Suite of Brawles in B-flat Major

• Genre: a “brawle” (or “bransle” or “branle”) is a group dance originating in 15^th- or 16^th-century France. 
• A definition of the bransle from a source a few years before Locke’s birth, Randle Cotgrave’s Dictionarie of the French and English Tongue (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.”¹
• French music and culture was popular in the court of Charles II because his mother was French and he grew up in exile in France during the Protectorate.²
• The purpose of suites like this was to open court balls.

“After the King was come in, he took the Queene, and about fourteen more couple there was, and begun the Bransles.”

Samuel Pepys, writing about a court ball on November 15, 1666, in honor of the Queen’s birthday.³

1. Daniel Heartz and Patricia Rader, “Branle,” Grove Music Online (2001), accessed November 12, 2019, https://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/grovemusic/view/10.1093/gmo/9781561592630.001.0001/omo-9781561592630-e-0000003845.
2. Anita Hardeman, “The French Connection: French Influences on English Music in Restoration England,” paper presented at Western Illinois University, March 18, 2013, rev. May 22, 2013, WIU Libraries, accessed November 7, 2019, http://www.wiu.edu/libraries/music_library/Hardeman.pdf. 
3. Peter Holman, liner notes to Four and Twenty Fiddlers: Music for the Restoration Court Band, The Parley of Instruments, Peter Holman, Hyperion 66667, CD, 1993.