MINUET FORM PLUS

54 of the “Bear” minuet is a dramatic event (followed by a sudden modulation, to be sure). But we all recognize the basic consistency of minuet style: steady quarter-note motion in the accompaniment and in the general texture, in which a departure, like the big fermata at m. In the London symphonies, Haydn permits himself even more formal and tonal freedom in the minuets - freedom for the mind, away from powdered-wig formalities.

82 (“The Bear,” one of the best-loved of the Paris symphonies) has 14 + 24 bars, and the pattern of four-bar subphrases within these larger groups is varied the Trio section is 8 + 32 bars, with the first 8 repeated as the last 8 of the 32, and in between the tonality digresses from C major to C minor to E-flat major and returning. But already in Haydn’s quartets and symphonies, we can divine a tendency toward expanding the boundaries, breaking away from the eight-bar limitations, and exploring a wider tonal range.

MINUET FORM PLUS

21 is only 15 bars - one supposes an engraver’s error.) Unlike Beethoven’s minuets, which he wrote for orchestra (i.e., ballroom use), Schubert composed his for piano, i.e., for home use.Įxamples in chamber music and symphonies, away from the ballroom, are more familiar to most of us, like the third movement of Eine kleine Nachtmusik, with minuet in G (8 + 8 bars) followed by Trio in D (8 + 12), plus da capo. Schubert’s 30 Minuets, D 41, from 1816, weren’t published before 1889, and meanwhile ten of them were lost. 2, before you were ten years old because it was in everybody’s beginning piano book - maybe it was the first thing by Beethoven that you ever heard, even before Für Elise or the “Moonlight” Sonata. Beethoven’s 12 Minuets WoO 7, 6 Minuets WoO 9, etc., composed in the mid-1790s are typical, and you probably played the Minuet in G Major, WoO 10 No. There are plenty of 32-bar standard minuets in music, 8 + 8 bars, each repeated, followed by a “Trio” consisting of another 8 + 8 bars repeated, and then a da capo. We have two feet, but the minuet has three beats to the bar, so the positioning of steps varied between left, right, and together. The aristocratic minuet from the 18 th century, a highly stylized dance for a couple, or for several couples in a square format, watched over by polite society, was considered proper and difficult, and therefore a social test.

Minuet form