Francois Couperin’s La Flore (5th Ordre): Motivic Replication, Approach to III, and Analytic Methodology

Abstract

When I first played François Couperin’s keyboard miniature La Flore, it immediately struck me as beautiful, restrained, and austere. This article comments on the following aspects of the piece: (1) a persistent motive and its interaction with the piece’s structure; (2) how the opening measures both set up this motive and are echoed in the closing measures; (3) the somewhat circuitous route to the mediant; (4) the coda; and (5) the potential awkwardness of integrating the motive, which moves from scale degrees 5 ^ up to 8^ and back again, within an Urlinie structure which descends to 1^. To this end, I will also look at an unpublished 2016 reading by Charles Burkhart which incorporates David Neumeyer’s ideas of the ascending Urlinie and the three-voice Ursatz (Neumeyer 1987a and b).