Nouvelles Suites de pièces de clavecin · Suite

1. 0:00
   Gavotte and six doubles

   The gavotte moves in two broad beats, and trills and small turns ornament its tune. Each half repeats. Rameau keeps these phrases and their cadences through six doubles, variations with progressively busier figuration.

2. 0:41
   Move to Paris, 1722

   In 1722 Rameau moved from Clermont to Paris and published his Traité de l’harmonie. By then he had spent years as a church organist. His first opera at the Paris Opéra, Hippolyte et Aricie, followed in 1733, when he was fifty.

3. 1:24
   First double, right-hand semiquavers

   In the first double the right hand plays continuous semiquavers above a slower tune in the left hand. The gavotte’s chords fall in their original places, and the semiquavers fill the beats between them.

4. 1:51
   Rameau’s Traité de l’harmonie, 1722

   In the preface to his Traité de l’harmonie (1722), Rameau declared that “music is a science which must have definite rules”. His central rule was that a chord and its inversions share one root. The basse fondamentale, the imagined line of those roots, was for him the true bass.

5. 2:18
   Second double, left-hand semiquavers

   In the second double the hands exchange roles. The left hand plays running semiquavers in broken chords, and the right hand holds the slower notes above.

6. 3:14
   Third double, inner voice

   The third double puts quick notes inside the chords. A held upper note and a slower bass surround the moving middle voice.

7. 4:08
   Fourth double, repeated notes

   In the fourth double the melody moves in quick pairs of repeated notes, with a few running figures between them. The gavotte’s two broad beats stay the same underneath.

8. 4:56
   Fifth double, right-hand leaps

   In the fifth double the right hand leaps between separated notes, joined by short semiquaver runs. The bass moves in slower notes beneath. The phrases stay in A minor and cover a much wider span.

9. 5:46
   Sixth double, left-hand figuration

   The sixth double gives the running figures to the left hand beneath held right-hand chords. Low and high notes alternate within the bass line. The set ends with this variation’s cadence in A minor.

Joins

1. 1:24
   From the gavotte to the first double

   The gavotte closes in A minor. The first double begins the same phrases with continuous right-hand semiquavers above slower left-hand notes. On Meyer’s piano the tune now sits beneath the running part, and the two-beat dance metre continues.

2. 4:08
   From the third to the fourth double

   The third double ends on a cadence in A minor. The fourth double starts the dance again in pairs of repeated notes, and each pair carries the tune on to the next note. The moving inner voice of the third double is replaced by a succession of quick repeated notes above the bass.