Terpsichore

Terpsichore, whose name means delight in dancing, is assigned in the developed scheme to dance and choral song, the art in which movement and music were inseparable in Greek practice. That inseparability is the point: the choros of Greek festival and drama was at once a singing and a dancing body, so a Muse of dance is really a Muse of the whole performing chorus rather than of steps alone.

Like Melpomene she is named in a stray tradition as a mother of the Sirens. Her name has had an unusually long afterlife as a common word: terpsichorean survives in English as a slightly arch adjective for anything to do with dancing, and her figure, seated with a lyre to which a chorus moves, became the presiding image over ballet and social dance in later European allegory. Terpsichore lends her name directly to "the Terpsichorean arts," a standing English phrase for anything related to dance, one of the more durable linguistic legacies among the nine Muses; as with her sisters, the specific assignment of dance to her, rather than to the Muses collectively, is a convention that hardened in later antiquity and the Renaissance rather than one fixed from the earliest sources, which generally treat the Muses as an undifferentiated chorus of inspiration rather than nine specialists.

Terpsichore's name was given, more than a millennium after antiquity, to one of the foundational publications of European instrumental dance music: Terpsichore, a large collection of several hundred instrumental dance tunes compiled and arranged by the German composer Michael Praetorius and published in 1612, drawing together French court dances of the period, branles, courantes, voltas and other popular social dance forms, into the single most extensive and influential printed dance anthology of its era. Praetorius, better known today for his sacred choral music, compiled Terpsichore specifically as a practical resource of secular instrumental dance music for the courts and municipal musicians of early seventeenth century Germany, choosing the Muse of dance and choral song as an apt classical name for a purely functional, non-religious collection intended for actual use on the dance floor rather than for scholarly or devotional purposes.

Terpsichore remains one of the most frequently performed and recorded sources of early Baroque dance music today, studied by musicologists and performed by early music ensembles as a key primary source for understanding French and German court dance practice at the opening of the seventeenth century. The choice of title reflects a wider early modern habit, seen also in other period publications, of reaching for classical mythological names to lend gravity or thematic coherence to a practical secular work, giving the ancient Muse of dance a documented and still actively studied afterlife inside the history of European music considerably more concrete than her thin ancient mythology on its own would suggest.