Wednesday, October 29, 2014

Rising line in a menuet from Bacquoy-Guedon

A [dance treatise] from the early 1780s by Alexis Bacquoy-Guedon offers a brief historical narrative of the menuet and the contredanse. In the first section, six "airs" chart the distance from seventeenth to eighteenth centuries, and Bacquoy-Guedon follows that with six "modern" menuets and trios. The last of these uses the octave register prominently and closes with a rising figure to the ^8.



 Boxes in the copy below highlight the treatment of G5-D5-G4:



And this summary shows how the registers are worked out in terms of tonic/dominant groupings:

Finally, here is the rising line that wends its way up from D5 to the final cadence on G5:



For reference, my table of all the theme types (after Caplin) in Bacquoy-Guedon's examples may be found in Chapter 5 of my PDF essay Dance Designs in 18th and Early 19th Century Music: [link]. Appendix 2 of that same document has a list of direct links to pages with music in some treatises on the Library of Congress site.