Description
Among the movements of French Suite No. 5 in G major, this gavotte, placed fourth after the sarabande, is one of the best known and is often taken up on its own as a study piece. The gavotte is a court dance derived from French folk dancing, used in the Baroque suite as a light inserted dance.
It is in G major and 2/2, about a minute and forty seconds long with 326 notes. The gavotte's hallmark is an upbeat starting in the middle of the bar, and here too the melody begins with a two-beat upbeat. The writing is clear, a bright right-hand melody lightly supported by the left hand, in two parts that move to the dominant and then back home.
It is rated intermediate, but it has fairly few notes and lets you concentrate on shaping the melody. The task is not to mistake phrases that start mid-bar for downbeats, and to keep the gavotte's spring. No note falls outside D2 to C6, so 61 keys are enough. Slow the playback and check with the hand colours where each phrase begins, then repeat with the A-B loop until the sense of the bar comes naturally.
Six keyboard suites by Bach that elegantly incorporate Baroque dance forms.
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Sheet music provided by Mutopia Project
About the Composer
Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750)
Johann Sebastian Bach was the towering figure of German Baroque music, serving for decades as Cantor of St. Thomas Church in Leipzig. Renowned for his mastery of counterpoint, he laid the foundations of keyboard music with works such as The Well-Tempered Clavier and the Inventions. This site includes minuets and polonaises from the Notebook for Anna Magdalena Bach, the Inventions and Sinfonias, and fugues from The Well-Tempered Clavier. The Notebook pieces are catalogued with BWV Anh. (appendix) numbers, but many are by other composers - Petzold's minuets among them - or by no one known, and most of their song pages give the current view of who wrote them.
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