The Dance

The Baroque dance-suite, with its movements all in the same key (though not necessarily the same mode) and intended to be played as a whole, is to be seen as an early example of the consistent use of character in (keyboard) music in that, as we have seen ¹ with the sets by François Couperin in particular, most of the movements have humanised, and frequently emotionalised, titles. But, of course, the dances themselves also have character in the choreographic sense – tempo, expression, timesignature, quality of anacrusis, type of melody, not to mention rhythm and social requirements. The basic core of the suite were the four principal dances, allemande, courante, sarabande and gigue (or their close equivalents in other languages) could be seen as representing the politically important empires of Western Europe, a geographical cross with the United Kingdom and the southern Latin countries forming the upright and France and the Austro-Germanic Empire the crossbar: it may not be too naive to see the threat of the emerging nationalist movements. These core dances were often joined by a sprinkling of less common ones, such as the bourrée, the gavotte (a descendant of which is still very much alive and well in Brittany) and other movements (rondeau, prélude, and so on). Despite some loss of individuality, these characters remained after most of them were no longer used for actual dancing, as was already becoming the case in the Baroque period itself.