Branle [brande, brawl, brall, brangill].

A sideways step or movement in the 15th- and 16th-century Basse danse; a variety of French dances of popular character that were widely cultivated over several centuries. Some branles are still danced in France, and branle-like dances (line and circle dances) are popular in many cultures. A group dance, the branle, involves several couples disposed in a circle, in a single-file line (fig.1) or in a line of couples. Randle Cotgrave vividly defined in his Dictionarie of the French and English Tongues (London, 1611):

Bransle: a totter, swing, or swindge; a shake, shog, or shocke; a stirring, an uncertain and inconstant motion; … also, a brawl, or daunce, wherein many (men, and women) holding by the hands sometimes in a ring, and otherwise at length, move all together.

The music was often provided by the singing of the participants, and the characteristic motion was a step to the side. Visual illustrations of the dance go back to medieval times, but the term ‘branle’ is relatively recent, being rarely encountered before 1500 except as a designation for one of the steps of the basse danse. Branle music occasionally echoed the solo verse and choral refrain structure of the old French carole. An example of this primitive type may be found as late as the branle J’avois pris mes pantouflettes collected by J.-J. Rousseau and printed posthumously in his Consolations des misères de ma vie (1781). In this piece a ‘choeur’ singing in unison echoes the words and music of a solo ‘choryphée’. In his Dictionnaire of 1768 Rousseau gave a corresponding definition, which must be based on his observations of rural practices: ‘Branle: Sorte de danse fort gaie qui se danse en rond sur un Air de cour et un Rondeau, c’est à dire avec un meme refrain à la fin de chaque couplet’. Thus defined, the musical characteristics of the branle shared some affinities with the vaudeville; indeed, several 16th-century voix de villes were labelled ‘chanson-branle’.

The Carole was also a round dance. Illustrations of Le roman de la rose frequently depict it as such in medieval manuscripts. When translating Boccaccio’s Decamerone into French in the first half of the 16th century, Antoine Le Maçon replaced ‘carolette’ (little carole) with ‘branle’.

In his macaronic treatise on dancing, Ad suos compagnones, written in about 1519, Antonius de Arena described three kinds of branles: double, simple and coupé. Thoinot Arbeau, describing the practices of the mid-16th century in his Orchesographie (1588), mentioned four types of branle that were characteristically employed to begin the dancing at any festival. These may be tabulated according to general character, metre and musical phrase structure as illustrated in Table 1.

The last category corresponds to Arena’s branles coupés (mixed and mimed branles) and were also known as ‘branles de Champagne’, to Arbeau. Characteristic of branle simple was its three-bar phrase structure, resulting from the choreographic feature of a simple step (half as long) alternating with a double. This phraseological feature marks much French music not specifically identified with the branle, but surely deriving ultimately from the branle simple, or from the verse structure of texts that were made up to accompany its strains. The branle gay had a typical rhythmic pattern which is also often encountered in music not specifically so labelled (ex.1; cf ‘Fear no danger to ensue’ in Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas).

The mixed branles included many regional varieties. The ‘branles d’Escosse’ were popular in France in the 1560s. The ‘triory’ and the passepied were the characteristic branles of Brittany, just as the bourrée typified the Auvergne and the gavotte Dauphiné. The branle de Poitou was distinguished by its 9/4 metre, although sometimes it was in 6/4, or even 6/4 in alternation with 9/4. There are examples of all three possibilities in the earliest source that contains extensive examples of the branle types, Dixhuit basses dances (Paris, 1530) for lute, printed by Attaingnant (ed. D. Heartz, 1964). The typical suite of branles of about 1600 added four more dances to the four types of Arbeau: the branle de Poitou (in 9/4), the branle double de Poitou (in 6/4), the branle Montirandé (related to Arbeau’s branle du Haut Barrois, which he said is ‘sur l’air d’un branle de Monstierandel’) and the gavotte. Such is the order found in Anthoine Francisque’s lute tablature, Le trésor d’Orphée (Paris, 1600), in the Terpsichore (1612) of Michael Praetorius, the Apologie de la danse of De Lauze (1623; ed. J. Wildeblood, London, 1952) and the Harmonie universelle of Mersenne (1636–7). The initial branle double is lacking in both De Lauze and Mersenne and the former called the ‘Montirandé’ the ‘5e branle’. The ‘branle de Poitou à mener’ is the ancestor of the minuet, to which it bequeathed the possibilities of phrasing in 2 x 3 beats or in 3 x 3 beats. Pieces called ‘amener’, often found in 17th-century suites, belong to the same complex.

The diverse localities represented in the family of branles had characteristic instrumental accompaniments associated with them as well. According to the Mémoires of Marguerite de Valois the people of Burgundy and Champagne danced ‘avec le petit hautboys, le dessus de violon et tambourins de village’, and this is corroborated by Arbeau, who lived at Langres in Champagne. Regarding the branle de Poitou, Marguerite de Valois referred to ‘Les Poitevines avec la cornemuse’. Indeed, drone effects are a frequent feature of the branle de Poitou, lending it a character even more rural than other types. The many illustrations showing simple country people dancing out of doors in a chain or a circle to the accompaniment of a bagpipe may actually represent the branle de Poitou (fig.1 shows a 15th-century miniature of shepherds and shepherdesses dancing in a line with the characteristic sidewise step of the branle, accompanied by a bagpipe). In the 16th century rustic pipes were used even at the highest level of society. An anonymous painting at the Louvre, one of several commemorating festivities that took place in connection with the wedding of the Duke of Joyeuse in 1581, shows several elaborately dressed and gowned courtiers dancing in a circle, evoking the typical sideways motion of Arbeau’s branle (fig.2). Watching at the side is King Henri III with his mother, Catherine de Medici, and his queen, Louise de Lorraine, who is seated. On a raised platform behind the dancers are depicted one or more bagpipes and what looks like a shawm.

The variety of branle that Arbeau called ‘mimed’ (morgué) falls partly within the sphere of his mixed branles (branles de Champagne). Some took their origin from the commonplace: peas, clogs, horses and washerwomen. Others came from court masquerades, such as the ‘branles de Malte’, a veritable ballet of several movements that can be traced to an actual event at the French court in 1551. To this variety of mimed branle is related the Italian Brando, which designated a variety of entertainments related in character to the moresca (Cesare Negri described a ‘brando’ he staged in 1574). ‘Brando’ was also the general Italian title for branle tunes imported from France, just as ‘brawl’ was the most usual anglicization. With its adaptability to theatrical use and its tendency to form suites of like dances, or of contrasting dances, the branle was an important forerunner of the ballet de cour. One of the best early 16th-century illustrations of a branle is precisely that of a stage dance, a round executed by several couples representing the rejoicing of the Jews in the Mystère de la vengeance de Jésus-Christ (fig.3). This painting shows an ensemble of shawms, sackbut, fiddle and tabor that is close in its make-up to the characteristic ensemble of Champagne mentioned above.

With more abundant musical sources for stage dances in the early 17th century the debt owed by the ballet to the rhythmically variegated branle family becomes more apparent. In the movements of the Ballet des chevaux of 1610, for example, as it survives in the Philidor collection and as intabulated in Robert Ballard (ii)’s Deuxième livre for lute (1614), it is possible to identify by phrase structure a branle simple (Chant 3e) and a branle de Poitou in 9/4 (Chant 6e). Branles remained close to an easily singable, syllabic tune, and never lost this folklike quality, even in the more elaborate instrumental settings of later French ballet music. Rameau, for example, reveals in his music a sensitive ear for the rhythms of traditional and provincial dances.

Increasingly fewer dances entitled ‘branle’ were recorded in the late 17th and early 18th centuries, despite the fact that branles were almost ritually danced at the opening of court balls (fig.4). The few choreographic examples set down in Feuillet-Beauchamps notation are danses à deux, or resemble contredanses.

The fascination of the branle over the centuries has been largely the nostalgia of city dwellers for country pleasures, but urban civilization required ever newer fashions. By 1800 contredanses (akin to English country dances, which in turn resemble branles) and waltzes were the most popular dances in the French ballroom. Yet it is still possible to witness a variety of branles danced in regions of France.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

ES (G. Tani)

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J. Rimmer: ‘Carole, rondeau and branle in Ireland, 1300–1800’, Dance Research, vii/1 (1989), 20–46; ix/2 (1991), 97

R. Semmens: ‘Branles, Gavottes and Contredanses in the Later Seventeenth and Early Eighteenth Centuries’, Dance Research, xv/2 (1997), 35–62

DANIEL HEARTZ (with PATRICIA RADER)