Music for dancing, 1650-1700, part 1

This post initiates a series on dances from Playford's English Dancing Master (its first edition, 1651, was the only one called The English Dancing Master). I have already gathered fifty numbers with ascending cadence gestures in a PDF documentation essay published on Texas Scholar Works: Playford rising line file. Material from that essay is also included in my Rising Lines essay.

In this series of posts I will analyze a small number of these melodies for matters of register, line, and cadence.

Here is a simple example of register treatment, apparently in service to the title: Under and Over, which appears initially in the second edition (1652). I am using the text as it stands in the fourth edition, from 1670; according to Jeremy Barlow's annotations, several note changes in the ninth (1695) and later editions reduce the modal turns and emphasize typical tonal figures for G minor. (The second flat in the signature, on the other hand, was added in the fourth edition.)

Three of four phrases immediately establish the octave G4-G5. The first phrase then moves by step through that octave from above. The third phrase drops that octave by a step to F4-F5, while using many of the same notes (see double arrow). The second and fourth phrases drop the lower fifth and hold to the upper fourth instead, with a strong linear motion into the cadence.

Note that, overall, the lower range is extended by a step (from G4 to F4—see *) and the upper limit also by a step (from G5 to A5—see **).


A slightly more complex example: Arcadia, which was added in the seventh edition (1686). Four phrases again, marked (a) through (d), and in all of them lines (based on accented pitches) rather than spaces seem to hold sway: a third overlaps the end of the first phrase, reaching the first note of the second phrase, Bb, which then ascends into the cadence on F5; the third phrase continues from that note to an accented A5, then in the final phrase the march continues upward to close on the remarkably high note Bb5.

(If one insisted on gathering the lines into a middleground-background shape, the options would include (1) Bb: ^3 in bar 1 eventually reaching a primary ^5 in bars 7-8, then ascending in the second strain to ^8; (2) raising the pickup note F5 to background status, and holding it throughout till the final cadence completes the ascent; (3) treating the first phrase as "preliminary" [initial descent] to Bb4, which initiates a rising octave line to Bb5; and (4) reading a line of the sixth beginning with Bb4 in bar 4, ascending to F5 by the end of the strain, then further up to Bb5 in the second strain.)

In this series of posts, basic information about the individual tunes is taken from Jeremy Barlow, ed., The Complete Country Dance Tunes from Playford's Dancing Master, 1651-ca.1728.