What is Dance music?
'''Dance music''' is [[music]] that is made to be [[danced]] to. In a broader sense, an enormous amount of music sounds like dance music, even if it is not composed for dancing. The history of dance music is similar to the history of [[dance]] as well as to the history of music. Dance music was probably the first kind of music there was. Thousands of years ago human beings must have discovered the joy of making noises by beating sticks in [[rhythm]]. They probably danced as they did this. We know that the [[Ancient Greece|Ancient Greeks]] danced to music, although we do not know much about what that music was like. In the Dark Ages (before the [[Middle Ages]]) dancing was very popular. The [[Christianity|Christian Church]] thought that dancing was bad because it was always linked to the [[devil]]. This is why the church people thought that [[musical instrument|musical instruments]] were bad, because instruments were used for dancing. The earliest Western dance music that we know are some of the [[medieval music|medieval]] dances such as [[Carol (music)|caroles]] and the [[Estampie]]. Composers started to write their music down on [[music staff|music staves]]. Dance music had to have a regular beat so that the dancers could dance in time. This is why [[bar (music)|barlines]] were invented. The music was divided into bars with a particular number of beats in each bar. This was different from [[church music]] which was based on [[plainchant]] which was very free in the way it was sung. In the [[Baroque music|Baroque]] period many composers started to write pieces of music which were based on dance rhythms. Composers such as [[Johann Sebastian Bach]] wrote [[suite (music)|suites]] which were collections of dance movements. The most popular dances in a suite were: [[allemande]], [[courante]], [[sarabande]], [[minuet]] and [[gigue]]. Even when not writing dance movements, a lot of Baroque music is based on dance rhythms, for example: the grand opening chorus of Bach’s ''St Matthew Passion'' is based