Doctoral Colloquium (Music) | Sylvain Margot

Very little is known about dance music before the Baroque era. Most studies on the subject are by dance historians; only a few are by musicologists and none by music theorists. This is somewhat surprising since we have many pieces from sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europe. Transmitted and used for teaching by dance masters in the form of a simple melodic line, dance music was often ornamented, published in polyphonic arrangements, or reused within other works. The study of this corpus is particularly interesting for the analysis of melodic style.

The galliard was a virtuoso dance found throughout Europe. There are no less than 530 polyphonic galliards, published in 50 collections. Although its choreographic unit, the “cinque passi” or five-steps, is usually danced to a metric unit of two ternary measures, dance historian Barbara Sparti has noted that many later galliard sections have an odd number of measures. She interprets these deviations as the mark of a late evolution from dance music to “art” music. But is this the only explanation?

The eight dance treatises of the end of the Renaissance that deal with the galliard seem to support Sparti’s assertion. The choreographic structure of the dance, as described there, is always symmetrical. The two main choreographic functions, the passage and the mutation, are both built upon the elementary two-ternary-measure five-steps, making it impossible to dance a section with an uneven number of measures.

On the other hand, early irregular galliards were printed in the same volumes as other regular pieces without notable distinction, suggesting that they were danced too. Furthermore, they show hypermetric deviations that are also found in some later irregular galliards, which undermines Sparti's theory of a “late” evolution to art music. These include the compressed motive, that is the shortening of a melodic sentence by deletion of its initial repeating notes; the extended cadence, that consists in the addition of a final measure after the cadence has resolved; and the binary reinterpretation, that is a play with hypermetric ambiguity often found in French galliards.

Fortunately, an overlooked line in Arbeau’s dance treatise might provide a clue to how to dance on irregular galliards. Some types of révérence can be danced outside of the five-steps framework, thus allowing the dancers to insert a choreographic measure where relevant. By using this technique with a musical example, I will demonstrate that it is possible to solve the irregular galliard dilemma faced by many contemporary dance scholars.