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Writer's pictureHeather Wade

Fancy Schmancy

So all of you who are loyal followers (THANK YOU) know that the project for the summer is a Dance Suite that I wrote and am dribbling out in video form. Of course, it is ultimately intended to be heard as a unit, all 6 movements together, but for now you get them one at a time. Just so no one gets bloated. ANYWAY...


The latest video is a Minuet, the dance craze of the 17th century, (and now we TWERK. How far we've come. I'm so proud of us). Here are some interesting things about minuets...












King Louis the 14th really liked to dance. He thought dancing was the BEES KNEES. And one of his favorites was the minuet. So everyone else made sure they knew how to dance the minuet so that they looked like they belonged at court and so they could impress the king, and all that fantastic stuff. And that's how the minuet became so popular.



Minuets are short, dignified, and very

fancy and ooh-la-la. All the steps are little fancy tiny things. Like little cakes and sandwiches. Minuets are written in triple meter and in 2 parts, both of which repeat. If you want to be fancy too, you can call that BINARY FORM. Eventually, composers thought that minuets were really kind of way too short (like a minute or 2), so they extended them by adding another minuet in the middle of the first minuet. (Its like that horrible Thanksgiving thing, a turducken, where you stuff a duck inside a turkey). ANYWAY....the minuet in the middle was often written for only 3 players, in order to distinguish it from the first minuet, so it is called a TRIO. So when you hear a minuet and trio, you are hearing first the turkey, then the duck, and then the turkey again. Maybe I just ruined minuets for you. I'm sorry.


At first, minuets were written to be actually danced to. So composers who lived in the time of King Louis, like Jean-Baptiste Lully, wrote their minuets with that intention. But later, when people like Bach and Mozart and Haydn and Beethoven wrote them, they were really intended just for listening and not dancing to. The dance craze had moved on - we were getting a LITTLE closer to the awesomeness that is twerking.


You find minuets usually as a 3rd movements in symphonies and string quartets, and as solo movements, and other places too, although they are an old form, and are not written so much anymore. Beethoven kind of phased them out when he started writing scherzos as his 3rd movements instead.


Anyway, I hope you like my minuet. You can dance if you want. Or twerk I suppose...if you must....no judgement.







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