Especially in its incorporation of modes of inquiry from music analysis, musicology and dance history, Eric McKee's fascinating book on the minuet and the waltz has ambitious aims. As he notes at the outset:

McKee's overall orientation is laudable, since functional dance music has largely been ignored by music analysts, and stylized dance music has been treated as if it had minimal connection to the practice of dancing. McKee investigates both functional and stylized dance music, devoting a chapter each to minuets by J.S. Bach and Mozart, a chapter to waltzes by Joseph Lanner and Johann Strauss Sr., and three chapters to the waltz music of Chopin.

Before proceeding to individual chapters, I offer three global observations. First, except for the three chapters devoted to Chopin's waltzes, each chapter is a relatively independent entity. McKee's six chapters are preceded by an introduction that establishes the social and musical importance of the minuet and the waltz to the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries respectively, provides a short literature survey, and outlines the book's organization. While the introduction points to common themes, which do reappear subsequently, the lack of a conclusion after the final Chopin chapter leaves it largely to the reader to trace them. Second, most of the contents of the Bach and Mozart chapters previously appeared in articles in Music Analysis, and the first two of the three Chopin chapters were published in an essay collection.Footnote ¹ Well over half of the book consists of material already in print. Third, the degree of integration among McKee's modes of inquiry varies from one chapter to the next. Although nearly all of the music analysis is insightful, in some sections it is more closely connected to discussions of function, dance choreography and social meaning than in others.

Chapter 1 (‘Influences of the Early Eighteenth-Century Ballroom Minuet on the Minuets from J.S. Bach's French Suites, BWV 812–817’) is the least effective of the book's chapters. A review of eighteenth-century dancing tutors and composition manuals demonstrates that the essential feature of the minuet is not periodic lengths of phrases and strains but rather a clear projection of alternating strong and weak measures – in modern analytic parlance, two-bar hypermetre. Following the understanding of metric accent developed by Lerdahl and Jackendoff, McKee repeatedly illustrates the prevalence of strongly projected two-bar hypermetre in the minuets of Bach's French Suites.Footnote ² While McKee's inference of pervasive duple hypermetre is undoubtedly correct, the examples could equally well demonstrate larger-scale periodicity, since these minuets feature strains with lengths of 8, 16, 24 or 32 measures. The most revealing finding is that the phrases in these minuets are almost exclusively in sentence form, a phrase design that facilitates the immediate perception of duple hypermetre (pp. 32–3). McKee observes how subphrases within sentences are variously connected or separated. The bracketing of subphrases on McKee's musical examples often shows overlaps, especially at the downbeat of the third or fifth bar of a sentence. In many cases these overlaps are justified by the necessity to resolve a dissonance, usually a seventh. Sometimes, however, the overlap is motivated only by the presence of a less stable – but consonant – harmony at the expected end of the grouping boundary. One example is the minuet from the French Suite in B Minor, where the dominant triad at the end of bar 2 (and bar 4) is viewed as wholly leading to the next downbeat and not articulating a local grouping boundary (p. 35). The continuous eighth-note motion does not preclude this hearing, but this propensity for local overlap rubs against the more sharply articulated phrase divisions that, as McKee notes, point towards the galant style of mid-century. More problematic is that McKee relates such overlaps to the irregular phrase lengths allowed by some dancing tutors, but in those tutors there are genuine examples of phrases with non-duple lengths as opposed to ones that only arise due to overlaps. Yet the most unsatisfying aspect of the chapter – given McKee's overall aims – is the minimal contact between dance and music: once McKee establishes that the six-beat pattern of the dance steps suggests duple hypermetre, he retreats entirely to the analytic realms of duple hypermetre and sentence design.

In Chapter 2 (‘Mozart in the Ballroom: Minuet-Trio Contrast and the Aristocracy in Self-Portrait’), McKee hits his stride with an exemplary and creative blending of music and dance. Noting that contemporary sources consistently refer to the grace and simplicity of the minuet, McKee observes that the majority of Mozart's functional minuets feature relatively loud and forceful music. To explain this puzzling situation, McKee proposes that the music of Mozart's minuets ‘depicts the political, social, and historical power and authority of the minuet dance and of the aristocratic participants’ while the music of the trios ‘embodies the natural grace and noble simplicity exhibited by the dancers on the ballroom dance floor’ (p. 58). McKee aptly notes that the contrast between minuet and trio is not always present – especially in Mozart's early works – but his fresh interpretation of minuet-trio contrast has important implications. Hearing the trio framed by a majestic minuet ‘as the essence of the minuet as danced – as a pure, sparkling gemstone set within a golden crown’ (p. 89) argues against the subordinate position usually assigned to the trio. Moreover, the simplicity of a trio is artful and not a manifestation of a lower, rustic style. Defining this distinction musically comprises much of the chapter, and many of McKee's conclusions are provocative. The ‘oom-pah-pah’ accompaniment, for example, is viewed as not inherently low, but along with ‘murmuring’ accompaniments is viewed as a characteristic figure for the elevated quality of Mozart's trios (p. 72).

With Chapter 3 (‘The Musical Visions of Joseph Lanner and Johann Strauss Sr.’) McKee shifts from the noble minuet to the dizzying waltz, and to music composed by the two most famous waltz composers of the first half of the nineteenth century. A survey of descriptions of the waltz in contemporary dance treatises and literary works combined with examination of iconographic evidence shows the mesmerizing effect of the waltz on spectators. In particular, ‘the focus of the spectator rested on the waltzing women, who provided the viewer a swirling concert of colors, perfumes, textures, and feminine forms all wedded to music that both reflected and motivated the dancers’ beauty’ (p. 103). McKee distils four aesthetic categories where the visual spectacle and the waltz music of Lanner and Strauss Sr. intersect: repetitive continuity, self-containment, feminine beauty and variety. Repetitive continuity, emerging from the continuously repeated and circular dance steps, relates not only to the ‘oom-pah-pah’ accompaniment but also to the prevalence of eight-bar themes, sixteen-bar strains and thirty-two-bar waltzes. An intimate dance for individual couples, the waltz's self-containment has a musical analogue in the tonally and thematically closed phrase structure where themes almost always end with authentic cadences and thematic development is nearly absent. Equally straightforward is variety, which posits a similarity between the shifting kaleidoscope of dancing couples and a musical form involving the succession of contrasting themes that tend not to return.

Although strongly emphasized in literary and iconographic sources, McKee's third category – feminine beauty – is more elusive and multi-faceted, as it comprises physical attractiveness and the creation of a pleasurable and memorable experience for spectators. The musical correspondences McKee cites are diverse, though centred on the melody, since its minimal accompaniment leaves it as the principal object of aural stimulation, like the female dancer in the visual domain. In addition to the obvious attribute of lyricism, McKee specifically enumerates tight-knit organization and rhythmic vitality as key melodic qualities. A term developed by Erwin Ratz and William Caplin, ‘tight-knit construction’ describes melodies with symmetrical groupings, harmonic-tonal stability, unity of melodic-motivic material, and uniformity of texture.Footnote ³ No doubt waltzes have tight-knit themes, and such themes are more immediately pleasurable and memorable for the listener, but the extent to which tight-knit construction can be read as feminine is debatable. Fortunately, that is not McKee's claim. For all of these cross-domain relationships, McKee appropriately clarifies that the musical corollaries of his four aesthetic categories are ‘only approximate and should not be considered completely isomorphic (in any literal or fixed sense), but neither are they fully artificial and arbitrary’ (pp. 106–7). This is especially important in viewing rhythmic vitality as a musical corollary of feminine beauty. McKee seizes upon the unexpectedly frequent appearance of hemiola in the waltz melodies of Lanner and Strauss Sr. Noting that these hemiolas typically occur at the outset of phrases and dissipate by the ends of phrases, McKee suggests they subtly separate melodies from their accompaniment and permit a charming interplay between them. As McKee observes, the gendered reading of these hemiolas, while speculative, does date back at least to Berlioz's 1837 essay on Strauss Sr. and rhythm (p. 116).

The chapter concludes with comments on three complete waltzes by Lanner. The first two, both from 1830, are represented by form charts that demonstrate the general features of thematic succession, key design and cadential structure. The third, from 1835, is Lanner's famous ‘Die Werber’, which McKee provides as an example of the more sophisticated tonal designs that appear in Viennese waltzes written after 1830. Besides the use of non-tonic beginnings to several of the waltzes in ‘Die Werber’, McKee notes the quite unusual repetition of pitch motives between dances, sometimes involving motivic enlargement (pp. 124–6). Throughout the chapter, generalizations appear to apply equally to Lanner and Strauss Sr., yet the latter's music is represented by a single four-measure example. The reader is left to wonder why all three of the complete waltzes selected for more detailed study are by Lanner. One might surmise that the author finds Lanner's waltzes more aesthetically rewarding, but if that is the case, then it raises the question of whether the waltzes of these two composers have been somewhat too tidily placed in the same stylistic space. The claims regarding stylistic evolution in the 1830s would be strengthened by including an analysis of more than one complete waltz written after 1830, and this might shed more light on the motivations behind these stylistic changes, a topic raised by McKee but not explored at much length.

The remainder of the book deals with Chopin's waltzes, and Chapter 4 (‘Dance and the Music of Chopin: Historical Background’) sets the stage by investigating social dancing in Warsaw in the time of Chopin's youth and Chopin's activities as a dancer and dance musician. Complementing Goldberg's Music in Chopin's Warsaw, McKee paints a vivid picture of the ballroom scene with emphasis on the rise of the waltz as the most popular dance in Warsaw during the 1820s.Footnote ⁴ Based on his study of 116 waltzes by 36 composers published in Warsaw between 1816 and 1830, McKee concludes that prior to 1830, Viennese waltzes, as represented by Lanner and Strauss Sr., had relatively little influence on Warsaw dance composers (p. 139). Warsaw waltzes favour ternary da capo form, rarely have introductions and codas, often employ rounded binary rather than binary form for individual waltzes, and possess a variety of cadence types (i.e., inauthentic as well as authentic cadences). McKee aptly acknowledges their similarities: preference for the major mode, use of ‘oom-pah-pah’ accompaniment, prevalence of eight-bar phrases with duple subphrases, and common rhythmic patterns. He ultimately asserts that Warsaw waltzes ‘lack the melodic ingenuity and variety, tonal sophistication, and rhythmic flexibility of those by Lanner and Strauss Sr.’ (p. 140). Given the obscurity of this repertoire, it is unfortunate that McKee provides only a single musical example, and furthermore this waltz by Aleksander Rembieliński, which was chosen since Chopin favourably mentions his waltzes in a letter from 1826, instead demonstrates an outlier, possessing ‘virtuosic pianism’, ‘rhythmic subtleties’, and a ‘maverick tonal design’ (pp. 142–3). McKee's comments on Chopin's experiences as a dancer and occasional pianist for dancing are brief but demonstrate an engagement with dance throughout his adult life, including an account as late as 1847 of Chopin playing for dancers at a soirée in Paris.

Chapter 5 (‘The Musical Visions of Chopin’) begins with McKee's tabulation of Chopin's known waltzes: eight were published by the composer (composed between 1831 and 1847), nine were completed but left unpublished (five composed in Warsaw c.1826–30, four in Paris 1832–47), and eleven more are known to have existed but are now lost.Footnote ⁵ McKee discusses general features of Chopin's waltzes, beginning with those typical of the waltz in general, namely ‘oom-pah-pah’ accompaniments and melodic arches. Melodic arches are demonstrated within individual bars, over two-bar segments, and across eight-bar phrases, the latter being especially associated with Chopin's published waltzes, which McKee argues were conceived on a larger scale than his unpublished ones. Less convincing is McKee's subsequent treatment of neighbour-note motion as ‘the most condensed form of a melodic arch’ (p. 153). Without question, neighbour notes are important motivic elements in many of Chopin's waltzes, but they function similarly in many of his other short pieces (especially mazurkas and nocturnes). Moreover, owing to their brief or irregular pacing, many of these neighbour-note figures have tenuous connection to bodily movement, and indeed McKee's discussion largely retreats into conventional analysis of motivic repetition and parallelism. The chapter's next two subsections turn to more unusual features of Chopin's waltzes: the frequent placement of a long appoggiatura on the second downbeat in a two-bar unit and asymmetrical segmentation of a four-bar melodic unit as one bar followed by three bars. Here convincing connections to dancing return, as both features are interpreted as drawing attention to the female dancer since her twirls fall on the second downbeat in two-bar units.

The chapter concludes with a brief account of rhythmic patterns in Chopin's waltz melodies, noting that rhythms with agogic emphasis on the woman's twirl are pervasive in Chopin's unpublished waltzes and are not prominent in his published ones. Two of the unpublished dances have documented associations with women who were love interests of Chopin, as does the F-minor Piano Concerto, and this leads McKee to finish his chapter by claiming the waltz – not the mazurka – as the generic basis for the opening section of the concerto's final movement (pp. 170–71). Interesting as this topic is, it opens up vast new topics that McKee cannot begin to address in a two-page discussion. What other pieces of Chopin's incorporate the waltz topic? What exactly is the relationship between the genres of waltz and mazurka, and how has generic blending been theorized in Chopin's music and elsewhere? The last of these questions is broached in a one-sentence footnote that mentions Robert Hatten's concept of ‘troping’,Footnote ⁶ but none of the considerable literature on generic blending in Chopin's music is mentioned here.

In Chapter 6 (‘Chopin's Approach to Waltz Form’), McKee focuses on large-scale form, both thematic design and tonal structure. The first part of the chapter pursues an almost purely historical argument. McKee demonstrates that Chopin's earliest waltzes are similar to those composed by other Warsaw composers at that time, and those written around the time of his visits to Vienna – and in particular his first published waltz, op. 18 – show the influence of Lanner and Strauss Sr. In the second part of the chapter, McKee examines Chopin's seven remaining published waltzes. He continues his historical perspective, showing how Chopin gradually rejected Viennese features such as the preference for numerous themes, sharply articulated phrase boundaries and authentic cadences, but he also makes a plethora of sophisticated analytic observations, largely within the area of rhythm. The analyses reveal, for instance, Chopin's innovative deployment of hemiola at higher metric levels than in the Viennese waltz repertory. McKee's discussion strikes an appropriate balance between insightful observations on individual pieces and general trends that offer some understanding of why Chopin's waltzes are so stylistically diverse.

Despite the amount of close music analysis, McKee's writing is accessible to a wide range of readers. Although often printed in extremely small sizes, the numerous text tables, form diagrams, voice-leading sketches, and score excerpts work effectively with the prose. The analytic methodology is traditional – largely labelling of themes/sections, identification of key areas and cadence types, Schenkerian voice-leading sketches, analysis of melodic contour and rhythm. McKee's various observations on phrase rhythm, especially those concerning hypermetre, phrase overlap, and hemiola contain his most sophisticated analytic insights. And, at least in the chapters devoted to the waltz, the rhythmic perspectives are the ones that link most profitably to the dance as physical action and visual spectacle. The book is by no means too long, and a concluding chapter that briefly surveys the waltz in the second half of the nineteenth century would have been welcome, especially given the historical lines of thought pursued in the final Chopin chapter. One hopes that McKee has plans for a future book to follow the mid-century delirium of the waltz to its twentieth-century demise.