This was posted to the Music Library Association list. It's rather fascinating. English country dances for Louis XIV. It may be of interest to many of you.
Julia Sutton, who has made a specialty of early dances (she edited a modern edition of Caroso's dance music), is also an authority on Besard. =====AJN (Boston, Mass.)===== ----- Original Message ----- From: "Robert M Keller" <[email protected]> To: <[email protected]> Sent: Saturday, March 07, 2009 11:07 AM Subject: [MLA-L] Dances for the Sun King: André Lorin's "Livre de Contredance" The Colonial Music Institute announces release of Dances for the Sun King: André Lorin's "Livre de Contredance" Edited by Julia Sutton and Rachelle Palnick Tsachor Annapolis: The Colonial Music Institute, 2008 300 pages. 93 illustrations. Paper. $49.95 978-0-9818759-2-7 André Lorin's "Livre de Contredance" (1685-87) is a collection of dances of a type long known as English country dance. Lorin, sent to England by Louis XIV, was asked to bring back to court the "most beautiful" of the dances. He then profoundly changed them, imbuing them with the French style of the steps recently codified by the Académie Royale de Danse (of which he claimed membership) and showing how to perform them exactly with the music. Lorin's manuscript is published here for the first time, in complete facsimile, with the corresponding translation and a full performing edition of the dance on each facing page. Extensive illustrations and essays about Lorin's life and the long history of the dance type, explanations of the notated steps, concordances and biographies of the courtiers to whom the dances were dedicated fill out the volume. The earliest known written notation of English country dance for use in France, the manuscript documents the beginning of the transformation of English country dance into the French contredanse. Some of the thirteen dances are unique to Lorin's collection. Others were documented by Lorin before they were published in John Playford's The Dancing Master (1686). Several of these are very similar to the versions in The Dancing Master, but others contain significant differences. Lorin dedicated each dance to a member of the court of Louis XIV. At the end of the collection, he explained his choices of dedicatees in short poems that exhibit a sharp wit and hidden inferences. Edited by Julia Sutton and Rachelle Palnick Tsachor, the 300 page volume includes detailed information about dance in the reign of Louis XIV, the source of the new French Baroque technique that became the basis of ballet. Printed by Neponset River Press for The Colonial Music Institute To order, go to www.colonialmusic.org or <http://www.neponsetriverpress.com/> www.neponsetriverpress.com To get on or off this list see list information at http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~wbc/lute-admin/index.html
