This article is about the folk and court dance and its music. For other uses, see
Gavot.
The gavotte (also gavot, gavote, or gavotta) is a French dance, taking its name from a
folk dance of the Gavot, the people of the
Pays de Gap region of
Dauphiné in the southeast of France, where the dance originated, according to one source.[1] According to another reference, the word gavotte is a generic term for a variety of French folk dances, and most likely originated in
Lower Brittany in the west, or possibly
Provence in the southeast or the
French Basque Country in the southwest of France. It is notated in 4 4 or 2 2time and is usually of moderate
tempo, though the folk dances also use meters such as 9 8 and 5 8.[2]
In late 16th-century
Renaissance dance, the gavotte is first mentioned as the last of a suite of
branles. Popular at the court of
Louis XIV, it became one of many optional dances in the classical
suite of dances. Many were composed by
Lully,
Rameau and
Gluck, and the 17th-century
cibell is a variety. The dance was popular in France throughout the 18th century and spread widely. In early courtly use the gavotte involved kissing, but this was replaced by the presentation of flowers.[1]
The gavotte of the 16th, 17th, and 18th centuries has nothing in common with the 19th-century column-dance called the "gavotte"[3] but may be compared with the
rigaudon[4] and the
bourrée.
Etymology
The term gavotte for a lively dance originated in the 1690s from
Old Provençalgavoto (mountaineer's dance) from gavot, a local name for an Alpine resident, said to mean literally "boor", "glutton", from gaver (to stuff, force-feed poultry) from Old Provençal gava (crop). The word is cognate to French gavache (coward, dastard). The
Italianized form is gavotta.[5]
Musical characteristics
The phrases of the 18th-century French court gavotte begin in the middle of the
bar, creating a half-measure (half-bar)
upbeat. However the music for the earlier court gavotte, first described by
Thoinot Arbeau in 1589, invariably began on the downbeat of a duple measure. Later composers also wrote gavottes that began on the
downbeat rather than on the half-measure: an example is
Jean-Philippe Rameau's Gavotte Variée in A minor for keyboard.[6] Various folk gavottes found in mid-20th-century Brittany are danced to music in 4 4, 2 4, 9 8, and 5 8 time.[2]
In the ballroom the gavotte was often paired with a preceding triple-time
minuet: both dances are stately, and the gavotte's lifted step contrasted with the shuffling
minuet step. It had a steady rhythm, not broken up into faster notes.[1]
In the Baroque suite the gavotte is played after (or sometimes before) the
sarabande. Like most dance movements of the Baroque period it is typically in
binary form but this may be extended by a second melody in the same
metre, often one called the musette, having a
pedaldrone to imitate the
French bagpipes, played after the first to create a grand
ternary form; A–(A)–B–A.[1] There is a Gavotte en Rondeau ("Gavotte in
rondo form") in
J.S. Bach's
Partita No. 3 in E Major for solo violin, BWV 1006.
The gavotte could be played at a variety of
tempos:
Johann Gottfried Walther wrote that the gavotte is "often quick but occasionally slow".[8]
Renaissance
The gavotte is first described in the late 16th century as a suite or miscellany of
double branles danced in a line or circle to music in duple time, "with little springs in the manner of the Haut Barrois" branle and with some of the steps "divided" with figures borrowed from the
galliard.
The basic gavotte step, as described by Arbeau, is that of the common or double branle, a line of dancers moving alternately to the left and right with a double à gauche and double à droite, each requiring a count of four. In the double branle these composite steps consist of; a pied largi (firm outward step), a pied approche (the other foot drawn near to the first), another pied largi and a pied joint (the other foot drawn against the first).
In the gavotte's double à gauche a skip (petit saut) is inserted after each of the four components; the second pied largi is replaced by a marque pied croisé (the following foot crosses over the left with toe contacting the floor); the final pied approche is replaced by a grève croisée (the right foot crosses over the left, raised).
The double à droite begins with a pieds joints and petit saut, followed by two quick steps, a marque pied gauche croisé and marque pied droit croisé, during beat two, a grève droit croisée and petit saut on beat three and on the last beat pieds joints and a capriole (leap into the air with
entrechat).[9]
Baroque
The gavotte became popular in the court of
Louis XIV where
Jean-Baptiste Lully was the leading court composer.
Gaétan Vestris did much to define the dance. Subsequently many composers of the
Baroque period incorporated the dance as one of many optional additions to the standard instrumental
suite of the era. The examples in suites and partitas by
Johann Sebastian Bach are well known.
Movements of early 18th-century musical works entitled Tempo di gavotta sometimes indicated the sense of a gavotte rhythm or movement, without fitting the number of measures or strains typical of the actual dance. Examples of these can be found in the works of
Arcangelo Corelli or
Johann Sebastian Bach.[10]
Composers in the 19th century wrote gavottes that began, like the 16th-century gavotte, on the
downbeat rather than on the half-measure upbeat. The famous Gavotte in D by
Gossec is such an example, as is the Gavotte in
Massenet'sManon but not the one in
Ambroise Thomas'sMignon. A gavotte also occurs in the second act of The Gondoliers and the Act I finale of Ruddigore, both by
Gilbert and Sullivan.
Edvard Grieg's suite From Holberg's Time, based on eighteenth-century dance forms, features a "Gavotte" as its third movement (1884).
Australian composer
Fred Werner used a gavotte he composed for teaching students.
Igor Stravinsky's ballet Pulcinella features a "Gavotta con due variazioni", as number 18, and movement VI in the suite (1922).
Sergei Prokofiev employs a gavotte instead of a minuet in his
Symphony No. 1 (Classical), Op. 25 (1917), and includes another one as the second of his Ten Piano Pieces Op. 12 (1913), and another as the third of his Four Piano Pieces, Op. 32 (1918).
Carly Simon's song "
You're So Vain" includes the lyric "You had one eye in the mirror as you watched yourself gavotte". In this context it means "moving in a pretentious manner".[13]
The
Stephen Sondheim musical Sunday in the Park with George uses the word gavotte as a satirical device in the otherwise irregular, non-steadily rhythmical, song "It's Hot Up Here" to start the second act, "We're stuck up here in this gavotte".
The
Johnny Mercer song "
Strip Polka" includes the lyric "Oh, she hates corny waltzes and she hates the gavotte".
Geneticist
W. D. Hamilton in his paper "Gamblers since life began: barnacles, aphids, elms." in The Quarterly Review of Biology (1975) referred to the drilled formality of the mechanisms of individual reproduction as "the gavotte of chromosomes".
Philosopher
Stephen David Ross characterises metaphysical
aporia as "the disruptive side of a tradition that needs both repetition and its annihilation for intelligibility. It is a site at which same and other dance their unending gavotte of life and death."[14]
Agustín Barrios wrote a solo guitar piece, "Madrigal Gavotte", which is a combination of the two styles.
In the anime Kiniro no Corda (La Corda d'Oro), "Gavotte in D" by
Gossec is heard many times, though referred to only as "Gavotte".
The "Cutting Gavotte" is an attack in the Japanese version of the role-playing game Infinite Undiscovery.
In the Broadway musical 1776 during the song "Cool, Considerate Men", reference is made to "Mr. Adams' new gavotte"—a reference regarding
John Adams' ideas for a declaration of independence from
Great Britain.
In the 1967 film, How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying, the song "A Secretary Is not a Toy" refers to a gavotte. The song discourages personal indiscretions with secretaries at the firm. The reference to a gavotte is meant to be ironic, as the original dance accompanying the song from the Broadway show was a modified gavotte.
In the manga and anime One Piece, the skeleton musician character Brooke (and his "zombie," Ryuuma, which was given life by Brooke's shadow) has a signature technique, Gavotte Bond en Avant.
In the
Robert Pinsky poem "Impossible To Tell", the gavotte is mentioned in the first line.
In
John Updike's novel Bech at Bay, for the protagonist, "It embarrassed him that for these young Czechs American writing, its square dance of lame old names, should appear such a lively gavotte, prancing carefree into the future."[15]
In the mid-nineteenth-century novel The Scout, William Gilmore Simms describes a lonely sentry: "He sang, and whistled, and soliloquized; and, not unfrequently, relieved the dull measured step of the sentinel by the indulgence of such a gavotte as a beef-eating British soldier of the 'prince's own' might be supposed capable of displaying in that period of buckram movement."[16]
Describing American foreign policy in the wake of the
September 11 attacks, author
Norman Podhoretz says, "Far from 'rushing into war,' we were spending months dancing a diplomatic gavotte in the vain hope of enlisting the help of France, Germany, and Russia."[17]
Polish resistance fighter Jan Kamieński describes his personal experience of the chaos of the first German air strike on Poland in these terms: "Paintings were falling off the walls, the Biedermeier sofa and its complement of chairs bounced around as if dancing some crazy gavotte, the Bechnstein grand piano slid past me on two of its casters …".[18]
The poem "Wakefulness" by John Ashbery includes the sentence: "A gavotte of dust-motes / came to replace my seeing."[19]
In the poem "12/2/80" from Waltzing Matilda (1981),
Alice Notley writes: "A leaf if local / only when falling. // 'What? like a gavotte?' / the common evergreen rustle: / hours & regulations & so on ...",[20]
Chas and Dave produced a song called Give it Gavotte which uses this style on the album Job Lot
In "The Wild Wood", the third chapter of
Kenneth Grahame's novel
The Wind in the Willows, one of the lines describing the blooming spring is "Comfrey, the purple hand-in-hand with the white, crept forth to take its place in the line; and at last one morning the diffident and delaying dog-rose stepped delicately on the stage, and one knew, as if string-music had announced it in stately chords that strayed into a gavotte, that June at last was here."
^Sachs, Curt (1963). World History of the Dance. Translated by Bessie Schönberg. New York: W. W. Norton. p. 389.
^Quantz, Johann Joachim. On Playing the Flute. Translated by Edward R. Reilly (1975 paperback reprint ed.). New York: Schirmer Books. p. 291. {{
cite book}}: Unknown parameter |agency= ignored (
help)
^Thoinot Arbeau, Orchesography, translated by Mary Stewart Evans, with a new introduction and notes by Julia Sutton and a new Labanotation section by Mireille Backer and Julia Sutton. American Musicological Society Reprint Series (New York: Dover Publications, 1967): 128–130, 175–176.
ISBN0-486-21745-0.
^Ross, Stephen David (1989). Metaphysical Aporia and Philosophical Heresy. Albany, New York: State University of New York Press. p. vii.
ISBN978-0-7914-0006-7.
^Simms, William Gilmore (1854). The Scout: Or the Black Riders of Congaree. W. J. Widdleton; reprinted in the Americans in Fiction series (1968), Ridgewood, New Jersey: The Gregg Press Incorporated. p. 385.
^Kamieński, Jan (2008). Hidden in the Enemy's Sight: Resisting the Third Reich from Within. Toronto; Tonawanda, New York; Hightown, Lancs: Dundurn Press; Gazelle Book Services Limited. p. 21.
ISBN978-1-55002-854-6.
Guilcher, Jean-Michel. 1963. La tradition populaire de danse en Basse-Bretagne. Etudes Européennes 1. Paris and The Hague: Mouton. Second edition, 1976, Paris: Mouton.
ISBN9027975728. New, expanded edition, 1995, Spézet-Douarnenez: Coop-Breizh.
ISBN2909924394. Douarnenez: Chasse-Marée-Armen.
ISBN2903708592. Reprinted 1997.
Semmens, Richard T. 1997. "Branles, Gavottes and Contredanses in the Later Seventeenth and Early Eighteenth Centuries". Dance Research 15, no. 2 (Winter): 35–62.