.

How will the musician give the piece he performs the appropriate expression, which the composer conceived, if he cannot determine… exactly what sort of movement and what character are appropriate to each kind of measure? In order to acquire the necessary qualities for a good performance, the musician can do nothing better than diligently play all sorts of characteristic dances. Each of these dance types has its own rhythm, its phrases of equal length, its accents at the same places in each motif; thus one identifies them easily, and through repeated practice one unconscientiously becomes accustomed to distinguishing the proper rhythm of each dance-type, defining its motifs and accents, so that finally one easily recognizes in a long piece the various intermingling rhythms, phrases, and accents…. On the other hand, if one neglects to practice the composition of characteristic dances, one will only with difficulty or not at all achieve a good melody. Above all, it is impossible to compose or perform a fugue well if one does not know every type of [dance] rhythm. ([c. 1777] 1995, preface)

And in his treatise The Art of Strict Musical Composition Kirnberger reiterates the importance of dance for students of composition: Every beginner who wants to become well grounded in composition is advised to become familiar with the disposition of all types of [dances], because all types of characters and rhythm occur and can be observed most accurately in them. If he has no skill in these character pieces, it is impossible to give a definite character to a piece ([1771–79] 1982, 216n78).

While Kirnberger advocates that composers be familiar with the full range of ballroom dances in order to be conversant with a wide vocabulary of characters and rhythm, it was the minuet that was most commonly used to teach the basic elements of musical composition. For music theorists and composition teachers such as Kirnberger, Joseph Riepel, and Heinrich Koch, the minuet offered several pedagogical advantages. It was a familiar and current genre: both as a dance type and as a musical type, its length could be relatively short, often no longer than sixteen bars, and it could be relatively simple in its melodic and harmonic designs. Thus, beginning composition students were able to start with something small and manageable but that contained all the essential elements of larger compositions. In other words, the minuet was appropriated as an idealized model for larger, more complex compositions.³ For Riepel, a minuet, according to its realization, is no different from a concerto, an aria, or a symphony…. [T]hus we wish to begin therewith, [with the] very small and trifling, simply in order to obtain out of it something bigger and more praiseworthy.⁴ Koch echoes this sentiment: The knowledge of these forms is useful to the beginning composer not only in itself but also with regard to the larger products of art; for these forms are at the same time representations in miniature of larger compositions ([1787] 1983, 118). As Wolfgang Budday (1983) argues, the correlation between simple and more complex eighteenth-century musical forms and genres suggests that the minuet and other ballroom dances are integral to if not the basis of the Viennese Classical style.

A fallout of this pedagogical approach is that instead of considering the minuet repertoire in all of its diverse forms, composition teachers stripped it down to its bare essentials and clothed it with elements that were considered to be the ideal features of Classical composition: harmonic simplicity, proportional symmetry, periodicity, and a transparent melody and accompaniment texture. This idealization led to the false notion that all minuets exhibit, or should exhibit, these musical attributes, especially dance minuets, where a regular and symmetrical 8 + 8 periodicity was until quite recently considered an essential feature for it to be danceable. The research of Tilden Russell (1983, 1992, 1999) has shown that minuets found in composition treatises as well as dance treatises represent a repertoire very distinct from minuets composed for the ballroom dance floor, where it is not at all unusual to find a wide range of formal organizations, levels of complexity, and, in some instances, irregular phrase organizations.

For Bach, Mozart, and Chopin, the three art composers whose dance music I examine in this book, dance was a part of their compositional pedagogy, both as students and as teachers. While little is known about Bach’s own musical education, it is likely that he used minuets and other dances to teach composition and keyboard performance to his sons.⁵ Leopold Mozart, who was an experienced pedagogue, required Nannerl and Wolfgang to compose and perform minuets as elementary music exercises. Wolfgang also employed this pedagogical technique with his students Barbara Ployer, Thomas Attwood, and Franz Jacob Freystädtler, whom he taught in Vienna in the mid-1780s.⁶ Writing from Paris to his father six years earlier, in May 1778, Wolfgang provides an amusing account of his futile attempts to use the minuet to teach the uninspired daughter of the duc de Guines.

She did quite well in writing a bass line for the First Menuett that I had written down for her. Now she is beginning to write for 3 voices; she can do it all right; but she gets easily bored; and I can’t help her there…. She simply has no inspiration of her own; nothing comes out of her; I have tried all sorts of methods. Among other things I tried the idea of writing down a simple Menuett to see whether she could do a variation on it? – Well, that didn’t work…. Then I wrote down 4 bars of a Menuett and said to her – look, what a stupid fellow I am, I started a Menuett and can’t even finish the First part – please be so kind and finish it for me. (Mozart 2000, 154)⁷

Chopin’s earliest surviving works, composed in 1817, when he was seven years old, are polonaises, which are similar to the minuet in function and position within the hierarchy of Polish social dances. Either the minuet or the polonaise was used ceremonially as the opening dance of a ball; and in both the order of the couples was determined by their social position, with the highest-ranking couple dancing first, in the case of the minuet, or leading the other couples, in the case of the polonaise. In emphasizing the historical and cultural authority of the polonaise, Polish commentators were fond of drawing comparisons to the French minuet. Kazimiérz Brodziński observes that while the polonaise "can be called a serious knightly dance, the French minuet is the dance of an elegant court and of an educated society. The expression of grace in [the minuet] is formal and contractual: every movement is extremely calculated…. The polonaise is equally as the minuet a dance of dignified persons but has more freedom and is less theatrical" (1829, 85–86).⁸

Firsthand knowledge of ballroom dancing was important for composers for the simple reason that they were often called upon both professionally and informally within their social circles to provide music for dancing. Eighteenth-century residences of the aristocracy and royal courts, especially those of great wealth and influence, invariably included a ballroom, a resident retinue of musicians, a dancing master, and a court composer. Among other duties, the composer would be asked to provide dance music for formal balls and ballet productions, especially during carnival season. As a contractual part of their vocation, composers such as Haydn and Mozart thus had a professional relationship to ballroom dancing; to be successful, they needed to know what was in vogue on the ballroom dance floor and how to write music that was both beautiful and useful for dancing. Hummel, Schubert, and Chopin are the last major art composers who maintained an active, though, in the case of Schubert and Chopin, nonprofessional, relationship with ballroom dance music. Many accounts survive that speak of their unsurpassed abilities as improvisers of dance music at private social gatherings. The most interesting account of this type of improvisation that I have found comes from an entry in Louis Spohr’s travel diary in which he describes a private musicale held in the home of one of his friends in 1814 during the Congress of Vienna. Late at night, just as the party was ending, a few of the ladies asked Hummel to provide some dance music.

Gallant and accommodating as he always was toward the ladies, he seated himself at the piano and played the desired waltzes, at which point the young people in the next room began to dance. I and some of the other artists present gathered around the piano, our hats in our hands, and listened. No sooner had Hummel noticed this new audience than he began to improvise freely, holding, however, to the steady waltz rhythm in order not to disturb the dancers. He took the most striking themes and figures from my own compositions and those of others that had been played in the course of the evening’s program and wove them into his waltzes, varying them more fancifully with each repetition. Finally, he worked them into a fugue, giving full rein to his contrapuntal wizardry, without ever disturbing the pleasure of the dancers. Then he returned to the gallant style and ended with a bravura which was extraordinary even for him, still exploiting the themes he had originally selected, so that the whole extravaganza had the character of a fully rounded composition. The listeners were delighted, and thanked the ladies whose passion for dancing had provided them with such a treat. (1961, 109–10)

Deeply rooted in the creative imagination of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, ballroom dance practices provided a rich and diverse language of musical devices, conventions, and gestures that composers drew upon for all genres of music – both instrumental and vocal, secular and sacred. Not only were the raw materials of concert music drawn from the ballroom (phrase rhythms, thematic repetition schemes, and rhythmic patterns) but also elements of expression. Music theorists and aestheticians considered music and dance to be intimately related – sister arts, whereby music mimetically represented the physical motions and gestures of dance. It followed that the correspondence between physical gesture and musical gesture was an important source of expression in music. As Newman Powell observes, Kirnberger regarded rhythms of dance music as the embodiment of an emotional state or affect (1967, 73). In his treatise on aesthetics, Kalligone, written in 1800, Johann Gottfried Herder asserts that one can scarcely avoid associating music with movement when he is deeply moved: his face, his posture, the way he moves his body and beats time with his hands all express what he hears. The dances of primitive peoples and of warm-blooded, vigorous races alike all take the form of mime. This was true even of the Greeks, who spoke of music as the ‘leader of the dance,’ a dance that involved every response [of which] the soul was capable ([1800] 1981, 255).

RESEARCH REVIEW

Although this dance survey has been brief, it is at least adequate, I hope, to demonstrate the deep and penetrating influence of dance in the time period of my study. Given its importance in social life, composition pedagogy, performance practice, and music aesthetics as well as its pervasive presence in all genres of music, it is surprising just how little research has been devoted to the topic of dance-music relations. By research in dance-music relations, I mean studies that explore the dynamic and creative intersection between dance and music: How is the structure of music and its meaning shaped by the social contexts of the ballroom dance floor? How does one medium serve as an analogue for the other? And how are they different?

Perhaps not surprisingly, more attention has been given to dance-music relations of the eighteenth century. Powell’s translation of and brief but thoughtful commentary to the preface of Kirnberger’s Recueil d’airs de danse caractéristiques is the earliest scholarly work I am aware of that draws attention to the creative relationship between a composer’s knowledge of dance rhythms and the art of composition, a line of critical inquiry that, he observes, has been almost totally neglected by twentieth-century musicians, even those especially interested in baroque style (1967, 74, 72). Leonard Ratner is the first to answer Powell’s call to arms. In his seminal 1980 text, Classic Music, Ratner interprets eighteenth-century dance types as part of an expressive vocabulary of musical topics, which he defines as characteristic figures that allude to well-known categories of music associated with different types of human activities (e.g., dance, ceremony, military, hunt) or musical styles (e.g., French overture, learned style, Turkish style, galant style). Ratner’s book not only provided the beginnings of a critical framework in which to interpret dance topics in non-dance genres, but it also drew attention to the extent that dance topics were used in Classical music. Two important studies quickly followed: Rhythmic Gesture in Mozart (1983) by Wye Jamison Allanbrook and Sarah Reichart’s 1984 dissertation, The Influence of Eighteenth-Century Social Dance on the Viennese Classical Style. Allanbrook closely follows and develops Ratner’s model of musical topics, exploring in greater detail the expressive rhythmic gestures and characteristic meters and tempos of social dance and their employment in two of Mozart’s operas, Le nozze di Figaro and Don Giovanni. Reichart’s dissertation is the first study to provide a detailed investigation into the social contexts, choreographies, and music of eighteenth-century ballroom dances; she then uses that information to identify and interpret dance allusions in the concert music of Mozart, Haydn, and their contemporaries. In their book Dance and the Music of J. S. Bach (1991), Meredith Little and Natalie Jenne follow a similar path from the ballroom dance floor to stylized dance music, first presenting the choreographic and musical characteristics of French court dances and then discussing Bach’s interpretation of them in his instrumental dance works.

Tilden Russell, in his 1983 dissertation and two subsequent articles (1992 and 1999), provides sophisticated, in-depth studies of ballroom minuet music drawn from a wide range of sources, including dance treatises, published collections of dances (recueils), and manuscript tunebooks. Russell dismantles the myth of perfect correlation between the choreography and the music and in its place reveals a rich and diverse repertoire that not only lacked standardization but also