Bourrée in E minor

The Bourrée is the fifth of the six movements in Bach's Suite in E minor, BWV 996, written somewhere between 1708 and 1717. No manuscript in his own hand is known. What survives is a copy made by the organist Johann Gottfried Walther sometime between 1710 and 1717, titled "Praeludio con la Svite da Gio: Bast: Bach". Underneath that title a second hand, never identified and possibly writing as late as 1800, added "aufs Lauten Werck", which points at the lautenwerk, a gut-strung keyboard built to sound like a lute. The case for the lute itself is that the writing lies under two hands on the instrument. The case against is the key, since a baroque lute tuned in D minor needs a capo to reach E minor at all.

Guitarists settled the argument by adopting it. The piece falls under the fingers in standard tuning with almost nothing rearranged, and it has been a first-year classical guitar assignment for generations. Guitar editions print it in the treble clef and sound it an octave lower. That convention matters here, because a mandolin reads the same page and plays the notes where they are written.

In 1969 Jethro Tull recorded it as "Bourée", an instrumental on Stand Up cut at Olympic Studios that takes the first eight bars and hands them to a flute over a walking bass, with a bass solo in the middle. It did not chart in Britain and reached number five in the Netherlands. For a great many rock listeners it was the first Bach they heard.

The shape is a plain binary dance. Eight bars, repeated, that leave E minor and cadence in G major, then sixteen bars, repeated, that run the circle of fifths back home: B to E, E to A, A to D, D to G, G to C, and around to the B seventh that lands on E minor at the end. The chord letters on this page follow that bass, the voice that states the harmony.

A mandolin takes the top voice and leaves the bass to the chord letters. It has to sit an octave above the guitar's page, because Bach's upper line walks down past the open G course three separate times, most of all in the last two bars where it lands on a D sharp the instrument does not have. Moved up as a whole, the counterpoint is untouched. The left hand stays in first position, with one B at the seventh fret of the E course near the top of the second half. Most of the practice goes to the pick: eight bars of even eighths at a dance tempo, then the same eight again, and any bump shows twice.