Description
The loure, a dance Bach rarely used in his suites, appears in French Suite No. 5 in G major as the sixth movement, between the bourrée and the closing gigue. It is an old French dance in a slow, broad meter with dotted rhythms, sometimes regarded as a kind of gigue, and its presence is one of the distinctive features of No. 5.
It is in G major and 6/4. It lasts about a minute and forty seconds but has only 273 notes, the fewest in this suite. Dotted rhythms recur through an unhurried walk felt as two broad beats to the bar, creating a weighty, settled character. Set between the quick motion of the bourrée and the gigue, it is where the suite slows down for a moment.
It is rated intermediate, but it has few notes, and the difficulty lies more in feeling the beat and rhythm than in finger work. The task is to feel 6/4 as two broad beats and render the dotted rhythms as a weighty walk without making them too sharp. The range, D2 to C6, needs no more than 61 keys. Slow the playback to hear the long and short of the dotted figures, and repeat one phrase at a time with the A-B loop to absorb the broad sense of the bar.
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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