The intimately related phenomena of dance and instrumental variation were prominent features of Spanish culture during the 17th and early 18th centuries. These variations (diferencias) on a set piece of music or choreographed movement permeated the activities of professional and amateur musicians, secular and sacred festivities, and were cultivated by the aristocracy as well as the lower class. The incorporation of variation into the instrumental music which accompanied dance enabled the instrumentalists to produce pieces of sufficient length and diversity to accommodate the needs of the dancers on different occasions. As to the two volumes which will complete this set, Volume 2 supplies a complete inventory and transcription of th e extant instrumental dance pieces and variation sets (495 pieces plus 228 pasacalles), and Volume 3 will contain the original notes in Spanish.

Vol. 1: Treatises and music ; vol. 2: choreographic descriptions with concordances of variants.

The Notes in Spanish provides the original text and quotations, already presented in English in Volume I, in their original Spanish.

This collection of selected writings of Ms. Hilton includes a complete facsimile of her 1981 book Dance of Court & Theater (no longer available) as well as two significant articles, and a notated triple-meter danse � deux by LouisP�cour. Book One (the facsimile) provides in-depth analysis of primary sources on dance of the baroque period.The main body of the text is devoted to mastery of the Beauchamp-Feuillet notation system,which includes the relationships of steps to music in such dance types as the menuet,gavotte, bourr�e, sarabande, passacaille, loure, gigue, and entr�e grave. Instruction is also given on style, bows and courtesies, the use of the hat, and the ballroom menuet ordinaire as given by Pierre Rameau.Book Two adds theslow Seventeenth-Century French Courante; A survey of the 56 dances extant to music by J.B. Lully with their airs and some of the more virtuosic, theatrical step-units in notation; Louis P�cour's ballroom dance Aimable Vainqueur (1701 in six pages of dance notation with a five-part score of Andr� Campra's music from Hesione (1700)and an updated bibliography.

David Buch's informative volume is the first modern study edition and commentary dealing with almost all of the surviving French five-part scores of dance music from the ballets de cour 1575-1651. These full scores are especiall y important since most ballets from this time are preserved only in two-part readings (melody and bass). The exception here is a newly-created five-part score for the Ballet des Nations based on an original two-part setting. Also included are the six Allemandes from 1575 to ca. 1600 a Ballet cheval of 1615 a selection of miscellaneous Entres from several ballets prepared for the Concert Louis XIII par les Viollons et lest 12 Grands hautbois of 1627 and Philidor's five-part reading of seventeen Entres from the Ballet du Roy des Festes de Baccus of 1651.