Courante Uyt Italien, Duytslandt,
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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).


See also

*
Baroque dance Baroque dance is dance of the Baroque era (roughly 1600–1750), closely linked with Baroque music, theatre, and opera. English country dance The majority of surviving choreographies from the period are English country dances, such as those ...
*
Renaissance dance Renaissance dances belong to the broad group of historical dances. During the Renaissance period, there was a distinction between country dances and court dances. Court dances required the dancers to be trained and were often for display and enter ...


References


Further reading

*Lenneberg, Hans. 1958. "Johann Mattheson on Affect and Rhetoric in Music: A Translation of Selected Portions of ''Der vollkommene Capellmeister'' (1739)". ''Journal of Music Theory'' 2, no. 1 (April) and no. 2 (November): 47–84, 193–236. *Mattheson, Johann. 1739.
Der vollkommene Capellmeister: Das ist, Gründliche Anzeige aller derjenigen Sachen, die einer wissen, können, und vollkommen inne haben muß, der einer Capelle mit Ehren und Nutzen vorstehen will
'. Hamburg: verlegts Christian Herold. Facsimile reprint, fifth edition, edited by Margarete Reimann. Documenta Musicologica 1. Reihe, Druckschriften-Faksimiles 5. Kassel: Bärenreiter-Verlag, 1991. . *Mattheson, Johann. 1981. ''Johann Mattheson's Der vollkommene Capellmeister", a revised translation with critical commentary by Ernest Charles Harriss. Studies in musicology 21. Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press. . *Walther, Johann Gottfried. 1732.
Musicalisches Lexicon oder, Musicalische Bibliothec
'. Leipzig: verlegts Wolffgang Deer. Facsimile reprint, edited by Richard Schaal. Documenta musicologica, 1. Reihe, Druckschriften-Faksimiles, 3. Kassel: Bärenreiter-Verlag, 1953. Modern edition of the text and musical illustrations, edited by Friederike Ramm. Kassel: Bärenreiter-Verlag &
Karl Vötterle Karl Vötterle (12 April 1903 – 29 October 1975) was a German music publisher. Life Vötterle was born in Augsburg. With the intention of printing song sheets for the members of the musical youth movement, he founded the Bärenreiter-Verlag ...
GmbH & Co. KG, 2001. .


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