Description
The left hand sets down an A minor chord one note at a time, with rests in between, while the right hand sets off in dotted rhythms above it: so begins this corrente, the third movement of Partita No. 3. Mutopia's source edition titles it Courante; this site uses the Italian name Corrente that Bach used when he published the suite. It is the quick Italian type of the dance, not the stately French one.
In triple metre, it starts from an upbeat of three semiquavers, and unbroken semiquavers in the right hand alternate with rhythms built from a dotted quaver and a semiquaver. Sequences, the same figure repeated at different pitches, are everywhere, and in some passages the right hand keeps returning to a low E while moving the line above it. Near the end the left hand drums octave Es in dotted rhythm while the right hand travels through the harmony overhead.
An advanced movement whose task is to keep the speed for nearly three minutes without losing track of where the harmony changes within the runs. Once the first statement of a sequence is learned, the rest only shift in pitch, so spotting the repeats in the score view makes the reading much lighter. Practise the stretch of left-hand octaves with the A-B loop at a reduced playback speed until each leap lands on the beat without lagging.
Suite-form works from the Baroque era; Bach's Partitas, a sequence of varied dances, are ranked among the greatest keyboard works.
Browse all songs in Partitas →Sheet Music
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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