Description
This is one of the dances that follow the Sarabande in French Suite No. 6 in E major, BWV 817. The gavotte was a favourite dance at the French court, and Bach set such lighter dances between the four core movements of the suite for variety. Within the suite it is among the shortest and has relatively few notes, with a bright character free of weight.
It is in E major and 4/4. A gavotte characteristically begins in mid-bar with a two-beat upbeat, and that entry gives it its distinctive bounce. It is in binary form, each half repeated, and the melody has clear punctuation, so its divisions are easy to hear. The range runs from E2 to B5, with 251 notes in about 50 seconds.
It has roughly half the notes of the Bourrée or the Gigue from the same suite, which makes it a natural way into the French Suites. The challenge is the upbeat: you need to play towards the end of each phrase rather than towards the downbeat. Looping one phrase from its entry to the next cadence with the A-B loop helps you feel where the weight of the bar lies.
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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