Capering & Kickery

Mademoiselle Angelina

Kickery has been all-Regency-all-the-time lately due to my current research projects, but I'm going to take a little break from that era and move forward to the 1840s. 

While digging around in sheet music archives for something else entirely, I came across a new piece of music for the version of the five-step waltz taught by Pietro Saracco in New York in the mid-19th century.  New five-step music is hard to find, but that alone wouldn't make this worthy of note.  What's exciting about it is the cover page, shown at left (click to enlarge).

"The Angelina" was composed by Arnold Müller and was published in New York with a copyright date of 1846, which makes it earlier than most other sheet music for the dance.  The earliest previous evidence I had for this five-step waltz was sheet music by Christian Nolff dated 1848 and 1849, though I did have one earlier (1844) piece of music.  So it's nice to have a new piece by a different composer, and to bring the origin of the dance back a couple of years, almost as far back as the polka.  It hadn't yet even acquired its more compact title of "five-step waltz", which suggests to me that the dance was very, very new at this point.

Even more interesting is that the dance is credited as a "New Waltz in Five Steps invented by Monsieur Saracco, choreographist, and Mademoiselle Angelina, first teacher of the Parisian dancing academy of M(onsieu)r Cellarius".  Mademoiselle Angelina is the namesake of the music.

This is sensational to me on two levels. 

Dancing to "Wakefield Hunt"

Continuing my mini-series of Regency(ish)-era figure reconstruction...

The figures that appeared with "Mutual Love" (and a couple of other tunes) are a good example of tune/figure interchangeability -- specifically, of figures being reused with multiple pieces of music.  The other half of that interchangeability is tunes being recycled for different figures.  For that, I'm going to move on to the figures that appeared with "Wakefield Hunt'.  And the other figures that appeared with "Wakefield Hunt".  Yes, two figures, both alike in dignity (but completely different otherwise), in the fair 1770s and 1780s, where we lay our scene.  Two is actually a very small number; very popular tunes didn't go out of style and might be found with a dozen or more different figures over the years.

Dancing to "Mutual Love"

I get a lot of requests to tell people what dance figures to do to a particular piece of Regency-era country dance music.  The correct answer is "any historical figures that you like", since dance figures and tunes were mix-and-match during this period rather than locked together into tune-figure pairings with specific names.  So it's rare for me to do a through dissection of any particular set of figures.

But most people nowadays don't want to (or can't) call their own figures, and even people who don't want to try for that level of historical accuracy often do want to do figures in historical rather than modern style.  So I'm going to do a little series of posts doing historical reconstructions of the figures set to various tunes, which can then be used for that tune or any other tune of suitable length. 

First up: the figures that appeared in the 1770s with the tune "Mutual Love".

And the award for lack of originality in choreography goes to...

I'm accustomed to finding duplicate dance figures in the little country dance tune books of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century.  That's why I've taken to calling them tune books, since calling them dance manuals implies that the dance figures themselves are new, unique, or special.  What was exciting about them was the music; the figures were repetitive and uninspired.  In the little tune books, with twelve or twenty-four tunes, I'll often notice that the same dance figures (the complete sequence given for a tune) appear with two different tunes.  In the larger books, with two hundred or more tunes, I'll find several instances of repetition without much effort, with some figures being used several times.

And sometimes I find a doozy of a tune book whose publisher repeated so many dance figures -- even by the low standards of the era -- that more than half are duplicates.  That's unusual enough to be worth talking about by way of an example of how blithely indifferent dancers of this era were to originality in their country dance choreography.  And it can serve as Exhibit A for any future discussions of the interchangeability of Regency dance tunes and figures, which many present-day dancers have trouble accepting.