Description
At only about 38 seconds and 196 notes, this Menuet is the shortest movement of French Suite No. 6 in E major, BWV 817. The minuet was danced widely at the courts of the 17th and 18th centuries, and in Bach's suites it is the typical light dance placed between the Sarabande and the Gigue. Among the brighter dances of this suite it works like a brief pause.
It is in E major and 3/4. The minuet is a moderate triple-time dance with a settled step and a light weight on the first beat. It is a short binary movement, each half repeated, and within this small frame a melody and a bass line are laid out cleanly. The range runs from E2 to A5.
With the fewest notes in the suite, it is easy to bring to a playable state first. Its plainness, though, means every small difference in how long a note is held or how it is released can be heard. Slow the playback speed to hear the difference in weight between the first beat and the other two, and check the phrase divisions in the score view as you shape an elegant triple-time flow.
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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