Anglaise

Through balanced figures, graceful motion, and collective participation, the Anglaise turns the order of the eighteenth-century ballroom into a living social rhythm.

THE TERM IN BRIEF

Anglaise

WHAT IT IS	A dance and a stylised instrumental form.
WHERE IT COMES FROM	From English dance practices transmitted through a French name.
HOW IT MOVES	With a lively pace and a clearly articulated duple rhythm.
WHERE IT APPEARS	In social dancing and instrumental music of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
WHAT TO LISTEN FOR	Balanced phrases, steady momentum, and a bright sense of movement.

Anglaise as a Dance and a Musical Term

Anglaise —with the earlier spelling angloise also found in historical sources— is a term with several related meanings. It may denote a dance of English origin, a French adaptation of English country-dance practice, an instrumental movement that retains the energy of dancing, or, more broadly, a composition that seventeenth- and eighteenth-century musicians regarded as English in character.

The name therefore does not identify one immutable form. Its meaning shifts according to period, place, and source. It carries one set of implications in an English dance manual, another in a French collection of contredanses, and still another in a German keyboard suite. This flexibility is not an obstacle to understanding the Anglaise; it is part of its history. The term belongs to a family of connected dance and musical practices rather than to a single fixed blueprint.

From English Country Dancing to the French Ballroom

The Anglaise has its roots in the world of the English country dance. The first edition of John Playford’s The English Dancing Master, published in London in 1651, brought together tunes and instructions for social dances performed in several kinds of formation. The book and its many later editions document a practice in which musical phrasing, spatial design, and the sequence of figures were understood as parts of one coordinated system.

By the end of the seventeenth century, English dances were being observed, recorded, and reshaped in France. The manuscripts associated with the French dancing master André Lorin and Raoul-Auger Feuillet’s Recueil de contredances of 1706 reveal this process in action. French teachers did more than reproduce imported material. They translated it into their own terminology and notation, adjusting its figures and manner of performance to the habits of the French ballroom.

In French sources, contredanse anglaise became particularly associated with the longways formation of English country dancing: couples stood in facing lines and progressed through the set as the dance unfolded. It could later be distinguished from the contredanse française, or cotillon, which was more closely linked to a square formation. Historical usage was never perfectly uniform, however, and the names evolved along with the dances themselves.

Dance as Social Architecture

The Anglaise is built on the interaction between collective order and continual change. In a longways set, each couple participates in a sequence of approaches, exchanges, crossings, turns, and returns. A figure is completed within a clearly defined musical phrase, then repeated as different couples move through the formation. Choreography does more than prescribe steps: it regulates how dancers meet, part, and re-enter the larger pattern.

This progressive design helps explain the importance of balanced musical periods. Four- or eight-bar phrases provide stable spans in which a figure can be completed, while repetition allows the same action to pass from one pair of dancers to another. Regularity does not produce stillness. Beneath the symmetry lies continuous circulation, giving the dance a sense of forward motion without weakening its formal clarity.

Compared with the ceremonial display of a courtly minuet danced by a prominent couple, country dancing and its continental forms placed greater emphasis on participation within a group. They were neither casual nor technically undemanding. Their patterns required memory, precision, spatial awareness, and cooperation. Sociability itself was organised through musical time.

Metre, Rhythm, and Form

An Anglaise is often recognised by its lively tempo, clear pulse, and strong sense of direction. Many examples use duple metre or 6/8, although neither is an absolute requirement. Historical repertories also contain other metrical choices, so metre alone cannot establish the identity of the dance.

More revealing are the firm beginnings of phrases, accents that support changes of figure, and rhythmic displacements that keep the movement alive. In his Musicalisches Lexicon of 1732, Johann Gottfried Walther described the Angloise as an English dance and instrumental piece made from “displaced” notes — wording that points towards syncopation and accents carried across the boundaries of the bar. The style is therefore not defined by plain, unbroken regularity. Its vitality often comes from the tension between a steady underlying pulse and notes that momentarily pull against it.

In instrumental repertory, the Anglaise frequently takes binary form with repeats. Its two parts shape a balanced melodic and harmonic journey, while their repetition preserves something of the dance’s functional logic. The name does not prescribe a particular key, instrumentation, or texture. It may appear in keyboard music, in writing for a solo melodic instrument, or in ensemble repertory; its tonal and contrapuntal language depends on the individual work.

From Ballroom Dance to Stylised Composition

As dance types entered cultivated instrumental repertory, the title Anglaise could become detached from any one choreography and act instead as a marker of character. Periodic phrasing, rhythmic momentum, and certain kinds of melodic motion remained recognisable even when the music was written to be heard rather than danced.

The body is not erased by this transformation. Articulation, repetition, accent, and small rhythmic delays continue to suggest steps, changes of direction, and coordination between partners. For performers, knowledge of the dance background affects tempo, the weight given to strong beats, the shaping of phrases, and the treatment of syncopation. An overly heavy performance can immobilise the music; indiscriminate speed can blur the articulation that allows it to dance.

Bach also used the English qualifier in compound titles. The Bourrée anglaise that closes the Partita in A minor for solo flute, BWV 1013, demonstrates the flexibility of eighteenth-century terminology. Here anglaise modifies an already familiar dance name, adding a particular rhythmic or national inflection rather than defining an entirely separate form.

Anglaise, Contredanse, Hornpipe, and Gavotte

The Anglaise meets several neighbouring terms without becoming fully interchangeable with any of them. Country dance names the English social-dance tradition from which many continental forms developed. Contredanse anglaise is the French designation associated especially with the longways formation. Anglaise itself can have a wider musical reach, indicating a dance-like composition understood as English in style.

Its relationship to the hornpipe arises from lively movement, strong metrical support, and rhythmic patterns that continental listeners could hear as characteristically English. Its relationship to the gavotte is equally close: both may use binary form, clear periodic phrasing, and a comparable position within a suite. Their distinction depends not on one isolated feature, but on the interaction of metre, phrase opening, accent, melodic profile, title, and historical source.

The surviving document must therefore guide interpretation. A dance title is not a neutral label. It records how a publisher, dancing master, copyist, or composer understood and reshaped musical “Englishness” within a wider European culture of exchange.

🎧 Listening to Bach’s Anglaise

One of the clearest meetings between historical dance and stylised instrumental writing occurs in Johann Sebastian Bach’s French Suite No. 3 in B minor, BWV 814. The suite took shape around 1722 and survives through a rich manuscript tradition. Its Anglaise follows the Sarabande and precedes the Menuet–Trio. After the Sarabande’s measured gravity, it brings a more agile rhythmic energy while remaining within the expressive world of B minor.

The history of the title is itself revealing. In an earlier version of the suite, the movement appears as a Gavotte; in the revised form, it is called Anglaise. The change does not prove that the two dances were identical. It shows, however, that their boundaries could be porous and that a title depended on which musical feature a composer or copyist regarded as decisive.

The movement is written for keyboard, in binary form with repeats and duple metre. It begins directly on the downbeat rather than with the characteristic upbeat of a gavotte. From the opening phrase, a stable pulse meets syncopations, notes held across bar lines, and small displacements of accent. Quick leaps and compact directional patterns animate the melody, while the two voices exchange material in a way that suggests successive approaches and withdrawals.

Begin by holding on to the steady duple tread. Against it, the syncopations briefly shift the weight without disturbing the dance’s foundation. Then follow the way each short phrase answers the previous one and notice what the repeats accomplish. The route may be familiar when it returns, but memory has altered the listener’s experience of it.

In Glenn Gould’s performance on the modern piano, sharply defined lines and controlled articulation illuminate this inner mechanism. What we hear is not a literal reconstruction of eighteenth-century steps. It is the memory of dancing transferred to the keyboard: the ballroom has disappeared, yet its play of balance and momentum still moves the music.

📚 Further Reading

The Anglaise becomes clearer when dance manuals, eighteenth-century theory, and modern Bach scholarship are read alongside one another. The following selection offers a concise route from social practice to stylised composition.

• John Playford, The English Dancing Master (1651): the essential primary starting point for English country dancing, bringing together tunes and instructions that reveal the close relationship between musical phrase and choreographic figure.
• Raoul-Auger Feuillet, Recueil de contredances (1706): a central document for the French notation and adaptation of English dances at the beginning of the eighteenth century.
• Meredith Little and Natalie Jenne, Dance and the Music of J. S. Bach: a comprehensive study of dance types, rhythmic models, and their consequences for understanding and performing Bach’s music.
• Mary Oleskiewicz, “The Partita in A Minor for Unaccompanied Flute BWV 1013”: a modern musicological study that examines the anglaise, its metrical variety and syncopation, and the French stylistic background of the Bourrée anglaise.

🔗 Related Terms

These terms place the Anglaise within the broader history of social dance and Baroque instrumental music.

• Country dance: the English social-dance tradition from which many forms known on the Continent as anglaises or contredanses anglaises developed.
• Contredanse: a French term encompassing several forms of group dancing that became especially prominent during the eighteenth century.
• Hornpipe: an English dance and musical type connected with the Anglaise in some sources through rhythm, movement, and national character.
• Gavotte: a French dance in duple organisation, related in certain formal features but distinguished by its characteristic relationship between the upbeat, the downbeat, and the opening of the phrase.
• Suite: an ordered sequence of stylised dances in which an Anglaise may serve as a concise, lively movement between weightier sections.

📖 References & Sources

The historical identity of the Anglaise has been established here through seventeenth- and eighteenth-century dance manuals and lexicographical sources, the critical edition of Bach’s music, and modern research into dance practice, rhythm, and performance. Digital scholarly collections were used to verify historical documents and the manuscript transmission of BWV 814.

Primary Sources

• Feuillet, Raoul-Auger. Recueil de contredances mises en chorégraphie, d’une manière si aisée que toutes les personnes peuvent facilement les apprendre sans le secours d’un maître. Paris, 1706.
• Playford, John. The English Dancing Master: Or, Plaine and Easie Rules for the Dancing of Country Dances, with the Tune to Each Dance. London: Thomas Harper, 1651.
• Walther, Johann Gottfried. Musicalisches Lexicon oder Musicalische Bibliothec. Leipzig: Wolffgang Deer, 1732.

Scores and Critical Editions

• Bach, Johann Sebastian. Die sechs Französischen Suiten / Zwei Suiten a-Moll und Es-Dur. Neue Bach-Ausgabe, Series V, Volume 8. Edited by Alfred Dürr. Kassel: Bärenreiter, 1980.

Secondary Scholarship

• Daye, Anne. “John Playford and the English Dancing Master, 1651.” On Common Ground 3. Dolmetsch Historical Dance Society, 2001.
• Daye, Anne. “The Cotillon: Its Origins, Development and Demise.” Historical Dance 4, no. 4 (2022): 25–38.
• Little, Meredith, and Natalie Jenne. Dance and the Music of J. S. Bach. Expanded Edition. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001.
• Oleskiewicz, Mary. “The Partita in A Minor for Unaccompanied Flute BWV 1013: Problems and Possibilities.” BACH 51, no. 2 (2020): 259–294.

Digital Collections and Catalogues

• Bach Digital. Catalogue entry and digital sources for French Suite No. 3 in B minor, BWV 814.
• Library of Congress. An American Ballroom Companion: Dance Instruction Manuals, ca. 1490–1920.
• Netherlands Bach Society. All of Bach: French Suite No. 3 in B Minor, BWV 814.