Music and Dance

This chapter provides an introduction to and analyses of relationships between music and dance in two dance practices from Western Europe: the first from early eighteenth-century France, the second from early nineteenth-century Vienna. The chapter introduces French dance notation and shows how it facilitates an analysis of the steps and music for a bourrée. The analysis offers insights into the musical grammar of the bourrée and the contribution that dance practice made to the construction of social relations in the court of Louis XIV. The second dance practice is that of the waltz, which had a prominent place in the social landscape of early nineteenth-century Vienna. Analyses of waltzes by Josef Lanner and Franz Schubert make clear the relationship between the music and steps of the waltz, as well as how composers adapted their music to the different social contexts within which the dance was performed.