Music, Dance, and Meaning in the Early Nineteenth Century

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.