Near the beginning of Act 3 of Smetana’s Bartered Bride the circus comes to town. And, after a lengthy and tongue-twisting preamble by the ringmaster featuring Esmeralda, an exotic Spanish dancer; a (fake) Red Indian and a very inebriate (and consequently also fake) dancing bear; the performers show off their acrobatic skills in the fast […]
Habanera? Of course you know what it is! A very famous example — The dance originates from Havana, hence Habanera; its provenance being more obvious, perhaps, from its other title, the Havanaise. As a popular rhythm it certainly caught on with French composers during the latter half of the nineteenth and early twentieth century; here’s another version, […]
In the last act of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, after performance of the ‘tedious brief scene of young Pyramus and his love Thisby’, Bottom offers the Duke a choice between an epilogue ‘or to hear a Bergomask dance between two of our company’; the Duke – wisely – chooses the dance. The transposition of the popular rhythms […]
I thought, before I started in on this topic, that it would be a good thing to have some sort of idea of what was and what wasn’t folk music, since – not unusually, I’m afraid – my notions on the subject were woolly, vague and lacking in definition. So, firstly, I turned to that fount […]
