Galops by Johann Strauss, sr.

The galop (galopp, gallopade), a simple dance in duple meter and rapid tempo, undoubtedly had 18th century predecessors, but it was in the 1820s that it quickly became popular in urban ballrooms. Johann Strauss, sr., wrote a large number of them. Here are five.

Erinnerungs-Galopp, Op.27 (1830?)
Sperl-Galopp, Op.42 (1831)
Reise-Galopp, Op.85 (1836)
Cachucha-Galopp, Op.97 (1837)
Furioso-Galopp, Op.114 (1840)

The Erinnerungs-Galopp, Op.27 (1830?), is a musical instantiation of both the simplicity and the speed of the dance. The tendency toward 16-bar themes/strains is clear in the galop; this opening strain is unusual in its twenty bars. The ascent through the octave is one of the most direct I have found anywhere in the repertoire of European traditional tonal music.

The second strain of the Sperl-Galopp, Op.42 (1831) shows the typical violinistic distinction of registers (^5 and ^3 in bars 1-2), but the upper register is definitely the focus. The point of interest for us is the cadence (boxed), in which the wedge figure brings a secondary line up from ^5 (B4). Note that the codetta brings the total number of bars to twenty again and contradicts the preceding by its emphasis on ^7-^8.

The second strain in the trio to the Reise-Galopp, Op.85 (1836), "flips" the wedge as an obvious fifth-line descends but is then suddenly overtaken by a rising line in the cadence.

The second strain of the Cachucha-Galopp, Op.97 (1837) attempts an imitation in 2/4 time of the Spanish cachucha, a mainly theatrical dance from the 1830s that was in 3/4 meter. Another wedge figure.

The opening of the Furioso-Galopp, Op.114 (1840), offers an ascending line as direct as the one in the Erinnerungs-Galopp of a decade earlier, but now running through two-plus octaves (B3 to B4 to B5-C#6-D#6-E6) and with persistent chromatic inflection.