As I’ve written in the previous part of the research, the early waltz, or deutscher walzer will lead to the Viennese waltz. As McKee writes, this dance was revolutionary not so much that it involved the embrace, but because the couples maintained it through the whole dance while continuously turning in circles (McKee, 2012: 100). In dancing, there is one important distinction between this early form of the late eighteenth century and the Viennese waltz of the early nineteenth century, and it involves the coordination of the couples. In deutscher walzer, the couples coordinated their movements with each other as a type of group dance. With Viennese waltz, couples, aside from a general counterclockwise motion around the room, didn’t coordinate their movements with other couples.
Music was also different. At first, early waltz tunes were fairly simple in form, based on the old landler or deutscher tanze melodies I’ve mentioned in the previous part. It wasn’t until around the second decade of the nineteenth century that the waltz music started to become more independent with the characteristics like the oom-pah-pah ostinato accompaniment, which wasn’t consistently used, nor established as a defining feature in the old landler or deautscher pieces. Scott goes further to write that it was even scarcely and rarely used. McKee pointes out how Reeser observed the oom-pah-pah in the waltz music occurring “only sporadically before about 1815.” (McKee, 2012: 71)
Generally, only with the explosion and popularity of waltz, did the oom-pah-pah become associated with a single genre, like it is today. In the past, by itself oom-pah-pah could have been used in different ways within a variety of styles. For example, the oom-pah-pah figures wasn’t used at all in Mozart’s first collection of deutsche tanze, while in the subsequent deutsche and landler pieces, it was utilized inconsistently, yet the pattern appeared as a standard accompaniment in his minuet trios. In fact, it was used as a standard pattern also in trios by many other composers, with the earliest occurrence that McKee had found being the trio of a minuet by J.C. Bach. (Fig. 1)
Fig. 1. Oom-pah-pah in J.C. Bach’s minuet trio Continue reading “Percussion Quintet Research, Part 3: Viennese and piano waltz”