Joseph is also active as a choral conductor. Other research interests include performance and analysis, phenomenology, and choral performance practices. His research explores dance-music relationships in the latter half of the eighteenth century, and he has presented papers at meetings of the American Musicological Society, the Mozart Society of America, and the North American Conference on Nineteenth-Century Music. Joseph Fort completed his PhD dissertation ‘Incorporating Haydn’s Minuets: Towards a Somatic Theory of Music’ at Harvard University in November 2015, and is currently preparing it for publication. As the sources show, the danced minuet enjoyed such ubiquity in this period that it-not the ‘art’ minuet of the quartets and symphonies-was considered to set the norms for the minuet genre. I focus on the logistics of the minuet as a group dance, performed simultaneously by multiple couples. Drawing on dance treatises from the 1790s, music-theoretical writings from the 1780s-90s, and several sets of minuets written over 1792-1801 specifically for the annual balls of the Gesellschaft bildender Künstler (most of which are preserved only in the original instrumental parts held in the Österreichische Nationalbibliothek), I reconstruct the minuet of 1790s Vienna. I examine contemporaneous accounts that attest to group dancing of the minuet at the public balls in Vienna. In this paper I demonstrate that by the final decade of the eighteenth century a large portion of the bourgeoisie embraced the minuet, knew the steps for the dance, and performed it frequently. Only after the minuets were danced would the ballroom become crowded with middle-class dancers’ (2007). Even for a dance as established as the minuet, confusion still abounds: David Wyn Jones, for instance, claims that ‘it was the most common social dance in Austria, at all levels of society’ (2002), while Melanie Lowe holds that the minuet’s ‘courtly status and association with nobility was affirmed at every public ball by the effective exclusion of all but those dancers. Although the extent to which dance suffused social life in 18th- and 19th-century Vienna has long been acknowledged, little is known about the occasions and practices that shaped this dance culture.
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