Old French suite: the sarabande as vocal & instrumental genre

The subject of this article is the correlation between french prosody, music and dance, and the appearance of a « danse chantée» (dance with singing) genre in the French court in the second half of the 17th century. Different ways of occuring of this genre are considered: from the instrumental piece to the song (or dance with singing) and the opposite. The genre features of the dance-song are revealed in a sarabande as an example of the rhetoric epoch of Baroque. The article proposes an interesting summary of our study of the attributes of the music and lyrics of some specific sarabands of Jacques de Chambonnieres and the gavotte of Louis Couperin to compare. Considering the sarabande as an instrumental piece with not only the dance as it’s prototype but also the song, and a further analysis gives a new clue to the conception of the genre to the performer. The poems written to the specific instrumental compositions reveal not only its connection with the vocal genre, but makes more evident the necessity to implement the laws of prosody and singing in the execution within the baroque tradition.