gavotte

The word gavotte derives from Provençal gavoto, the term applied to the inhabitants of the Gap region of the Hautes-Alpes — a mountain people known in Provençal as Gavots. The Gavots were highlanders whose folk dances, performed at festivals in the mountain villages of the Dauphiné and Provence, had a distinctive hopping, leaping character. When their dances began appearing in the lowland towns and eventually in the royal courts of France, they brought their regional name with them: this was the Gavots' dance, the gavotte. The pattern is common in dance etymology — the csárdás is the inn dance, the polka may be the Polish dance, the mazurka is from Mazovia. A regional population's name becomes the dance's name through the simple mechanism of cultural transmission and the outsider's habit of labeling what they see by where it came from.

The gavotte entered French court culture in the late 16th century, where it underwent the transformation typical of folk-to-court migration: the leaping, energetic original was smoothed, formalized, and fitted with the musical structure that the court expected of its entertainments. By the reign of Louis XIV, the gavotte had become a standard component of the ballet de cour and the theatrical suite, appearing in court entertainments choreographed by Jean-Baptiste Lully. Lully's gavottes — in the ballets and operas he composed for Versailles — established the dance's musical characteristics: a brisk duple meter (usually alla breve, or cut time), phrases beginning on the third beat (a half-bar anacrusis that gives it its characteristic pickup feel), and a light, clean articulation quite different from the earthier rhythms of its Alpine origins.

Johann Sebastian Bach brought the gavotte to its highest musical expression in the instrumental suites of the early 18th century. Bach's gavotte movements — found in the French Suites, English Suites, Partitas, and the solo violin and cello works — use the dance's formal structure as a vehicle for counterpoint and melodic development of extraordinary sophistication. The Gavotte en Rondeau from the Partita No. 3 for solo violin is perhaps the most famous single gavotte in the repertoire: a piece that uses the dance's regular phrase structure and characteristic pickup to create what sounds like an entire orchestra compressed into one instrument. Handel, Telemann, and Rameau also wrote gavottes; the form was ubiquitous in baroque instrumental music before falling out of fashion with the galant style of the mid-18th century.

The gavotte underwent a self-conscious revival in the 19th century as composers looked to baroque forms for structural models. Prokofiev's Classical Symphony (1917) includes a gavotte as its third movement — a witty modern evocation of 18th-century elegance that uses the dance's formal conventions while harmonizing them with early 20th-century language. Saint-Saëns, Massenet, and other French composers of the belle époque wrote gavottes with nostalgic charm. The dance itself — the actual social dance, as opposed to the musical form — was revived briefly in late 19th-century ballrooms as a fashionable antiquarian exercise before fading again. What survived was the name as a musical genre, the mountain villagers of Provence permanently installed in the baroque suite.