It seems a stretch to say that the music of a composer like Bach is so intimately tied to dance. Music, like all art,
comes to have a language of its own and an internal logic that may not be very closely connected to whatever social
forms are dominant at the time. Baroque music had relatively fixed structures and no doubt Bach used the traditional forms and
went further than anyone else in wringing invention out of them. But just because a section of a composition is called a
gavotte or a gigue doesn't mean that the composer was thinking much about dance when he or she wrote it. To put too much stock in the dance[music connection is, I think, to deny a composer his art.
And isn't there a painting of Bach striking one of his students? Pretty stern fellow to be enamored much with dancing. And with all those kids,
he must have done most of his dancing in bed.
Now Beethoven, there is a revolutionary. I'd bet that the music he wrote after becoming deaf has little to do with dance.
An so what? To suggest that music divorced from dance is not worthy is ridiculous. Sort of like saying that once painting freed itself from
a stricter representation of reality, it wasn't really painting. Is Mondrian's Broadway Boogie Woogie less a fine painting than Childe Hassam's Fifth Avenue in Winter? Whoops. Maybe Mondrian's is better since connected to dance!!
michael yates