The ''courante'', ''corrente'', ''coranto'' and ''corant'' are some of the names given to a family of

triple metre Triple metre (or Am. triple meter, also known as triple time) is a musical metre characterized by a ''primary'' division of 3 beats to the bar, usually indicated by 3 (simple) or 9 (compound) in the upper figure of the time signature, with , , ...

dances from the late

Renaissance The Renaissance ( , ) , from , with the same meanings. is a period in European history marking the transition from the Middle Ages to modernity and covering the 15th and 16th centuries, characterized by an effort to revive and surpass ideas ...

and the

Baroque era The Baroque (, ; ) is a style of architecture, music, dance, painting, sculpture, poetry, and other arts that flourished in Europe from the early 17th century until the 1750s. In the territories of the Spanish and Portuguese empires including th ...

. In a Baroque dance suite an Italian or French courante is typically paired with a preceding

allemande An ''allemande'' (''allemanda'', ''almain(e)'', or ''alman(d)'', French: "German (dance)") is a Renaissance and Baroque dance, and one of the most common instrumental dance styles in Baroque music, with examples by Couperin, Purcell, Bach a ...

, making it the second

movement Movement may refer to: Common uses * Movement (clockwork), the internal mechanism of a timepiece * Motion, commonly referred to as movement Arts, entertainment, and media Literature * "Movement" (short story), a short story by Nancy Fu ...

of the suite or the third if there is a prelude.

Types

''Courante'' literally means "running", and in the later Renaissance the courante was danced with fast running and jumping steps, as described by

Thoinot Arbeau Thoinot Arbeau is the anagrammatic pen name of French cleric Jehan Tabourot (March 17, 1520 – July 23, 1595). Tabourot is most famous for his ''Orchésographie'', a study of late sixteenth-century French Renaissance social dance. He was bo ...

. But the courante commonly used in the

baroque The Baroque (, ; ) is a style of architecture, music, dance, painting, sculpture, poetry, and other arts that flourished in Europe from the early 17th century until the 1750s. In the territories of the Spanish and Portuguese empires including t ...

period was described by

Johann Mattheson Johann Mattheson (28 September 1681 – 17 April 1764) was a German composer, singer, writer, lexicographer, diplomat and music theorist. Early life and career The son of a prosperous tax collector, Mattheson received a broad liberal education ...

in ''Der vollkommene Capellmeister'' (Hamburg, 1739) as "chiefly characterized by the passion or mood of sweet expectation. For there is something heartfelt, something longing and also gratifying, in this

melody A melody (from Greek language, Greek μελῳδία, ''melōidía'', "singing, chanting"), also tune, voice or line, is a Linearity#Music, linear succession of musical tones that the listener perceives as a single entity. In its most liter ...

: clearly music on which hopes are built."Quoted in Alfred Dürr, preface to Johann Sebastian Bach, ''Französische Suiten: die verzierte Fassung / The French Suites: Embellished Version: BWV 812–817'', new, revised edition, edited by Alfred Dürr. Bärenreiter Urtext (Kassel: Bärenreiter-Verlag, 1980).

Johann Gottfried Walther Johann Gottfried Walther (18 September 1684 – 23 March 1748) was a German music theorist, organist, composer, and lexicographer of the Baroque era. Walther was born at Erfurt. Not only was his life almost exactly contemporaneous to that ...

in the ''Musicalisches Lexicon'' (Leipzig, 1732), wrote that the rhythm of the courante is "absolutely the most serious one can find." During the Baroque era there were two types of courante; the French and the Italian. The French type is usually notated in , but employing rhythmic and metrical ambiguities (especially hemiola), and had the slowest tempo of all French court dances, described by Mattheson, Quantz and Rousseau as grave and majestic,Meredith Ellis Little and Suzanne G. Cusick, "Courante", ''The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians'', second edition, edited by Stanley Sadie and John Tyrrell (London: Macmillan Publishers, 2001). while the Italian type was a significantly faster dance. Sometimes French and Italian spellings are used to distinguish types of courante, but original spellings were inconsistent.

Bach Johann Sebastian Bach (28 July 1750) was a German composer and musician of the late Baroque period. He is known for his orchestral music such as the '' Brandenburg Concertos''; instrumental compositions such as the Cello Suites; keyboard w ...

uses ''courante'' and ''corrente'' to differentiate the French and Italian styles respectively in his Partitas of the ''Clavierübung'' and, in ''Dance and the Music of J. S. Bach'' by Meredith Little and Natalie Jenne, the courante and corrente are treated as distinct dances, but editors have frequently ignored the distinction. In Bach's unaccompanied Partita for Violin No. 2 the first movement (titled Allemanda) begins as if in

time Time is the continued sequence of existence and events that occurs in an apparently irreversible succession from the past, through the present, into the future. It is a component quantity of various measurements used to sequence events, to ...

in a manner one might initially perform and hear as a courante. The second movement is titled corrente and is rather lively. An indication of faster tempo that appears to exist in Baroque composer

Georg Muffat Georg Muffat (1 June 1653 – 23 February 1704) was a Baroque composer and organist. He is best known for the remarkably articulate and informative performance directions printed along with his collections of string pieces ''Florilegium Primum'' a ...

's instructions on Lullian bowing is a confusion in translation.Meredith Little and Natalie Jenne, ''Dance and the Music of J. S. Bach'', expanded edition (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001) p. 115. (cloth); (pbk).

References

External links

Video – ''La Courante Reglée'' – basic steps demonstrated and described, in costume, by Dancilla

Video – Renaissance courante reconstructed by period group

Video – basic steps in theatre class

Video – Musical Contexts – Courante in Action – reonstruction for Baroque Orchestral Music (AQA GCSE Music)
{{Authority control Renaissance dance Baroque music Baroque dance Triple time dances Dance forms in classical music Renaissance music

Types

See also

References

Further reading

External links