Page 140 - ESSENTIAL LISTENING TO MUSIC

Figure 8.2
Couples in the late eighteenth century dancing the stately min- uet. In some areas of Europe at this time, women were forbidden to dance the minuet because it was thought to involve excessive body contact.
Figure 8.3
Minuet and trio in ternary form
triple meter (Figure 8.2). The minuet began life in the Baroque era as a popular dance, but during the Classical period composers appropriated it for use within the high-art genres of the symphony and the string quartet. “Dance music” had become domesticated as “listening music.”
When the minuet appeared as a movement of a symphony or quartet, it came in pairs. Because the second minuet of the pair had originally been played by only three instruments, it was called the trio, a name that persisted into the nineteenth century, no matter how many instruments a composer required. Once the trio was finished, convention dictated a return to the first minuet, now performed without repeats. Because the trio also was composed in ternary form, an ABA pattern was heard three times in succession. (In the following, the ABA structure of the trio is represented by CDC, to distinguish it from the minuet.) Because the trio was different from the surrounding minuet, the entire minuet– trio–minuet movement formed an ABA arrangement (Figure 8.3).
Mozart’s Eine kleine Nachtmusik (A Little Night Music), written in the summer of 1787, is among his most popular works. It is a serenade, a light, multimovement piece for strings alone or small orchestra, one intended for an evening’s enter- tainment and often performed outdoors. Although we do not know the precise occasion for which Mozart composed it, we might well imagine Eine kleine Nacht- musik providing the musical backdrop for a torch-lit party in a formal Viennese garden. The Menuetto appears as the third of four movements in this serenade (see Listening Cue) and is a model of grace and concision (Example 8.1).
As you can see, the contrasting B section interjects rapid motion, but is only four measures long, and the return to A does not reproduce the full eight
A (minuet) B (trio) A (minuet)
𝄆a 𝄇𝄆ba 𝄇 𝄆C 𝄇𝄆DC 𝄇 ABA
118 chapter eight classical forms
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