Posted 24 September 2010; last updated 28 November 2010.

The table below gathers data from several other pages on theme types in dance or dance-influenced pieces from a period roughly 1730-1820 (with a substantial drop back in time for Playford's collections). Follow the links for additional information and musical scores.

Please understand that the information displayed here is not "cut and dried," a set of simple measurements. As Caplin makes abundantly clear throughout Classical Form, the assignment of labels for thematic elements often involves a judgment call. Nevertheless, I believe that the information in the table below, taken as a whole, offers useful insights into formal design in dances and some related musics. First among those insights is the variety of thematic classes employed: the historical narrative (derived by Caplin from Schoenberg but shared by most scholars) that charts a path from the 18th-century period to the 19th-century sentence is not just overly simplistic, it is simply wrong. One can indeed see a sharp trend toward limiting designs to the period in the second half of the 18th century, but the hybrid antecedent + continuation remains important also. And in the early 19th century, one does not see an equally sharp turn toward the sentence; instead, it would appear that the earlier variety of designs is recovered.

Numbers will not always sum to the "Total" column because of other data (such as 16-bar themes) not included here. Follow the links for additional information.

Legend:

Total = the total number of pieces in the collection examined
Period 2 = Period with modulating consequent or half cadence
antec+cont = Caplin's Hybrid 1: antecedent+continuation
weak ant+cont = Caplin's Hybrid 2: "weak antecedent"+continuation
      **NB: I strongly prefer "weak antecedent" to Caplin's "composite basic idea."
weak ant+cons = Caplin's Hybrid 3: "weak antecedent"+consequent
pres+cons = Caplin's Hybrid 4: presentation+consequent