Dance in Three

For much of popular music, rhythmic measures of four beats are the default method of organization. However, music composed of three-beat measures has occupied a sizable chapter of Western musical history. This week on Arizona Encore, we’ll explore music in triple time and learn about the styles that it has helped to generate.

We’ll begin in the baroque period with Georg Frederic Handel and the minuet, discovering some characteristics of this elegant dance before jumping ahead one hundred years to hear how French composer Melanie Bonis kept the minuet genre alive in a Romantic context.

By the nineteenth century, though, another dance in triple time had emerged: the waltz. We’ll hear dramatically contrasting waltzes from two icons of the Romantic piano tradition–Franz Liszt and Frederic Chopin–before exploring the mazurka, a triple meter dance style originating in Poland and introduced to European society by Chopin.

The last stop on this tour of triple meter will be the sarabande, a somber dance in three that originated in Central America before being brought to Europe by returning colonial explorers. Though the sarabande’s roots lie in the Renaissance, we will hear a contemporary interpretation of the genre from guitarist and composer Leo Brouwer, concluding our nearly 300-year-long journey through musical history with a reminder that centuries-old musical forms can still provide fresh inspiration for today’s composers.