The Circulating Waltz

The story about the origin of many a popular ballroom dance - like the Polka (Paris) or the Tango (Buenos Aires) - are firmly rooted in an urban environment. The place generally linked to the identity of the waltz today, happens to be the city of Vienna. By opposition, the narrative about the place and circumstances of birth of the eternally revolving dance, is rooted in the countryside and pastoral traditions. By the mid 18th century - when the waltz was first mentioned - most West-European town folks already could look back on a long tradition depicting peasants and their dances as savage, grotesque and primitive, but at the same time idyllic and endearing. There clearly was an appropriation of some kind going on that deserves our attention. My research is about early forms of waltz-like stage dances as well as the transnational urban networks of immigrant musicians from the German Cultural room working in cities abroad. I will try to illustrate that they largely defined what a waltz was or could be. Moreover they also underpinned how it moved on, around the globe, onwards from 1767 when a first melody ever properly called a waltz was printed in London. Cornelis Vanistendael graduated as a master in East-European Languages & Cultures (University of Ghent, 1995), PhD in History of Art (University of Ghent, 2020). He worked for 8 years as a HR Consultant & head hunter, of which 5 years were spent with Deloitte Human Capital Division. He thereafter dedicated his career to cultural heritage. This choice was inspired by his - until then - private archive research regarding various aspects of musical culture, which he eventually made into a PhD during his spare time. Currently he works full time for Erfgoed Noorderkempen, a small cultural heritage organisation in the North of Belgium as a database administrator (museum collections and archi