Rising lines in the Playford collections

Although rising cadence figures are by no means unknown before the mid-eighteenth century, I was surprised to find that the volumes of John Playford's [English] Dancing Master were a rich source for music with rising lines. Here is a link to the first entry in my rising-line tables: the Playford list. As with the Buelow contredanses mentioned in a previous post, I have also made a page with facsimiles for the Playford pieces. And here is a sample, "From Aberdeen":

More rising cadence gestures from Bacquoy-Guedon

As an addendum to an earlier post, here are three more pieces from Bacquoy-Guedon that use rising cadence gestures in the second strain. Airs nos. 3 and 4 are menuets in the older style. No. 3 focuses registral play in the second strain on and about ^8  (G5). No. 4 asserts ^5-^8 to begin the second strain but leads the sequence up through that interval from the ^5 (D5). The minor-key trio for Menuet no. 4 starts the second strain firmly from ^5 and then ascends in the second and concluding phrase.

Rising lines in an 18th century contredanse collection

As a follow-up to the recent post on a menuet from the Bacquoy-Guedon treatise (early 1780s), here is a link to a list of 30-plus examples of rising lines in contredanses from collections preserved in the Royal Danish library: Buelow. On another page, I have reproduced the scores: Buelow scores. It is assumed that the dances come from published sources and were gathered into these volumes for court use.

Here is one of them. Note that four figures are specified, which means the music will minimally be played twice in alternativo fashion, or ABAB. It's also quite possible that the first strain would be repeated at the end, in coda fashion. Since three couples (not four) are specified, it is most likely that the instructions are meant for a long dance rather than a quadrille, meaning that the strains would be repeated multiple times (as often as necessary for all the dancers to complete the figures).

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, here is my table of all the theme types (after Caplin) in Bacquoy-Guedon's examples: [table] -- and my web page with direct links to pages with music in some treatises on the Library of Congress site: [links].

Update; PDFs available

I've taken a retrospective look at all the posts and have gathered materials into topic-specific PDF files that are accessible from my personal website: Neumeyer. The topics are:

1. (available) Formal functions in European dance music from the 18th and 19th centuries, analyzed using William Caplin's form-function theory
2. (available) Critique of Carl Schachter's critique of the rising Urlinie
3. (available) Schubert, dance, and dancing in the early 19th century
4. (available) Anthology of analyses of Schubert, Valses sentimentales, D 779, no. 13 (the original purpose of the blog).

I have also divided the blog itself in two. Hearing Schubert D779n13 will continue to focus on analysis and in particular on rising lines and cadence gestures. It will, in effect, become the textual commentary for my Ascending Lines website, especially its composition lists. A new companion blog, Dance and Dance Music, 1650-1850, will focus on dance and dancing in the 18th and 19th centuries.

Grieg and the rising line

Why Grieg on a Schubert blog? Because the first movement of the Peer Gynt Suite no. 1, Morgenstimmung, is a textbook example of a simple but colorful harmonic plan combined with motivic gestures that match a Schenkerian background line (rising, in this case), all serving the obvious expressive purpose of depicting dawn (thus making for a very easily managed hermeneutic exercise).

I discuss the piece briefly in my JMT article on the ascending Urlinie (1987). Here are the musical examples:

Here is Example 9's material again in the context of the entire opening (piano reduction here, of course, done by Grieg himself):



And here is Example 10 again, in the score context:


The movement's design is three-part, each section marked by the appearance of the theme motive in E (in the last instance over E 6/4).

Here is the entire harmonic plan (thumbnail -- click on it to see the original size graphic). Timings are keyed to a version of Herbert von Karajan and the Berlin Philharmonic posted to YouTube.

Here are the parallel harmonic patterns aligned vertically (thumbnail -- click on it to see the original size graphic): upper system section A, lower system sections A and A'' (up to the structural cadence). The second pattern greatly expands on the I-III-V progression of section A.