1. An old formal French dance in quadruple time.
2. Music composed in quadruple time for dancing the gavotte.
moderate tempo French peasant dance
high-stepping French dance.
Light-hearted dance in common time (4/4), originating from the Pays de Gap, France, whose inhabitants were called Gavots. Originally a folk dance, it was adopted by the court and continued to develop ever more complicated steps until it could only be performed by professional dancers. The music begins with an upbeat of two crotchets, and the phrases usually begin and end in the middle of each bar. It became popular at the court of Louis XIV (Lully composed several gavottes), later becoming an optional movement of the Baroque suite. The gavotte has been revived by some 20th-century composers, including Prokofiev and Schoenberg, who uses one in his Suite 1934. + prikaži više