During the seventeenth-century, dance secured its position as a serious art discipline. As a result, dance music became prevalent across Europe, and composers of the period and indeed many since have turned to dance forms and structures as a rhythmic framework and inspiration for their composition; featuring perhaps most prominently in the Baroque is the organisational scheme of the dance suite. Dance music found itself inextricably woven into the fabric of both sacred and secular music, from court and opera house to church and cathedral. Of course, one may conclude that the influence of Baroque dance reaches far beyond the compositional stage, informing an array of performance decisions including articulation, tempo, phrasing, and, for string players, even bowings. In this sense, the historical distance between composer and performer is condensed and the music’s affection and stylisation unite with the gestures of its realised performance in the modern day.

Characteristics of early dance forms were incorporated into the works of many European composers. This particular collection focuses on its use by two leading forces in organ music of the German Baroque and indeed its development and evolution within Western music: Johann Sebastian Bach and Dieterich Buxtehude. Some of its more apparent manifestations appear in dance in the scherzo-like gigues and dance suites. Subtler uses of the sarabande (characterised most keenly by its held second beat) in the melancholic coloratura chorale prelude BWV 652, the fugue of BuxWV 149 and of course, the Passacaglia BWV 582, all of which take pride of place amongst the track listing.