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lifetime. A 1768 keyboard treatise relates
that Bach once tried a pianoforte by
the famous organ and harpsichord maker
Silbermann, and liked its tone but said the
treble notes were weak and the keys took
too much effort to play. Bach’s criticism
caused Silbermann to sulk at first, but he
then spent years improving the instrument,
and Bach later expressed “complete
approval.”
The suite in Bach’s day was a fairly formalized
sequence of dance movements,
or at least movements in forms that had
been dances. A late Baroque composer
would not have expected anyone to
actually dance to his suites: they were
art music, and the sequence of dance
forms was a shorthand way of indicating
rhythm, tempo and mood to players and
listeners, and creating variety among the
movements. In Bach’s English Suites, the
sequence includes five dances, four of
which were compulsory:
Allemande is a French word meaning
“German,” and eighteenth-century writers
noted that it was a dance of some
gravity, as befitting the grave character of
German people. Of course, the Germans
themselves did not think of themselves as
particularly ponderous, so an allemande
in Germany may well have been less heavy
or slow than an Italian or French one. The
basic steps consisted mostly of walking,
and though the allemande’s heyday was
around the turn of the seventeenth century
and it was rarely danced in Bach’s
time, it still retained its walking character.
The courante — French for “running”
— is a quick dance in triple meter. Some
courantes (usually, but not always, the
ones given the Italian title corrento) are
in a broad, swinging rhythm, but Bach
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rarely wrote those. He preferred a more
complex type of courante in which the
rhythm is less obvious, sometimes seeming
to have two beats per measure rather
than three.
The sarabande was originally a frenetic
import from Spanish America in the sixteenth
century, when its steps were considered
risqué, if not indecent. Needless
to say, it caught on with the younger set,
but it became a slower dance in the seventeenth
century, probably because the
people who danced it got older. It had
a strongly accented second beat, which
made it rhythmically non-conformist (for
centuries, the default setting in all music
was that when there were three beats in
a measure, the second beat would be the
weakest beat). By Bach’s day, the sarabande
was slow and serious, but it still had
an accented second beat.
The gigue (jig in English) is a lively
dance in compound triple meter: six, nine
or twelve short notes in groups of three,
so the overall pulse can have two, three or
four beats. The dance went out with the
Baroque, but its signature rhythm is still
makes an occasional appearance: Leonard
Bernstein’s song “America” from West Side
Story is a well-known example.
Between the sarabande and the gigue
in each suite, Bach inserts one of four
kinds of movements. The bourree and
the gavotte are both up-tempo dances
in duple meter, often musically indistinguishable
from each other. The minuet
and passepied are up-tempo triple-meter
dances, also musically similar, to the point
where the passepied is often described as
simply a kind of minuet. The minuet was
relatively young in Bach’s day, still danced
socially circles, and it survived into the