Paine's Quadrilles, Twelfth Set, 1819 (4 of 4)

(This is fourth in a series of four posts covering Paine's Twelfth Set.  The introductory post in the series may be found here, figures one and two here, and figures three and four here.)

Concluding my series on Paine's Twelfth Set, the final figure!

No. 5, tune "La Nouvelle Fantasia"
Figure.
Chassez croisez huit, les quatre Cavaliers en avant 4 mes, les quatre dames de meme, balancez tour de mains, la Cavalier seul en avant et en arriere 8 mes, la dame seul de meme. 
La Grand Promenade.

All 8 chassez across and back again, the 4 Gent: advance and retire 4 bars, the 4 Ladies the same, balancez and turn your partners, one Gent: advance and retire twice 8 bars, the opposite Lady do the same.  
Promenade all 8.

(This is fourth in a series of four posts covering Paine's Twelfth Set.  The introductory post in the series may be found here, figures one and two here, and figures three and four here.)

Concluding my series on Paine's Twelfth Set, the final figure!

No. 5, tune "La Nouvelle Fantasia"
Figure.
Chassez croisez huit, les quatre Cavaliers en avant 4 mes, les quatre dames de meme, balancez tour de mains, la Cavalier seul en avant et en arriere 8 mes, la dame seul de meme. 
La Grand Promenade.

All 8 chassez across and back again, the 4 Gent: advance and retire 4 bars, the 4 Ladies the same, balancez and turn your partners, one Gent: advance and retire twice 8 bars, the opposite Lady do the same.  
Promenade all 8.

Figure 5: 8b introduction + 48b x4 + 8b coda
Music: A=8b, B=8b, C(A)=8b, D=16b, to be played A + (ABCDAx4) +A (see notes below)
8b    Chassé-croisé huit (all chassez-croisez)
4b    Les cavaliers en avant et en arrière (all four gentlemen forward and back)
4b    Les dames en avant et en arrière (all four ladies forward and back)
8b    Balancez et tour de mains (all balance and turn partners by two hands)
8b    Pas seul / en avant et en arrière deux fois (first gentleman solo)
8b    Pas seul / en avant et en arrière deux fois (opposite lady solo)
8b    Promenade (all eight promenade all the way around)
(Repeat all of the above three more times with each vis-à-vis pair leading in turn)
—
At the very end only:
8b    Chassé-croisé huit (all chassez-croisez) 

The above is a nice, workable reconstruction, matching the music and matching Rogers' exactly other than our perennial disagreement about tour de mains (he's still going with right, I'm still going with two, and never the twain shall meet...)

The only problem with it is that I don't feel that it really matches the figures given.  Specifically, I think La Grand Promenade at the end is meant to be the "coda" figure, which means it is not part of the regular figure, which cuts the regular figure to only forty bars.  I can't be certain of that, but in others of Paine's quadrille sets, the coda figure is set aside on a separate line like that, sometimes (but not always) with words like pour Fin (for the Finale) attached.  Paine's sets were not carefully or consistently edited, so some sets include pour Fin, some do not but have a single figure on a separate line that seems to be meant as a coda figure, and some appear not to have one and may or may not be intended to.  But La Grand Promenade really looks like a coda figure. 

So that means there is a forty-bar figure and a forty-eight bar tune.  I think that whoever wrote the figures (it may or may not have been Paine himself) just wasn't paying attention. 

When faced with a problem like this, the choice comes down to whether to alter the figures to fit the music or whether to alter the music to fit the figures.  The music is unambiguously forty-eight bars.  The first (A) strain is repeated twice at the beginning.  The most obvious way to trim the music would be to play it only once, but that wrecks the otherwise beautiful figure-music correlation which has the two pas seul figures in the sixteen-bar D strain.  Taking out any other strain would really be doing violence to the music and its rondo form (the C strain is a copy of the A strain).

Inserting some random figure to bring the total up to forty-eight bars is not an appealing solution, so that leaves us with the version given above, which at least uses the figures printed on the music and no others.  What finally reconciled me to this was the fact that if one takes away the initial chassé-croisé, what's left looks very familiar.  It's a combination found in, among other places, the anonymous Scottish manuscript, Contre Danses à Paris 1818, where it appears as a possible Finale figure attached to the popular tune "Le Garçon Volage".  That figure is forty bars, with no coda, in almost exactly the same form as above, the only difference being that in the en avant and pas seul figures, the ladies dance before the gentlemen.  I think of it colloquially as the Garçon Volage figure, even though that tune was used and reused for different quadrille figures and even different types of dance. 

So, all right, this is the not-really-Garçon Volage figure bracketed by chassé-croisé in the same way that a short (thirty-two-bar) Finale figure is often L'Été bracketed by chassé-croisé.  I still think the way it is notated on the sheet music is somewhere between "carelessly formatted" and "actual mistake", but this interpretation does the least violence to figures and music.

Steps: most of the necessary sequences were given or linked in my second post in this series.  The full promenade may be done as seven chassé; jeté, assemblé.  For the pas seul, each dancer may literally go forward and back twice using any combination of sequences for en avant et en arrière.  Particularly confident and skilled dancers could also just improvise using steps and sequences from the period repertoire.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

A bit of musical trivia to conclude my discussion of Paine's Twelfth Set: "Le Garçon Volage" was far from the only tune recycled in this era.  Paine's contemporary, G. M. S. Chivers, shamelessly borrowed three of the tunes from Paine's Twelfth Set for his own quadrilles.  "L'Aimable" and "La Belle Flamand" were used for figures two and three of his Carbineers set, both with completely different forty-bar figures, and "La Nouvelle Fantasia" was used for the fifth figure of his Cuirassiers with a different forty-eight bar figure bracketed by (surprise!) chassé-croisé.  

Happy dancing!

The above is a nice, workable reconstruction, matching the music and matching Rogers' exactly other than our perennial disagreement about tour de mains (he's still going with right, I'm still going with two, and never the twain shall meet...)

The only problem with it is that I don't feel that it really matches the figures given.  Specifically, I think La Grand Promenade at the end is meant to be the "coda" figure, which means it is not part of the regular figure, which cuts the regular figure to only forty bars.  I can't be certain of that, but in others of Paine's quadrille sets, the coda figure is set aside on a separate line like that, sometimes (but not always) with words like pour Fin (for the Finale) attached.  Paine's sets were not carefully or consistently edited, so some sets include pour Fin, some do not but have a single figure on a separate line that seems to be meant as a coda figure, and some appear not to have one and may or may not be intended to.  But La Grand Promenade really looks like a coda figure. 

So that means there is a forty-bar figure and a forty-eight bar tune.  I think that whoever wrote the figures (it may or may not have been Paine himself) just wasn't paying attention. 

When faced with a problem like this, the choice comes down to whether to alter the figures to fit the music or whether to alter the music to fit the figures.  The music is unambiguously forty-eight bars.  The first (A) strain is repeated twice at the beginning.  The most obvious way to trim the music would be to play it only once, but that wrecks the otherwise beautiful figure-music correlation which has the two pas seul figures in the sixteen-bar D strain.  Taking out any other strain would really be doing violence to the music and its rondo form (the C strain is a copy of the A strain).

Inserting some random figure to bring the total up to forty-eight bars is not an appealing solution, so that leaves us with the version given above, which at least uses the figures printed on the music and no others.  What finally reconciled me to this was the fact that if one takes away the initial chassé-croisé, what's left looks very familiar.  It's a combination found in, among other places, the anonymous Scottish manuscript, Contre Danses à Paris 1818, where it appears as a possible Finale figure attached to the popular tune "Le Garçon Volage".  That figure is forty bars, with no coda, in almost exactly the same form as above, the only difference being that in the en avant and pas seul figures, the ladies dance before the gentlemen.  I think of it colloquially as the Garçon Volage figure, even though that tune was used and reused for different quadrille figures and even different types of dance. 

So, all right, this is the not-really-Garçon Volage figure bracketed by chassé-croisé in the same way that a short (thirty-two-bar) Finale figure is often L'Été bracketed by chassé-croisé.  I still think the way it is notated on the sheet music is somewhere between "carelessly formatted" and "actual mistake", but this interpretation does the least violence to figures and music.

Steps: most of the necessary sequences were given or linked in my second post in this series.  The full promenade may be done as seven chassé; jeté, assemblé.  For the pas seul, each dancer may literally go forward and back twice using any combination of sequences for en avant et en arrière.  Particularly confident and skilled dancers could also just improvise using steps and sequences from the period repertoire.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

A bit of musical trivia to conclude my discussion of Paine's Twelfth Set: "Le Garçon Volage" was far from the only tune recycled in this era.  Paine's contemporary, G. M. S. Chivers, shamelessly borrowed three of the tunes from Paine's Twelfth Set for his own quadrilles.  "L'Aimable" and "La Belle Flamand" were used for figures two and three of his Carbineers set, both with completely different forty-bar figures, and "La Nouvelle Fantasia" was used for the fifth figure of his Cuirassiers with a different forty-eight bar figure bracketed by (surprise!) chassé-croisé.  

Happy dancing!