mazurka

The tradition & historical record

The Mazurka (Polish: mazurek, GEN. mazurka) is a Polish musical form based on stylised folk dances in triple metre, usually at a lively tempo, with character defined mostly by the prominent mazur's "strong accents unsystematically placed on the second or third beat". The Mazurka, alongside the polka dance, became popular at the ballrooms and salons of Europe in the 19th century, particularly through the notable works by Frédéric Chopin. The mazurka (in Polish mazur, the same word as the mazur) and mazurek (rural dance based on the mazur) are often confused in Western literature as the same musical form. ¹

The folk origins of the Mazurka are three Polish folk dances which are: ¹

mazur, most characteristic due to its inconsistent rhythmic accents, slow and melancholic kujawiak, fast oberek. The mazurka is always found to have either a triplet, trill, dotted eighth note (quaver) pair, or an ordinary eighth note pair before two quarter notes (crotchets). In the 19th century, the form became popular in many ballrooms in different parts of Europe. Mazurka as a term denoting a music piece originated in France, and is connected to the name of the mazur dance. Until the mid-20th century, Mazur also signified an inhabitant of Mazovia, while Mazurka meant a Mazovian woman in the past. Mazurek is a diminutive and masculine form of Mazur. In relation to dance, all three words (mazur, mazurek, mazurka) underline the connection to Mazovia. Apart from that, the word mazurek refers to various terms in Polish, e.g. a cake, a bird and a popular surname. Mazurek is also a rural dance identified by some as the oberek. It is said oberek is a danced variation of the sung mazurek, the latter also having more prominent accents on second and third beats and less fluent of a rhythmical flow, which is so characteristical of oberek. ¹

Several classical composers have written mazurkas, with the best known being the 59 composed by Frédéric Chopin for solo piano. In 1825, Maria Szymanowska wrote the largest collection of piano mazurkas published before Chopin. Henryk Wieniawski also wrote two for violin with piano (the popular "Obertas", Op. 19), Julian Cochran composed a collection of five mazurkas for solo piano and orchestra, and in the 1920s, Karol Szymanowski wrote a set of twenty for piano and finished his composing career with a final pair in 1934. ¹

The form was common as a popular dance in Europe and the United States in the mid to late nineteenth century. ¹

In Cape Verde the mazurka is also revered as an important cultural phenomenon played with acoustic bands led by a violinist and accompanied by guitarists. It also takes a variation of the mazurka dance form and is found mostly in the north of the archipelago, mainly in São Nicolau, Santo Antão. In the south it finds popularity in the island of Brava. ¹

Czech composers Bedřich Smetana, Antonín Dvořák, and Bohuslav Martinů all wrote mazurkas to at least some extent. For Smetana and Martinů, these are single pieces (respectively, a Mazurka-Cappricio for piano and a Mazurka-Nocturne for a mixed string/wind quartet), whereas Dvořák composed a set of six mazurkas for piano, and a mazurka for violin and orchestra. ¹

In France, Romantic music Camille Saint-Saëns wrote 3 mazurkas: op.21 in g minor, op.24 in g minor, and op.66 in b minor. Impressionistic Composers Claude Debussy and Maurice Ravel both wrote mazurkas; Debussy's is a stand-alone piece, and Ravel's is part of a suite of an early work, La Parade. Jacques Offenbach included a mazurka in his ballet Gaîté Parisienne; Léo Delibes composed one which appears several times in the first act of his ballet Coppélia. The mazurka appears frequently in French traditional folk music. In the French Antilles, the mazurka has become an important style of dance and music. A creolised version of the mazurka is mazouk which—beginning around 1979 in Paris—morphed into the globally popular dance style “zouk” developed in France and popularised by Paris's Island-creole supergroup Kassav'; mazouk had been introduced to the French Caribbean in the late 1800s. In the 21st century in Brazil and the Afro-Caribbean diaspora, zouk (and its progenitor band Kassav') remains very popular. In popular 20th century folk dancing in France, the Polish/classical-piano (see Chopin) mazurka evolved into mazouk, a dance at a more gentle pace (without the traditional 'hop' step on the 3rd beat), fostering more-intimate dancing and associating mazouk with a "seduction" dance (see also tango from Argentina). This "sexy" style of mazurka has also been imported to “balfolk" dancing in Belgium and the Netherlands, hence the name "Belgian Mazurka" or "Flemish Mazurka". Perhaps the most enduring style of intimate dancing music of this origin moved zouk from the 1980s–2000s into its wildly popular (especially in Brazil and Africa) slow-dancing variant called zouk love, which remains a staple of French-Caribbean dance venues in Paris and elsewhere. ¹

The text above is adapted from the Wikipedia article “Mazurka”, available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 licence. ¹

mazurka is Polish folk dance in triple meter, usually at a lively tempo, and with accent on the second or third beat, according to the structured record cited below. This entry was generated automatically from that record and has not yet been reviewed by a person familiar with the tradition. ²

The source record links this tradition to 37 external registers, which can be verified through the citation. ²