robison@eosp1.UUCP (Tobias D. Robison) (04/30/84)
References: At last, a forum for this flame. Why do almost all literate professional musicians insist upon playing minuets far slower than their composers intended them to be played? I have even heard performers change the order of a suite in order to make the last movement a fast one, instead of the "slow" concluding minuet that the composer intended. (I won't name any names, though; blood is thicker than water.) Minuets in Bach's time were played at approximately halfnote=80. That's halfnote!! not quarternote or dotted half. Quandt and one of Bach's sons explicitly discuss this tempo. Our "recordings" from Mozart's time (2 minuets on barrel organs) show that the minuet had not slowed down, which is borne out also by the writings of other theorists. The consensus among historians used to be that the minuet "slowed down" late in Mozart and Haydn's lives, as shown by the complexity of the minuets in their VERY late works. "But isn't the minuet a slow stately dance?", you will ask. Yes it is stately, but each step of the minuet is a HALFNOTE long. The dance is danced, rather catchily, on every other beat of the music. To no surprise, minuets make heavy use of halfnote rhythms in their music. I think the correct tempo is terrific, even for fairly late works of Mozart and Haydn, and early Schubert. Start thinking about this the next time you are listening to a "stately" minuet; imagine the music at its proper speed and you will realize you are being shortchanged. (Take the last movement of the Bach first Brandenburg, for example.) - Toby Robison (not Robinson!) allegra!eosp1!robison decvax!ittvax!eosp1!robison princeton!eosp1!robison
ark@rabbit.UUCP (Andrew Koenig) (04/30/84)
I have a little trouble imagining the last movement of the first Brandenburg going at halfnote=80 (quarter note-160). I think it sounds right about quarternote=130.
ken@ihuxq.UUCP (ken perlow) (05/01/84)
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I agree with Mr Robison on this one--they did take life slower
back then, but dances were a rollicking good time--minuets are
not slow. Neither are galliards, but you don't see many of them
in full orchestration. On the other hand, the labelling of a
symphonic movement "Minuet" does not necessarily mean that it is
to be performed as if it were one. It seems to me that "minuet"
became a generic term for an AABBA piece in 3/4.
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Maybe "minuet" is a little like "foxtrot". There are a lot of swing records from the 40s that are marked "foxtrot" even though they are much too fast to foxtrot to, presumably because the record manufacturers either didn't know what they really had or didn't want to scare people off with a "swing" label.