Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Music, Dance, and Meaning in the Early Nineteenth Century

2012; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 31; Issue: 2-3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/01411896.2012.680880

1547-7304

Lawrence M. Zbikowski,

Sports, Gender, and Society

Abstract In early-nineteenth-century Europe, dance was an essential part of celebration and recreation in both city and country and of the rich social and cultural context within which music was performed. As has often been noted, however, the cultural practices of early-nineteenth-century Europe underwent a number of profound changes, and the practices surrounding music and dance were no exception. While in the years before 1800, a clear distinction existed between dance music for a privileged few and dance music for everyone else, circumstances began to change, and by the 1820s the line between dance for the few and dance for the many had blurred, or, in many cases—and the waltz certainly represented one of them—all but disappeared. As a consequence of this change, the meaning to which dance music gave rise in the early nineteenth century also changed: Dance music might be for a literal dance or it might be for a quasi-dramatic evocation of the dance, but its role as a way to structure musical discourse—that is, the resource it offered as a musical topic—became decidedly attenuated. Recent research in cognitive science can help explain why dance topics in the eighteenth century were so effective, but to discover why the meaning of dance music in general, and dance topics in particular, changed so significantly in the early nineteenth century, we must look elsewhere. In the musical universe consequent to this change, there was music to accompany the whirl and press of ballroom dance, music that called forth memories of the whirl and press of ballroom dance, and little else in between. Notes 1Richard Taruskin, "A Suggestive Detail in Weber's Freischütz," Current Musicology 75 (Spring 2003), 165–68. 2Adolf Bernhard Marx, Die Lehre von der musikalischen Komposition, praktisch theoretisch (Leipzig: Breitkopf & Härtel, 1837–38), vol. 2, 55. "Der Walzer hat zweierlei Bewegungen: erstens dreht sich jedes Paar der Tanzenden im Kreise um seinen eignen Mittelpunkt; zweitens bewegt es sich mit solchen fortgesetzten Wendungen in einer grössern Kreislinie fort, bis es wieder an seinen Ort gelangt und der Kreis geschlossen ist. Jene kleiner Kreiswendung wird in zweimal drei Schritten ausgeführt und ist gleichsam das Motiv des Tanzes." Translations are mine unless otherwise indicated. 3Marx, Die Lehre von der Musikalischen Komposition, vol. 2, 56. "Jener allbekannte Walzer aus Webers Freischützen … zeigt uns ein solches ächtes Walzermotive… . [Abgesehen hiervon sehen wir in obigen Sätzen] Hülfstöne in der Melodie den blossen Akkordtönen vorgesetz, um den Antritt hervorzuheben; jede andre melodische, harmonische, rhythmische Schärfung, auch allenfalls die Aushülfe eines forzato, eines vorschlagenden Basses u.s.w. dient zu gleichem Zwecke." 4Marx, Die Lehre von der Musikalischen Komposition, vol. 2, 56. "Eben, weil dergleichen in der Hast jenes Freischützwalzers nicht fühlbarer werden, erscheint er gemeiner, und zwar in richtiger Absicht des Komponisten, der hier eine ungebildete Menge sich der blossen Walzlust rücksichtlos hingeben, und daher nichts als die rohe Walzfigure erklingen lässt. Mannigfaltigere und edlere Empfindungen geselliger, zärtlicher oder aufgeregterer Lust können sich zu der Tanzbewegung einfinden under der Musik mannigfache, anmuthigere Kantilene verleihen." 5Joseph Lanner took advantage of this potential by using the opening waltz of Weber's Aufforderung zum Tanz (mm. 35–58) and a contrasting section (mm. 95–126) as the basis for the first waltz and trio of his op. 7 set of waltzes, published in 1827. Joseph Lanner, Sämtliche Werke für Klavier (New York: Broude Bros., 1973), vol. 1, 2–3. 6Frederick Niecks, Programme Music in the Last Four Centuries: A Contribution to the History of Musical Expression (London: Novello and Company, 1907), 138. 7Indeed, it is just this section that Lanner leaves out in his adaptation of Weber's music for the waltz and trio of his op. 7 waltzes. 8In his biography of his father, Weber's son described the Aufforderung zum Tanz as a "Singspiel ohne Worte auf dem Clavier" ("Musical play without words for the piano") (Max Maria von Weber, Carl Maria von Weber: Ein Lebensbild [Leipzig: E. Keil, 1864–66], vol. 2, 204). For an exploration of this idea and a consideration of the place of the Aufforderung in Weber's oeuvre, see Matthias S. Viertel, Die Instrumentalmusik Carl Maria von Webers: Ästhetische Voraussetzungen und struktureller Befund, Europäische Hochschulschriften, Reihe XXXVI, Bd. 20 (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1986), 428–57. 9One prominent exception was the contredanse, which, rather than being based around couples, was performed with paired lines of dancers in the round, or in square formations, and which involved relatively simple steps. See Patri J. Pugliese, "Country Dance," in The International Encyclopedia of Dance: A Project of Dance Perspectives Foundation, Inc., ed. Selma Jeanne Cohen (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), vol. 2, 254–58. As Richard Leppert has noted, however, the contredanse of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries did little to break down class distinctions, since those who performed the dance were invariably all of the same status; see Richard Leppert, Music and Image: Domesticity, Ideology and Socio-Cultural Formation in Eighteenth-Century England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 97. 10The distinction I draw here could also be conceived of in terms of public venue: Literal dances were typically found in ballroom settings of the sort described by Alice M. Hanson, where the audience was seated so that they could attend to the dance floor; see Musical Life in Biedermeier Vienna (London: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 150–68; as well as Eric McKee, Decorum of the Minuet, Delirium of the Waltz: A Study of Dance-Music Relations in 3/4 Time (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2012), 95–106. Quasi-dramatic evocations of the dance were typically found in the concert hall, in which the audience was seated so that they could attend to the musicians; see Isabel Maathes, "Der Raum des Paradieses: Gesellige Erfahrung und musikalsiche Wahrheit im 18. und 19. Jahrhundert," in Le concert et son public: mutations de la vie musicale en Europe de 1780 à 1914 (France, Allemagne, Angleterre), ed. Hans Erich Bödeker, Patrice Veit, and Michael Werner (Paris: Éditions de la Maison des sciences de l'homme, 2002), 289–99. 11Leonard G. Ratner, Classic Music: Expression, Form, and Style (New York: Schirmer Books, 1980). 12Victor Kofi Agawu, Playing with Signs: A Semiotic Interpretation of Classical Music (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991); Victor Kofi Agawu, Music as Discourse: Semiotic Aventures in Romantic Music (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009); Robert S. Hatten, Musical Meaning in Beethoven: Markedness, Correlation, and Interpretation (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994); Robert S. Hatten, Interpreting Musical Gestures, Topics, and Tropes: Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004); Raymond Monelle, The Sense of Music: Semiotic Essays (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000); Raymond Monelle, The Musical Topic: Hunt, Military and Pastoral (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006). 13Wye Jamison Allanbrook, Rhythmic Gesture in Mozart: Le Nozze Di Figaro and Don Giovanni (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983). 14Allanbrook, Rhythmic Gesture in Mozart, 75–76. 15Meredith Little and Natalie Jenne, Dance and the Music of J. S. Bach, rev. ed. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001), 37. 16Allanbrook, Rhythmic Gesture in Mozart, 4. 17Giacomo Rizzolatti and Corrado Sinigaglia, Mirrors in the Brain: How Our Minds Share Actions and Emotions, trans. Frances Anderson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 20. 18Luciano Fadiga et al., "Visuomotor Neurons: Ambiguity of the Discharge or 'Motor' Perception," International Journal of Psychophysiology 35 (2000), 171. 19Fadiga et al., "Visuomotor Neurons," 172. 20Francesca Garbarini and Mauro Adenzato, "At the Root of Embodied Cognition: Cognitive Science Meets Neurophysiology," Brain and Cognition 56/1 (October 2004), 102. 21Rizzolatti and Sinigaglia, Mirrors in the Brain, 80; translation adapted. 22Maria Alessandra Umiltà et al., "I Know What You Are Doing: A Neurophysiological Study," Neuron 32/1 (July 2001), 160. 23Marc Bangert et al., "Shared Networks for Auditory and Motor Processing in Professional Pianists: Evidence from FMRI Conjunction," NeuroImage 30 (2006), 917–26; Roy Mukamel et al., "Single-Neuron Responses in Humans During Execution and Observation of Actions," Current Biology 20/8 (April 2010), 750–56. 24Valeria Gazzola, Lisa Aziz-Zadeh, and Christian Keysers, "Empathy and the Somatotopic Auditory Mirror System in Humans," Current Biology 16 (September 2006), 1824–29. 25Bernhard Haslinger et al., "Transmodal Sensorimotor Networks During Action Observation in Professional Pianists," Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience 17/2 (2005), 282–93; Bangert et al., "Shared Networks for Auditory and Motor Processing in Professional Pianists." For a review and discussion, see Katie Overy and Istvan Molnar-Szakacs, "Being Together in Time: Musical Experience and the Mirror Neuron System," Music Perception 26/5 (2009), 489–504. 26Vittorio Gallese and Corrado Sinigaglia, "What Is So Special about Embodied Simulation?" Trends in Cognitive Sciences 15/11 (November 2011), 512–19. 27Beatriz Calvo-Merino et al., "Action Observation and Acquired Motor Skills: An fMRI Study with Expert Dancers," Cerebral Cortex 15 (August 2005), 1243–44. 28Steven Brown, Michael J. Martinez, and Lawrence M. Parsons, "The Neural Basis of Human Dance," Cerebral Cortex 16 (August 2006), 1157–67. 29Dedre Gentner, "Structure-Mapping: A Theoretical Framework for Analogy," Cognitive Science 7 (1983), 155–70; Dedre Gentner and Kenneth J. Kurtz, "Relations, Objects, and the Composition of Analogies," Cognitive Science 30 (2006), 609–42; Keith J. Holyoak and Paul Thagard, Mental Leaps: Analogy in Creative Thought (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995), chap. 1; Keith J. Holyoak, "Analogy," in The Cambridge Handbook of Thinking and Reasoning, ed. Keith Holyoak and Robert G. Morrison (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 117–42. 30For a discussion of the complex relationships between physical gestures and music, see Alexander Refsum Jensenius et al., "Musical Gestures: Concepts and Methods in Research," in Musical Gestures: Sound, Movement, and Meaning, ed. Rolf Inge Godøy and Marc Leman (New York: Routledge, 2010), 12–35. 31Scott Curtis, "The Sound of Early Warner Bros. Cartoons," in Sound Theory/Sound Practice, ed. Rick Altman (New York: Routledge, 1992), 191–203; Daniel Goldmark, Tunes for 'Toons: Music and the Hollywood Cartoon (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005). 32Zhe Chen, Rebecca Polley Sanchez, and Tammy Campbell, "From Beyond to Within Their Grasp: The Rudiments of Analogical Problem Solving in 10- and 13-Month-Olds," Developmental Psychology 33/5 (September 1997), 790–801. 33Usha Goswami, Analogical Reasoning in Children (Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1992); Usha Goswami, "Analogical Reasoning in Children," in The Analogical Mind: Perspectives from Cognitive Science, ed. Dedre Gentner, Keith J. Holyoak, and Boicho N. Kokinov (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001), 437–70; Dedre Gentner, "Why We're So Smart," in Language in Mind: Advances in the Study of Language and Thought, ed. Dedre Gentner and Susan Goldin-Meadow (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003), 195–235. 34Josep Call and Michael Tomasello, "Reasoning and Thinking in Nonhuman Primates," in The Cambridge Handbook on Thinking and Reasoning, ed. Keith Holyoak and Robert G. Morrison (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 607–32. 35Lawrence M. Zbikowski, "Dance Topoi, Sonic Analogues, and Musical Grammar: Communicating with Music in the Eighteenth Century," in Communication in Eighteenth Century Music, ed. V. Kofi Agawu and Danuta Mirka (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 283–309. 36Allanbrook, Rhythmic Gesture in Mozart, 76. 37For a view of relationships between music and gesture in opera largely consonant with the perspective I take here, see Mary Ann Smart, Mimomania: Music and Gesture in Nineteenth-Century Opera (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004). 38I describe this process of meaning construction in some detail in my analysis of the Finale of Franz Joseph Haydn's String Quartet Op. 76, No. 4 in "Dance Topoi, Sonic Analogues, and Musical Grammar," 299–305. 39For more on this perspective on embodiment, see Raymond W. Gibbs Jr., Embodiment and Cognitive Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006). 40Allanbrook, Rhythmic Gesture in Mozart, 6–8. 41Allanbrook, Rhythmic Gesture in Mozart, 31. 42Thomas Wilson, A Description of the Correct Method of Waltzing, the Truly Fashionable Species of Dancing (London: Printed for the author, published by Sherwood, Neely, and Jones, 1816); Friedrich Albert Zorn, Grammar of the Art of Dancing Theoretical and Practical: Lessons in the Arts of Dancing and Dance Writing (Choregraphy) with Drawings, Musical Examples, Choregraphic Symbols, and Special Musical Scores [1905], ed. Alfonson Josephs Sheafe, trans. Benjamin P. Coates, (Brooklyn, New York: Dance Horizons, 1976). Wilson distinguishes among the slow waltz, the sauteuse waltz, the quick sauteuse waltz, and the German waltz. Zorn lists the galop waltz, the waltz (La Valse), the two-beat waltz (La Valse à Deux Temps), the three- or six-step waltz (La Valse à Trois ou à Six Temps), the reverse waltz (La Valse à l'Envers), the hop waltz (Valse Sautillée), the balance waltz (Valse Balancée), the waltz (Valse en Cinq Temps), the mazurka waltz (Valse de Mazourka), and the Hungarian waltz (Valse Hongroise). 43Hanson, Musical Life in Biedermeier Vienna, 150–68; McKee, Decorum of the Minuet, Delirium of the Waltz, chap. 3; Derek B. Scott, Sounds of the Metropolis: The Nineteenth-Century Popular Music Revolution in London, New York, Paris, and Vienna (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), chap. 5. 44Lydia Goehr, The Imaginary Museum of Musical Works: An Essay in the Philosophy of Music (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992). 45Robert Schumann, Gesammelte Schriften über Musik und Musiker, 2 vols., ed. Martin Kreisig (Farnborough, Hampshire, UK: Gregg International Publishers, 1969), vol. 1, 201–3. It is worth noting that Florestan breaks off his narration in the middle of dance no. 10, which (as Otto Kinkeldey noted) makes use of a quite striking, and even histrionic, juxtaposition of E-major and B♭-major harmonies. See Otto Kinkeldey, "Schubert: Dance-Composer," The Musical Quarterly 14/4 (October 1928), 615. 46Eduard Hanslick, On the Musically Beautiful: A Contribution Towards the Revision of the Aesthetics of Music, trans. Geoffrey Payzant (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing Company, 1986), 57. Note that Marx distinguished between "common" waltzes and those that could prompt "more various and more noble feelings of social, tender, or aroused desire," something that does not seem to be countenanced by Hanslick's critique. 47Lydia Goehr, The Quest for Voice: Music, Politics, and the Limits of Philosophy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), chap. 3. 48Maureen Needham, "Louis XIV and the Académie Royale de Danse, 1661: A Commentary and Translation," Dance Chronicle 20/2 (1997), 180, translation adapted. For a similar perspective on the importance of dance for distinguishing nobility, see Pierre Rameau, The Dancing Master [1725], trans. Cyril W. Beaumont (New York: Dance Horizons, 1970), xii. 49Georgia J. Cowart, The Triumph of Pleasure: Louis XIV & the Politics of Spectacle (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 14. 50Alain Viala, "Les Signes Galantes: A Historical Reevaluation of Galanterie," trans. Daryl Lee, Yale French Studies 92, Exploring the Conversible World: Text and Sociability from the Classical Age to the Englightenment (1997), 11–29. 51In offering this analysis I differ from Janice Dickensheets and Kofi Agawu, each of whom regards the waltz as a topic within nineteenth-century musical practice. The examples that Dickensheets provides, however, are of complete works that are either proper waltzes (as in the case of Weber's Freischütz waltz) or impressions of waltzes (as in the case of the second movement of Hector Berlioz's Symphonie fantastique); she does not cite examples comparable to those offered by Allanbrook. See Janice Dickensheets, "Ninteenth-Century Topical Analysis: A Lexicon of Romantic Topoi," The Pendragon Review 2/1 (2003), 5–19; and Agawu, Music as Discourse, 41–50.