Bourre [boure]

(Fr.; It. borea; Eng. boree, borry).

A French folk dance, court dance and instrumental form, which
flourished from the mid-17th century until the mid-18th. The word was
generally boure in French; the preferred current spelling may in fact
be of German origin. As a folkdance it had many varieties, and
dances called bourre are still known in various parts of France; in
Berry, Languedoc, Bourbonnais and Cantal the bourre is a duplemetre dance, while in Limousin and the Auvergne it is commonly in
triple metre. Many historians, including Rousseau (1768), believed
that the bourre originated in the Auvergne as the characteristic
Branle of that region, but others have suggested that Italian and
Spanish influences played a part in its development. It is not certain if
there is a specific relationship between the duple French folkdance
and the court bourre.
Specific information on the bourre as a court dance is available only
for the 18th century, whence at least 32 choreographies entitled
bourre, boure, boree or bouree time are extant, both for social
dancing and for theatrical use (see Little and Marsh). The bourre
was a fast duple-metre courtship dance, with a mood described
variously as gay (Rousseau, Dictionaire de musique, 1768) and
content and self-composed (Mattheson, Der vollkommene
Kapellmeister, 1739). The step pattern common to all bourres, which
also occurred in other French court dances, was the pas de bourre.
It consisted of a demi-coup (a pli followed by an lev on to the
foot making the next step), a plain step, and a small gentle leap.
These three steps occurred with the first three crotchets of a bar,
whether in the duple metre of a bourre or the triple metre of a
sarabande, where the pas de bourre was also used. If the small leap
was replaced by a plain step, the pattern resulting was called a
fleuret. The pas de bourre preceded the fleuret historically, and is
somewhat more difficult to execute; by the early 18th century,
however, the two steps seem to have been used interchangeably,
according to the dancers ability. The bourre as a social dance was a
mixture of fleurets, pas de bourres, leaps, hops and the tems de
courante (a gesture consisting of a bend, rise and slide; see
Courante) at places of repose. Ex.1 shows the opening phrase of the
Bourre dAchille (Little and Marsh, no.1480), a popular ball dance
from 1700 which was actually part of a suite of three dances
(bourreminuetbourre) from the Prologue to the Lully-Collasse
opera Achille et Polyxne (1687). Each of the first two bars contains a
pas de bourre, the third has a hop and two plain steps, and the
fourth a tems de courante. Thus the rhythmic shape of the phrase is
that of three active bars followed by a point of arrival at the beginning
of the fourth bar and a subsequent relaxation of effort. A complete
bourre consisted of two strains, each containing one or more four- or
eight-bar phrases with a rhythmic shape as described. Each dance,

however, had a separate choreography with a unique mixture of the

possible steps.

Some form of the bourre was danced at French court festivals by

natives of the Auvergne as early as the mid-16th century. It was
eventually also used, probably in a more refined form, in the ballet de
cour. The Philidor Collection contains a Bourre dAvignon (i, 512)
which was probably a dance accompaniment, and the Ballet de la
delivrance de Renaud (1617) also contains a bourre for dancing.
Collections of airs de cour such as Llite des airs de cour (1608) and
Le recueil des plus belles chansons (1615) include texts for sung
bourres, showing the growing popularity of the dances characteristic
rhythms. Under Louis XIV the bourre came into fashion both as a
social dance at balls and as a theatrical dance. Lully included
bourres in many of his ballets and operas, such as Les amours
dguiss (1664), La naissance de Vnus (1665) and Phaton (1683),
and he composed one for the dancing-lesson scene in Act 1 of
Molires Le bourgeois gentilhomme (1670). Later French composers
for the stage, including Charpentier, Destouches, Campra and
Rameau, continued to use bourres in dancing-scenes and
occasionally in overtures.
As stylized dance music, the Baroque bourre was characterized by
duple metre (a time signature of 2 or ) with an upbeat of a crotchet, a
moderate to fast tempo (minim = c8092) and phrases built out of
four-bar units with a point of arrival at the beginning of the fourth bar
(seventh minim). A performance style in which quavers were ingales
(stepwise-moving passages of quavers unmixed with other values to
be played unevenly over a steady beat) is thought to have been
common for the bourre, particularly in France. These characteristics
also apply to the Rigaudon, and indeed Quantz virtually equated the
dances, but the two types can be distinguished because the rigaudon
was slightly more vigorous and tended to have more angular
melodies than the bourre. Moreover, 18th-century writers
(Rousseau, Mattheson etc.) consistently mentioned a crotchetminim
syncopation used to emphasize the third or seventh beat of a phrase
as characteristic of the bourre, a trait which would easily distinguish
a bourre from a rigaudon. Ex.2, Lullys bourre for Le bourgeois
gentilhomme, shows the characteristic syncopation, phrase structure
and homophonic texture.

The stylized bourre flourished as an instrumental form from the early

17th century. Praetoriuss Terpsichore (1612) included a few
examples, all with quite simple phrasing and a homophonic texture.
The Kassel Manuscript (ed. J. Ecorcheville, Vingt suites dorchestre,
1906/R) also contains a number of bourres, often placed as the
second dance in a suite. As the order of dances in a suite became
conventionalized into the familiar allemandecourantesarabande
group (see Suite, 5), the bourre continued to be included fairly
often, coming after the sarabande with other less serious dances like
the minuet and the gavotte. In that position it was included in
orchestral suites by J.C.F. Fischer, Johann Krieger, Georg Muffat and
J.S. Bach. Three of Bachs orchestral suites include pairs of bourres,
in which the first is to be repeated (bourre da capo) after the
second is played, a common treatment of the so-called popular
dances in the suite. Other bourres occur in his English and French
suites for keyboard, in two of the solo suites for cello, and in the
Partita for solo flute (see Little and Jenne). Handels Water Music
includes a bourre that hardly seems at all stylized.

Baroque keyboard versions of the bourre often took liberties with the
original simplicity of the dance form. Such composers as Lebgue,
DAnglebert, Purcell, Gottlieb Muffat, Bach and Domenico Scarlatti
wrote bourres, many highly ornamented with some idiomatic display
of keyboard technique. Yet even those like ex.3 (from Muffats
Componimenti musicali, 1690) which show no trace of the bourres
characteristic crotchetminim syncopation retain a fairly simple
homophonic texture and a clear phrase structure based on four-bar
units. Bourre style persisted well into the late 18th century, as the
opening movement of Mozart's G minor Symphony well illustrates. In
the 19th and 20th centuries some composers wrote pieces entitled
bourre, apparently as a reference to the French folkdances rather
than to the Baroque court dance and instrumental form: Chabriers
Bourre fantasque, in its fast duple metre and strict adherence to
four-bar phrases, suggests that the composer may have sought to
evoke the court bourre; the movement labelled bourre in
Roussels Suite pour piano op.14, however, a rapid triple-metre dance
with asymmetrical phrases, bears no resemblance to the Baroque
form.

BIBLIOGRAPHY
G. Taubert: Rechtschaffener Tanzmeister (Leipzig, 1717)
P. Rameau: Le matre danser (Paris, 1725; Eng. trans., 1931/R)
J. Canteloube: La danse dAuvergne, Auvergne littraire, artistique
et historique, iv (1936)
L. Horst: Pre-Classic Dance Forms (New York, 1937/R)

C. Sachs: Eine Weltgeschichte des Tanzes (Berlin, 1933; Eng. trans.,

1937/R)
W. Hilton: Dance of Court and Theater (Princeton, NJ, 1981/R)
B. Mather: Dance Rhythms of the French Baroque (Bloomington, IN,
1987), 21420
M. Little and N. Jenne: Dance and the Music of J.S. Bach
(Bloomington, IN, 1991), 3546
M. Little and C. Marsh: La danse noble: an Inventory of Dances and
Sources (Williamstown, MA, 1992)
F. Lancelot: La belle dance: catalogue raisonn (Paris, 1996)
MEREDITH ELLIS LITTLE