A dear old friend of mine once showed me a fragment of manuscript music by John Sebastian Bach.
This bit of music was part of a gavotte; and as in this paper I mean to tell you Bach's story, and his special association with that quaint dance-music, I think we had better first see what the gavotte and the chaconne, the passacaille and the sarabande, mean. All of this music was popular in Bach's day.
In a French gallery there is a picture of splendidly dressed ladies and gentlemen dancing the gavotte. They wear the costume of the latter part of the seventeenth century. They have smiling faces, nourish large fans, and wear high-heeled slippers, which they lift gracefully; for the gavotte was a very brilliant dance in its movement.
The name came from a people in Dauphiny, known as Gavots. They danced it more wildly than the stately people of Louis's court; but the music of every gavotte seems to me to be best suited to them. One can fancy them on their village green clattering away to the quaint gay music, flinging their arms about, or beating time with their hands. But when the gavotte was introduced into the upper classes, and with it various other dances of the people, it became more refined, dignified, even more serious.
Bach wrote many gavottes, some singly, some in what are called suites, or sets of short pieces of music. Just now all who can play well at all are interested in this dance-music of the eighteenth century. It holds its own perhaps as much from the fact that its form is very generally classic as from its charming melodies.
It is always well, even for beginners, to understand the principle on which any kind of music is written. You will find your practicing much more interesting if you look deeper than the mere sounds. Suppose we take some simple gavotte, and examine into the way it is written. Here, for instance, is the first strain in one of Bach's most popular gavottes:
Now let us see what the few rules created for its composition are. They are these:
It must be in common time, which really means equal time, two or four beats to the bar, although the term is generally applied to that of four crotchets to the bar, marked by the Italian C.
The movement is rather quick, and it is generally in two parts. These parts are, in accordance with a custom peculiar to old dances, repeated.