Joseph Haydn, in his 1772 “Joke” Quartet, follows a leaping, vigorous scherzo with a cheeky, playful trio:
Minuet music full#
Watch Mozart's full Serenade for Winds in C minor here.ĭuring this period, it also became common for composers to replace minuet movements with scherzos (literally “jokes”), trading out the stately, aristocratic character of the form’s origins for a more humorous and rustic type of dance. 1782), writes a trio in sunny C major that represents a total inversion of the preceding, melancholy C minor minuet: Mozart, in his C minor Serenade for Winds (c.
For example, they frequently used trio sections to explore contrasting key areas. Trio sections often still included a thinning or simplification in texture, but Classical composers began to focus on ways to create variety other than featuring fewer instruments. In the Classical period, the form became more stylized and concise, usually featuring just one trio in between two repetitions of the same minuet.
Watch Bach's full Brandenburg Concerto No. The upbeat, final trio is what Marissen describes as “Germanic hunt music.” It is in a highly contrasting duple meter and employs the unique, wind-band-like combination of oboes and horns: The next interlude is a sometimes-soothing, sometimes-galloping Polish dance, the Polonaise, featuring strings: The first, “French” trio features two oboes and bassoon, the scoring that Lully was known for: Each of the trio sections puts a different solo instrument group on display and represents a particular national style.
Minuet music series#
1720) features a series of three such intervening dances sandwiched between many iterations of a minuet refrain. The rest of the party would watch and then join in for the return of the Tutti minuet section. According to Bach scholar Michael Marissen, these intervening trio sections held an additional, elite social connotation: only the nobles were supposed to dance during this music. One of Lully’s admirers who adopted similar practices, German composer George Muffat (1653-1704), described the emotional consequences of such “Trio” contrasts for listeners, saying “through the rigorous observation of this opposition or contrast between…the fullness of the large choir and the tenderness of the trio, the ear will be transported to a state of special amazement, just as the eye is so transported by the contrast of light and shadow.” This alternating instrumentation technique was quite popular and by the end of the 17th century, it was common practice to label a contrasting, alternate section in a dance form as a “Trio” regardless of the actual instrumentation. For example, French composer Jean Baptiste Lully (1632-87) wrote minuets that alternated a full string orchestra with a smaller “Trio” of two oboes and a bassoon, as in the excerpt below from his 1670 score to the comédie-ballet Le Bourgeois gentilhomme.Īn alternate minuet for oboes (haubois) and bassoon from Lully’s score to Molière’s comédie-ballet Le Bourgeois gentilhomme Composers began to write alternate sections to go between duplications of the main minuet music, providing listeners with some variety of melody and timbre while increasing the length of the composition to fit the dance. As a result, the music that accompanied minuets was extremely repetitive. The minuet was a long dance, both in terms of the number of steps it included, and because it could sometimes take well over 100 measures for the ending of the dance pattern to coincide with the end of an appropriate musical section.
Minuet music manual#
In the diagram below from French dancing master Pierre Rameau’s manual Le maître à danser, the court observes as a couple advances (3 & 4) and bows to the King (1 & 2) before starting their dance:Ī minuet at the King’s great Ball: engraving from Pierre Rameau’s Le maître à danser This stately, aristocratic dance in 3/4 time featured individual couples completing step patterns of 12 measures while the rest of the party looked on. The story behind trio sections begins with the history of the minuet, a popular dance form that came into fashion in France in the 17th century.
So where does this (instrumentally misleading) label come from? We take for granted the fact the corresponding section in the music rarely features three instruments. The word “Trio” appears on concert programs all the time, usually attached to a minuet or scherzo movement in a symphony or a piece of chamber music.
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