gavots
gavots
Provençal
“Gavots were not a dance but a people, and the dance took their name.”
In the high valleys above Provence, in the Dauphiné region around the town of Gap, the people of the mountains were called gavots. The word was Provençal, likely from 'gava' meaning the crop of a bird, a term lowlanders applied to mountain folk with a kind of contemptuous amusement. 'Gavot' or 'gavache' was what people of the Rhône valley called those who came down from the Alps with rough wool, thick accents, and dances no one below recognized. The 16th century documented their step under their name, and the dance inherited the label of the people who danced it.
By the time the dance reached Paris it had shed its mountain associations and was reconstituted as court entertainment. Louis XIV danced it at Versailles in the 1660s, and Jean-Baptiste Lully composed gavots for the royal entertainments, turning an Alpine peasant step into Baroque ceremony. The dance acquired a precise musical structure: 4/4 time, entering on the third beat, with a characteristic lifted heel before each step. The peasant form was probably quicker and rougher; the court form was polished until it bore little resemblance to what the Gavots themselves had danced in winter markets.
The word passed into English as 'gavot' or 'gavotte' in the 17th century alongside the fashionable music. George Frideric Handel and Johann Sebastian Bach both included gavots in their keyboard and orchestral suites, turning the dance movement into a standard Baroque form. Bach's gavots in his English Suites, written in the early 1720s, give the form its clearest shape: a short binary piece starting after a half-bar rest, with a contrasting musette in the middle. The dance itself largely disappeared after the French Revolution dissolved court culture, but the musical form survived into the 19th century.
The Gavots, the people, have no presence in the word now. The Hautes-Alpes region above Gap is a hiking and ski destination, and the mountain communities that gave the dance its name are absorbed into the administrative France of the Fifth Republic. Their name survives most clearly in the dictionary entry for a Baroque dance they would likely have recognized only dimly in its finished Versailles form. The court took the step, polished it, and forgot where it came from.
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Today
The word gavots carries two histories at once. One is musical: a precise Baroque dance form with its characteristic entry on the third beat and its lifted heel before each step. The other is social: a name the mountain people of the Hautes-Alpes carried as an identity, sometimes with pride, sometimes with the sting of how the valley towns used it. The dance traveled because the people first traveled, bringing their steps down with the wool and the livestock to the winter markets.
When Bach wrote gavots for his English Suites in the 1720s, he was not thinking of the mountains above Gap. The music had been fully separated from the people who first danced it. This is the ordinary fate of folk material that enters the court and the conservatory: it gains formality and loses memory. Names survive long after the people who carried them are forgotten.
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