Dance has always been accompanied by music. It took centuries for the two art forms to separate and for dance-independent music to emerge. Even then, dance still very much continued to inform music, as it does to this day. Even now, hundreds of years after music and dance have parted, musicians are rediscovering the deep-seated and joyous dance at the center of Bach.
This is a selective account of that story. Allemande The Allemanda. Dance and music appear to have been inseparable until the fourteenth century, at the tail end of the medieval era, when the first specialists came along to teach only one or the other.
In the medieval era, a refined style of courtly dancing, appropriated from common dances, had emerged, and with it proper names for each dance. Outside the battlements of nobility, however, dancing activities were not yet codified affairs. When epidemics raged, it was not unusual for outbreaks of hysterical mass dance-madness to occur.
Medieval Italians, meanwhile, danced the tarantella whenever they stepped on a bigger spider; it supposedly cured the fatigue that such a bite induced. Dance rapidly turned from an unregulated, convulsive free-for-all into an art form during the early Renaissance.
With symmetry being paramount in dancing, dance music consisted of symmetric elements whose structure was audibly reinforced for the dancer; eventually, distinct rhythmic patterns were also adapted by music not necessarily intended to be danced to. Although not every Renaissance composer adhered to strict proportions as closely as William Byrd, with his pavans and galliards 2 , metric organization with recurring accents did provide the basis for a stricter sense of structure in the coming Baroque era.
