For Quantz, by declining to make
a theoretical decision, shows that his ear had fallen captive to the
Italian musical school which strove not so much to hear the
characteristic in music as the simply beautiful, and, indifferent to the
prevailing lively controversy over the keys, composed its melodies as
was most convenient for the voice of the singer and the fingers of the
accompanist.
In the first half of the eighteenth century people still possessed a
very keen ear for dance music. The great majority of the dance melodies
of that time are moderately animated. To our modern ear and pulse-beat,
on the contrary, slow dance music seems to be a contradiction in itself;
a melody which in those days inspired people and started their feet to
dancing would now lull us to sleep. We desire stormily exciting dance
music; our ancestors gave the preference to the gayly stimulating kind.
How entirely differently constituted, how differently qualified
historically, politically, and socially, was that generation in whose
ears sounded the dance rhythm of the majestic _sarabande_, the solemnly
animated _entree, loure_, and _chaconne_, the delicate pastoral
_musette_, the staid gliding _siciliano_, and the measured, graceful
minuet, compared to a generation who dance the whirling waltz, the
stormy skipping _galop_, and the furious _cancan!_ In the opera the
tragic hero could dance a _sarabande_, and even in choral songs of the
church the ear of the eighteenth century could distinguish dance music.
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