As is well known, the Dorian was the only mode to retain some kind of identity in secular music throughout the 17th century, even if that identity was sometimes nothing more than the lack of a key signature for pieces we would readily accept as being in D minor (or in G minor with one flat rather than two -- or even in C minor with two flats rather than three).
Nevertheless, vestiges of the Dorian octave facilitate rising lines that move fluidly from the lower part of the octave through ^8. I will explore the treatment of the Dorian octave in music from the early part of the 17th century in several posts at the end of this series. Here I am interested in how ^6 and ^7 interact with the three Urlinie figures I showed in the series introduction -- they're reproduced below.
We will start with a menuet by Jean-François Dandrieu (1682-1738) from the collection
Trois livres de claveçin de jeunesse, edited by Brigitte Francois-Sappey (Paris, 1975). The pieces in this volume come not from the more familiar three volumes of
Pièces de Claveçin but from smaller and earlier collections published between 1704 and 1720: two titled
Livre de claveçin and the
Pièces de claveçin courtes et faciles. Also unlike the larger volumes, which use the fanciful character titles common in the generation of François Couperin, the three smaller collections use dance and other generic titles.
The menuet in G minor uses the transposed Dorian signature -- see the opening below, where I isolate an unfolded fourth as the central figure. (One can also easily hear the interior third-line Bb4-Bb4-A4-implied G4 -- not marked in the score.)
The ending works its way through this fourth twice, in both cases using what I've marked as the "Dorian ^6."
The more abstract version below shows the background, which fits the model of figure b above.
Elisabeth Jacquet de La Guerre (1665-1729) was one of the most prominent French musicians of her generation. A child prodigy, she was a skilled harpsichordist and composer who spent her teenage years in the court at Versailles and later lived and worked in Paris. The first suite in the
Pièces de Claveçin of 1687 is in D minor using a Dorian signature and contains two courantes. The second of these opens with a strongly defined ascending gesture that charts a coupling of F4 and F5. (The notation is from an edition by Steve Wiberg published on IMSLP:
link.)
In the close, the coupling is repeated, with a completely filled linear ascent, after which a straightforward background descent ("x") is elaborated with a fairly simple leading-tone third-line ("y"). An interior ascending figure ("z") cuts across these: it is shown as a fourth ^5-^8 but is properly a third A4-C#5 that reaches and connects to the final note of "y."
In a continuation of this post, I will discuss a gigue and courante for two harpsichords by Gaspard Le Roux (1660-1707).
