Description
The French Suites are a set of six keyboard suites by Bach, and No. 6 in E major, BWV 817, is the last of them. After the Allemande, Courante and Sarabande come fashionable dances of the day such as the Gavotte, Polonaise, Bourrée and Menuet, and a Gigue closes the suite. The Bourrée is one of these inserted dances, lending the second half of the suite a light forward drive.
It is in E major and 2/2. The bourrée is a quick French dance in duple time that typically begins with an upbeat. Like most dances of the period it is in binary form, each half repeated, with a lively upper melody answered by a bass that moves with a clear tread. The range runs from B1 to B5, exactly four octaves.
It lasts only about a minute yet contains 542 notes, so even at the intermediate level it asks for nimble fingers. Feeling the 2/2 bar in two beats, rather than leaning on every beat, is the key to lightness. Slow the playback speed first and follow the two hands through their colours, then isolate the fast passages with the A-B loop; the notes will stay even as the tempo comes up.
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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