Caroline Usher wrote: > The passacaglia is not a dance.
Arthur Fossum wrote: > How come "pas de passacalle" is in Feuillet's Choregraphie from 1713? Probably because it was a dance at the time. If a musical form hangs around for a century or two, any statement about what it "is" will be perilous. "Symphony," "sonata," and "concerto" all meant something different in 1750 than they did in 1600. "Ciaccona" changed meanings several times. A local musician, for many years the pianist for the Los Angeles Philharmonic, developed her own working definitions of "passacaglia" and "chaconne:" both were ground-bass variations, but in a passacaglia the ground bass was heard alone at the beginning. She acknowledged that Bach wrote passacaglias in which the ground bass was not heard alone at the beginning, but said that Bach got it wrong. I'm not sure what use her definition could have been, even to her, but I never asked. HP To get on or off this list see list information at http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~wbc/lute-admin/index.html
