sources on the minuet
Posted by Laura W on September 11, 1998 at 23:42:43:
In response to Minuet, written by Bob Whitworth on September 11, 1998 at 09:52:15
] One of my favorite Bach pieces: Minuet in "G".
From the Anna Magdalene Notebook. One of my favorites, too.
According to _From the Ballroom to Hell: Grace and Folly in
Nineteenth-Century Dance_ by Elizabeth Aldrich (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1991), p. 207:
The most popular danse a deux of the eighteenth century, the minuet changed dramatically during the last decades of the century. By the early nineteenth century, it was rarely seen in the ballroom except as a specialty dance choreographed by a dancing master. Francis Peacock's remarks [in his dance manual of 1805] on the declining popularity of the minuet are especially interesting, as the time-span of his life [1723-1807] would indicate that he witnessed changes not only in the early-nineteenth-century byt in the eighteenth-century minuet as well.
She quotes several paragraphs from his dance manual which lament the decline of the minuet. (I will post them here if anyone is interested.)
Also, I looked up Minuet in the World Book Encyclopedia, and it says that the word derives from the French word menu, meaning small, because of the dance's short, mincing, dainty steps. It notes that it was in 3/4 time and very slow and stately. "The minuet was introduced in the court of Louis XIV in about 1650, and reached its greatest popularity in the 1700s. In the 1800s, dancers walked the minuet as a quadrille."
I'm not so sure about that last statement. Certainly Aldrich says nothing about a connection between the minuet and the quadrille.
- Minuet Patricia Bingham 19:22:05 9/12/98
(0)
Posting followups to old messages is disabled; instead go to the main index and post a new message which mentions this one.
