Rameau, Jean-Philippe

International Music Score Library Project [IMSLP] entry: Jean-Philippe Rameau

Jean-Philippe Rameau [1683-1764] was one of the great early French composers, along with Couperin. He wrote music in a wide variety of genres. Details of his long life are surprisingly obscure.

Piece	MP3	Midi	Genre
Gavotte [with six doubles]		MIDI	harpsichord
	This is a gavotte with 6 doubles, or variations. There are no tempo or dynamical indications in the score [but a gavotte is a gavotte!]. Sequenced in 2024 primarily from the version at IMSLP published by Les Editions Outremontaises, with a 2005 copyright. This version was released under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 licence; further information is available here, but the practical effects seem to be that you may do whatever you like with this work, even commercially, provided that you give appropriate credits and your work is itself released under a compatible licence. This is the seventh and last piece in the fourth suite of Nouvelles Suites de Pieces de Clavecin (1727). The advantage of the Outremontaises edition over the several PD and other editions in my collection is that it is virtually an urtext edition, free of all the material added for performance on a piano. Accordingly, I have used exactly the printed ornamentation, and ignored the temptations to elaborate or to vary the notes in the repeats. What I have done is to vary the timbres to suit a two-manual harpsichord with 4' and lute stops. This enables a distinction between the two hands, which would be virtually impossible on a piano. This is particularly important for the fourth double, where Rameau meticulously marks which notes are to be played by the right hand and which by the left, with a resulting echo effect. The first three doubles explore the theme with different accompaniments. The fourth uses, as just described, an echo effect. The fifth and sixth are more grandiose, with the theme firstly in the left hand and latterly in the right.

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Sequencing: Copyright © Andy Walker, 2024. You may use all my work freely for private purposes; commercial use is permitted only with my permission, but see above for details of llicencing for the gavotte.

Andy Walker, anw [at] cuboid4.me.uk [remove digit to construct address]