Minuet

A minuet (/ˌmɪnjuˈɛt/; also spelled menuet) is a social dance of

French origin for two people, usually in 3
4 time. The English word
was adapted from the Italian minuetto and the French menuet.

The term also describes the musical form that accompanies the
dance, which subsequently developed more fully, often with a
longer musical form called the minuet and trio, and was much
used as a movement in the early classical symphony.

Dance Minuet in the Classical period

The name may refer to the short steps, pas menus, taken in the
dance,[1] or else be derived from the branle à mener or amener, popular group dances in early 17th-century
France.[2] The minuet was traditionally said to have descended from the bransle de Poitou, though there is
no evidence making a clear connection between these two dances. The earliest treatise to mention the
possible connection of the name to the expression pas menus is Gottfried Taubert's Rechtschaffener
Tantzmeister, published in Leipzig in 1717, but this source does not describe the steps as being particularly
small or dainty.[3] At the period when it was most fashionable it was controlled, ceremonious and
graceful.[1]

Music

Rhythm and form

Minuet rhythm[4]

2. Minuet
0:00 / 0:00
From Bernhard Romberg's Flute Quintet in G major, Op. 1/3 (1798), James Galway, flute; The Young
Danish String Quartet

Problems playing this file? See media help.

The name of this dance is also given to a musical composition written in the same time and rhythm, though
when not accompanying an actual dance the pace was quicker.[1] Stylistically refined minuets, apart from
the social dance context, were introduced—to opera at first—by Jean-Baptiste Lully, who included no
fewer than 92 of them in his theatrical works[2] and in the late 17th century the minuet was adopted into the
suite, such as some of the suites of Johann Sebastian Bach and George Frideric Handel. Among Italian and
some French composers the minuet was often considerably quicker and livelier and was sometimes written
in 3 6 [5] Because the tempo of a minuet was not standard, the tempo direction tempo di minuetto
8 or 8 time
was ambiguous unless qualified by another direction, as it sometimes was.[6]

Initially, before its adoption in contexts other than social dance, the minuet was usually in binary form, with
two repeated sections of usually eight bars each. But the second section eventually expanded, resulting in a
kind of ternary form. The second (or middle) minuet provided form of contrast by means of different key
(although in many works, the second minuet stayed in the same key as the first minuet), orchestration, and
thematic material. On a larger scale, two such minuets might be further combined, so that the first minuet
was followed by a second one and then by a repetition of the first. The whole form might in any case be
repeated as long as the dance lasted.

Minuet and trio

Around Lully's time it became a common practice to score this middle section for a trio (such as two oboes
and a bassoon, as is common in Lully). As a result, this middle section came to be called the minuet's trio,
even when no trace of such an orchestration remains.[7] The overall structure is called rounded binary or
minuet form:[8]

A B A or A′
I (→ V) V or I(or other closely related) I

After these developments by Lully, composers occasionally inserted a modified repetition of the first (A)
section or a section that contrasted with both the A section and what was thereby rendered the third or C
section, yielding the form A–A′–B–A or A–B–C–A, respectively; an example of the latter is the third
movement of Mozart's Serenade No. 13 in G major, K. 525, popularly known under the title Eine kleine
Nachtmusik.

A livelier form of the minuet simultaneously developed into the scherzo (which was generally also coupled
with a trio). This term came into existence approximately from Beethoven onwards, but the form itself can
be traced back to Haydn.

The minuet and trio eventually became the standard third movement in the four-movement classical
symphony, Johann Stamitz being the first to employ it thus with regularity.[9]

An example of the true form of the minuet is to be found in Don Giovanni.[1]

A famous example of a more recent instrumental work in minuet form is Ignacy Jan Paderewski's Minuet in
G.

See also
Scherzo, a musical form derived from the minuet

References
1. Chisholm 1911.
2. Little 2001.
3. Russell 2006, 140–141.
4. Blatter 2007, 28.
 5. Milner, Fuller (27 February 2017). 6. Russell 2001.
"BEAUTY OF MUSIC | CHECK THE 7. "Minuet" (http://clickdavao.com/encycloped
TEMPO" (https://web.archive.org/web/201 ia/view_content.php?contentid=Minuet&titl
70716030710/https://www.americanpianist e=Dance). clickdavao.com. Retrieved
s.org/apa-blog/177-beauty-of-music-check- 2023-03-15.
the-tempo). American Pianists. Archived 8. Rosen 1988, 29.
from the original (https://www.americanpia
nists.org/apa-blog/177-beauty-of-music-ch 9. Langford 2019,.
eck-the-tempo) on 16 July 2017. Retrieved
20 February 2023.

Sources

Blatter, Alfred. 2007. Revisiting Music Theory: A Guide to the Practice. New York: Routledge.
ISBN 0-415-97440-2.
This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Chisholm, Hugh,
ed. (1911). "Minuet". Encyclopædia Britannica. Vol. 18 (11th ed.). Cambridge University
Press. p. 564.
Langford, Jeffrey. 2019. A History of the Symphony: The Grand Genre. New York: Routledge.
ISBN 0-131-12522-2.
Little, Meredith Ellis. 2001. "Minuet". The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians,
second edition, edited by Stanley Sadie and John Tyrrell. London: Macmillan.
Rosen, Charles. 1988. Sonata Forms, revised edition. New York: W. W. Norton. ISBN 0-393-
30219-9.
Russell, Tilden A. 2001. "Tempo di minuetto". The New Grove Dictionary of Music and
Musicians, second edition, edited by Stanley Sadie and John Tyrrell. London: Macmillan.
Russell, Tilden. 2006. "The Minuet According to Taubert". Dance Research: The Journal of
the Society for Dance Research 24, no. 2 (Winter): 138–162.

Further reading
Caplin, William Earl. 1998. Classical Form: A Theory of Formal Functions for the
Instrumental Music of Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven. New York: Oxford University Press.
ISBN 0-19-510480-3 (cloth); ISBN 0-19-514399-X (pbk). (pp. 220ff).
Elson, Louis Charles. 1908. The Theory of Music as Applied to the Teaching and Practice of
Voice and Instruments, 21st edition. Boston: New England Conservatory of Music.
(pp. 157ff).
Sutton, Julia. 1985. "The Minuet: An Elegant Phoenix". Dance Chronicle, no. 8:119–152.

External links
Media related to Minuet at Wikimedia Commons
Example of a Minuet Choreography (https://archive.today/20130106070826/http://www.early
-dance.de/en/content/6369-menuet-deux-pour-un-homme-et-une-femme): "Menuet à deux
pour un homme et une femme", Raoul Auger Feuillet: Recueil de Dances (1704)

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