Same titles for different classical pieces

Menuet, bourrée, sarabande, etc. are all dances and in this case musical forms associated to the dances in the baroque era (well, I am not sure if some of them could be originated in the pre-baroque era, NoteBoat surely knows it). Then, you can find many menuets from different composers, in fact, usually a composer has many menuets or similar dance pieces. Each form has usually a specific structure, time, etc.

I think we could use an analogy with the rock&roll or the blues in nowadays. All of them have the same general structure and each composer (or author) has several rock&roll or blues songs and many authors have (or could have) a song called simply 'blues' or 'rock&roll'.

Sometimes the title is a form, like a minuet, sarabande, bouree, allemande, etc. Sometimes it describes a mood - like a Nocturne. Sometimes it's a tempo, like adagio. Sometimes it's why the piece was written, like etude (which means study - etudes are typically for development of a specific technique).

Although there are a lot of titles used for classical pieces, there are also hundreds of pieces for each title. They basically told the audience (and the performer) what to expect.

The composer might give it a subtitle, like Beethoven did for the 'Moonlight' sonata - his subtitle is "Quasi una fantasia" (almost a fantasy). But the popular titles, like 'moonlight sonata' were typically given to pieces by folks other than the composer.

I think the trend of giving a piece of music a specific title probably started with the marketing of sheet music, where it was helpful for a publisher to separate their works from those of competitors. You really don't see specific titles for ANY instrumental music before the 1840s - unless it's a dedication to someone. But by the early 20th century, it's common to have descriptive names like "The Unanswered Question"

Thanks guys! I've done some studying of John Dowland pieces, and those have the descriptive names, but they are for people it seems...Mrs Winters Jump, My Lord Willoughby, etc.

But what you all said makes sense! Thanks alot guys!

Yes, they'd have been written under patronage (people paid the composer to write some music for them) or for mercenary purposes - my "Little Frog" was Queen Elizabeth's pet name for the Duke D'Anjou (of whom she was rather fond), and Dowland wanted an appointment as court lutenist from Her Maj, so Dowland wrote "the Frog Galliard."

A :-)

Good info Alan thanks!

I've enjoyed Dowlands works since starting to read sheet music, and some of his stuff is so damn fast! LOL....but it's always a treat....and extremely difficult for me to learn...but I really needed something difficult. I wanted to get something that would help me progress in more difficult areas and these seem to it the bill.

I think some are also different arrangements of the same piece - "Night on Bare Mountain" springs to mind, there is the original version by Mussorgsky and a variation by Rimsky Korsakov...

Not sure if that helps any..

Thanks Apache! I was more looking at titles like:

Waltz
Bouree
Minuette

Things that are vastly different, but it makes sense that it's the style.

Yeah, Apache, sometimes there's a different arrangement (or orchestration) of the same piece. Much more common is to lift the theme of somebody else's work - Brahms, Liszt, Rachmaninoff and others have stolen from Paganini; Bach took "Jesu, Joy of Man's Desiring" from Johann Schop, etc.

The say good composers imitate; the great ones steal :)

Fernando Sor's Variations on a Theme by Mozart (Opus 9), for example, is one of the classical guitar's "big" repertoire pieces.

Wow, I just looked that up....BIG is right....damn 7 minutes? I've got trouble going through 3 minutes without a mistake!

I've got trouble going through 3 minutes without a mistake!

That never goes away!

A :-)

That's not good to hear LOL