ABSTRACT
Dances emanating from court musicians were often directly linked with entertainment on the dramatic stage, resulting in frequent changes of order and movement type reflecting different performing conditions. The dance music of town musicians in the half of the seventeenth century had little in common with this tradition. While many dance-music collections before the end of the Thirty Years War seem to have relied on performers making their own choice of movement type when putting together sequences of dance music, those from the 1650s onwards increasingly removed this choice. Most municipal dance music was written in what its composers considered to be the Italian style. A clearer picture emerges in the often-substantial musical differences between certain French and Italian dances. Despite its French name, the Double was not a specific product of national style; it was merely an elaboration of its parent dance.
