Menuet series 2-4: Named menuets by François Couperin

In the thirteen ordres (suites) of keyboard music by François Couperin—as published in the Brahms-Chrysander edition—there are only four named menuets and one passepied (a very close relative). As the list below shows, there is no obvious preference for formal functions in the first strains of the four menuets.

1. Ordre: sentence
2. Ordre: period
3. Ordre: period
9. Ordre: antecedent + continuation

The first menuet may start with an 8-bar sentence but there's little to connect it with the Italian-influenced sentences of Bach, Haydn, or Beethoven. The basic idea is literally repeated, varied only in its ornaments, and the continuation phrase is really a contrasting phrase with no obvious relation to the presentation at all.

 The menuet in the 2. Ordre is much more to formula, a period with IAC in bar 4 and PAC in bar 8.

The third menuet is also a period and also to formula, except that it ends with a HC and is therefore not entirely self-contained.

The fourth menuet is tucked in at the end of the 9. Ordre, after a long series of fancifully named pieces. It is written in 6/8 meter, highly unlikely for the menuet and even for its cousin the passepied, which is typically written in 3/8 time. Here is the opening, which also places the barline oddly.

I have re-barred the piece in 3/8 meter below. Here the sentence form is more familiar sounding, with the repetition of the basic idea in the left hand in bars 3-4, and the bar-length sixteenth note figures that can be heard as stemming from "x" in the second phrase (and even the second ending).

The variety in formal functions in the first strains is, if anything, stressed even more in the second strains, which do at least share the common trait they are all longer than their respective first strains and all use phrase and theme-like units.

1. Ordre, menuet: 16-bar period; non-tonic opening with HC and PAC
2. Ordre, menuet: Contrasting middle with “period 1” (non-tonic opening), the antecedent of which is repeated then a full reprise of A, making the whole a small ternary form. Number of bars in the second strain is 20
3. Ordre, menuet: antecedent (with non-tonic opening) + continuation, repeated. PAC in both cases
9. Ordre, menuet: 16-bar period with two bars inserted between the segments; non-tonic opening with HC and PAC