Dr Paul Newton-Jackson (KU Leuven), New Uses for Old Dances: Eighteenth-Century Polonaises in Church, Theatre & Chamber
25 marca 2025 (wtorek), godz. 11:00, IS PAN, ul. Długa 26, Sala im. Sobieskich
Abstract:
In the early eighteenth century, it was hardly unusual for a German composer to include a polonaise within a larger multi-movement work. Yet only a few decades prior, such a thing was almost unheard of. Within the space of just ten or twenty years, movements labelled “polonaise” had made their debut in French-style overture-suites and Italianate sonatas. Around the same time, unlabelled movements “in a polonaise style” appeared for the first time in German-language sacred music. The dances themselves were not new: by the turn of the eighteenth century, polonaises already had a long history in German-speaking Europe. How, then, might we explain such a rapid and widely-adopted expansion of Polish-style dances into new compositional contexts? This lecture sheds new light on the early chronology of polonaises in multi-movement works, and offers some reasons why this innovation took place when it did. Drawing on contemporary music theory and criticism, this lecture also explores the implications of these novel uses of polonaises for the wider reception of Polish-style music in German lands.
Scholar Biography:
Paul Newton-Jackson is a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Musicology at KU Leuven, and is a Research Officer at the Alamire Foundation. In 2022, he completed a PhD at the University of Cambridge on the reception of Polish-style music and dance in German-speaking Europe, and his article “Early Modern Polonaises and the Myth of Polish Rhythms” was published in The Journal of Musicology in 2024. He is currently working on a three-year project exploring patterns of cultural exchange between Scotland and the Low Countries in large-scale sacred music of the sixteenth century, and his study of the “Dunkeld Partbooks” (University of Edinburgh Library MS 64) will be published as part of the Leuven Library of Music in Facsimile series in 2025.