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.