The French Clavecin School and the Creation of the Dance Suite

Dance music played a central role in the social life of the Renaissance, and it's importance as private entertainment continued through the Baroque period. As in the Renaissance, lutenist-composers were the pioneers in the field of dance music, not the harpsichord composers. The English virginals school of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries imitated contemporary lute music. The virginals is a type of small harpsichord named supposedly after the assumed virtue of Queen Elizabeth I, who, in addition to being one of the most brilliant and fair statespersons in history, was a talented and avid player.

A parallel situation arose in early seventeenth-century France. Lutenist-composers such as Robert Ballard, Rene Mesangeau, and Ennemond Gaultier and his nephew Denis began development of a higher genre of dance music. To dances that survived from the Renaissance, the allemande and galliard, the composers added the courante and the sarabande to form a composite musical work called the suite. Francois Couperin, composing in the early eighteenth century, called his suites ordres.

The lutenists tended to play stray movements as a unit. The harpsichord composers who followed, beginning around 1640 and called the French clavecin school, were more careful to unify their suites. "Clavecin" is the French name for harpsichord. The term suite comes from the French verb suivre, to follow. The name likely came into use by the custom of writing "suite" at the end of a dance to indicate that the next dance in the manuscript or book should follow.

As the dances were formally arranged by the clavecinists, all the dances shared a single key, each component dance featured a different meter, rhythmic characteristic, tempo, and affect, or emotional element. The clavecinists were centered at the court of Louis XIV in Paris.

Louis XIV

Notable members included its founder Jacques Champion de Chambonnierres, Louis Couperin, Jean-Henri d'Anglebert, Nicolas-Antoine Lebegue, Jean-Philippe Rameau, and Francois Couperin, Louis Couperin's nephew.

<>Jean-Baptiste Lully, though not a harpischordist but a guitarist, must also be included as a member of the school. Lully was the most powerful musician a the court of Louis XIV. He was a talented guitarist and dancer but, first and foremost, he was an innovative composer of dance and operatic music. In France, opera and a new art form, ballet, were combined into a single genre. Lully often expanded the dance portions of his opera-ballets by incorporating dances that originated in the provinces of France.

Jean Baptiste Lully

The additional movements were included orchestral suites that featured the dance movements from a particular opera-ballet. Harpsichord arrangements for home use of the orchestral music were also hastily prepared and were often made available to the public within days of the premiere. The folk movements Lully added to his opera-ballets found inclusion in the later suites of the French clavecin school. Lully is also the author of the French ouverture.

The Suite Proper

The suite proper required a minimum of an allemande, a courante, and a sarabande. The most serious movement was the allemande, and in it the French lute composers came closest to art music. The term allemande means "German" or German dance. The allemande was a moderate tempo dance cast in duple meter that assumed a serious, often majestic character. The serious character of the movement and its high level of musical sophistication later cast it as the prototype from which the Classic Period sonata-allegro would derive.

The courante, or corrente in Italian, derived its character from the French verb courir, to run. The name more accurately describes the Italian version because Italian musicians preferred even-note running lines. In French hands, the courante assumed the character of frequent metric shift. The movement was always written on compound meter, that is, with a number of beats in each measure that could be interpreted as either duple or triple meter. Hence six beats may be divided by accent into two groups of three or three groups of two. The shift may be demonstrated by counting aloud evenly 1 2 3 1 2 3 1 2 1 2 1 2 or 1 2 1 2 1 2 1 2 3 1 2 3.

The sarabande has the most curious history of all the suite movements. It originated in the New World, likely Mexico or Peru, and came into Spain with the returning treasure ships in the late sixteenth century. Initially, the sarabande was a quick, lascivious dance that so offended the Spanish that it was outlawed! By the middle of the seventeenth century, both fast and slow versions existed side by side. The slower version was often indicated by the word grave in the title. By the early eighteenth, it had slowed enough to become one of the stateliest and saddest movements in the suite. The sarabande was a triple meter dance. In French music the accent fell not on the first beat of the measure, but on the second. To get an idea of the effect, slowly count aloud 1 2 3 1 2 3, making the "2" slightly louder.

As noted, other dances promoted by Lully were included in clavecin suites by the second half of the seventh century. The gigue, which followed a metric scheme defined by four groups of three even notes that could be counted for effect:

1 2 3 1 2 3 1 2 3 1 2 3

1 ----2-----3----4-----

The gigue was a lively dances that originated in the British Isles as the jig.

The gigue became a permanent feature of the suites written by northern composers by accident. Johann Jakob Froberger (1616-1667), a keyboard composer whose publications served to disseminate French innovations to Germany and other northern countries, included gigues in the final section of his last book of dances. The book was not published until after his death and his publishers, not sure of the distribution of the dances, moved each gigue from the final section and appended each in turn to the suite in the same key.

French provincial additions of Lully included the country-dances the gavotte, the bouree, the minuet, the passpied, the loure, and the rigaudon, among others. These dances were placed in the order after the nuclear dances. The gigue usually stood midpoint between the sarabande and the provincial dances. The French suite followed the pattern:

Prelude (if included)-Allemande-Courante-Sarabande-Gigue-Followed by the optional dances, in typical order, Gavotte and Minuet

In the suites of northern composers such as J.S. Bach, the gigue was placed at the end and the additional dances were inserted between it and the sarabande. The minuet is the only suite movement to survive intact into the repertory of the Classic period. The German suite followed the pattern:

Prelude (usually always included)-Allemande-Courante-Sarabande-optional
dances, inserted before gigue in typical order, Gavotte and Bouree-Gigue

Sometimes an extra movement was played before the suite, and this movement derived from the French ouverture (from opera), toccata, fugue, fantasia, or prelude (see subsequent blog; also see Pervasive Imitative blog). The movement was often rhapsodic, with sharp contrasts of tempo, figuration, texture, and affect. It nearly always embraced extensive imitative writing in its second half. Its origin was the motet of the Renaissance, but in the Baroque period it was constructed to sound dramatic and improvised.

Dancing consumed a considerable portion of life at the Sun King's court. The suites for lute and clavecin were intended for listening rather than dancing, but the same movements as found in the suites for solo instruments, when played by orchestra, were clearly intended for dancing. To that end, dance masters were employed to develop choreography for professionals dancing in the opera-ballets, but also to teach members of the nobility the dance steps proper to each movement. The written instructions and manuscripts by the dance masters are essential to conscientious modern performers in understanding how each dance should be played.