French Ouverture: Prelude and Passacaille in F minor.

At the request of one of my subscribers, I decided to try my hand at writing a passacaglia emulating the style of French Baroque composer François Couperin. While both my research and efforts may have proven relatively insufficient in convincingly imitating most of the intricacies found within his keyboard style to the fullest extent, I am nontheless pleased with the results of this little experiment.

This work is supposed to be understood as a two-part ouverture as a whole: the first movement is comprised by a prelude riddled with double-dotted rhythmic figures very much intentionally reminiscent of other French Baroque ouvertures, specially those of Jean Baptiste Lully. The passacaille itself follows a strict repetition of the same harmonic baseline throughout the first two variations, which is then slightly altered in a kind of quodlibet by non-strict canonic imitation reaching up to 4 voices, followed by a coda almost identical to the last phrase of the prelude.

Thankfully I finally found a way to switch between soundbanks of my harpsichord soundfont automatically amidst playback, which in turn allowed me to include various registers of the instrument across diverse sections of the piece, namely three: Grand Jeu (literally translatable from French as "Great Game": I 4' 8' II 8'), Petit Jeu ("Little Game": I 4' II 8') and Luth (the lute register, also commonly known as a compound buff stop: I 4' Lute II 8').

YouTube scrolling video link:

French Ouverture - Prelude and Passacaille in F minor.pdf

Edited 2 hours ago2 hr by Fugax Contrapunctus

Wow! I actually think this piece has many qualities that make it a convincing imitation of this french baroque style, so overall, very well done. Some things I want to praise is your use of ornamentation, the tempo and time signature changes in the Passacailles, solid structure, your use of the same dotted rhythmic motive throughout both movements, and occasional, but functional dissonance.

There are some sections in your piece where I think that, despite this "lute" style of French Baroque you are going for, even in the non lute sections, some of the intervals are too wide (like E4 to Bb5), to the point that even if they could be rolled, or even shared by both hands, they could be slightly unidiomatic, especially with all of the ornaments going on and the different voices, so just something to think about.

Another thing I want to mention, is the lack of articulation. Sure, you have ornaments, but surprisingly, as opposed to Bach's music and other baroque composers, this is actually pretty common for the French Baroque tradition, leaving it up to the performers.

Overall, I think this is a great imitation, I think you did a wonderful job on this experiment, and I look forward to see where you take this piece moving on!