Lesson 51: A Complete Baroque Suite Movement

Take a complete dance movement from a first sight-read to a performance-ready tempo.
Build a practice plan that uses chunks, slow tempi, and targeted hardest-bar work — not start-to-finish repetition.

A piece is finished when it sounds inevitable, not when you can play it through.

For fifty lessons you have been learning techniques. This lesson is the first that asks you to learn a piece — a complete dance movement from the Baroque suite tradition, taken from cold sight-read to performance tempo over several practice sessions. The suite was the working composer's everyday format: a sequence of stylised dance movements, each with its own character (allemande grave, courante stepping, sarabande heavy on the second beat, gigue fast and triple). One movement at a time is plenty for a learner. The piece below is a Bourrée — an upbeat duple-meter French dance, light on its feet.

The piece — Bourrée in G major

A 16-bar Bourrée in the manner of the Playford and Hotteterre collections. Two strains of 8 bars each, each repeated. The character is upbeat: the dance begins on an upbeat eighth note (the “levé”) and lifts forward through every phrase.

First strain — bars 1–8 with upbeat

Second strain — bars 9–16 with upbeat

Practice plan — four sessions

The piece is more than you can play well on the first day. Plan four short sessions instead of one long one.

Session 1 — map the terrain: Play through both strains at half tempo, stopping at any bar that fights back. Mark the hardest two bars. Do not play through to the end — the goal is to find the trouble, not to mask it.
Session 2 — hardest bars first: Take the two marked bars and work them in isolation. Eight repetitions slow; then four with the bar before; then four with the bar after. Stop when each marked bar plays the same way three times in a row.
Session 3 — chunks: Play the first strain as one chunk, then the second strain as one chunk. Use the practice tempo from Session 2, not the target tempo.
Session 4 — bring it to tempo: Start at the rehearsal tempo and add metronome clicks until you reach the target. If a bar collapses at speed, drop back to that bar at slow tempo before continuing.

This is the chunked, slow-then-fast, hardest-bar-first procedure that lives in the reference. Apply it to every piece from here on; you will not be told it again.

Practice chunks

Two specific bars from the Bourrée that learners typically need to isolate.

Now play these

Playford: All in a Garden Green: A complete Playford dance — shorter than the Bourrée, ideal for applying the four-session plan a second time.
Playford: Cuckolds All a Row: A bright duple-time dance with strain repeats. Practise the strains as separate chunks.
Loeillet: Sonata in C major, Op. 3 No. 1: A full Baroque sonata to scale up the four-session procedure to a longer work.

When you can play the Bourrée end-to-end at quarter = 100 without restarting, and a listener can tap the dance pulse without effort, move on to Lesson 52.

For the wider performance preparation arc, see performance preparation.