Rameau for Piano Students and the Showpieces He Wrote

Ask a music student what Jean-Philippe Rameau is known for and you’ll usually hear about harmony. That’s fair. Rameau (1683-1764) published his Traité de l’harmonie in 1722, and the way most of us still talk about chords comes out of that book. What gets left out is that the same man wrote harpsichord pieces called “The Hen,” “The Three Hands,” and “The Savages,” and they are fun to play on the piano.

I’m adding several French Baroque pieces to my students’ repertoire this year, and Rameau is a big part of the list. Svetozar Ivanov, my teacher at USF, recently gave a talk at my local teachers’ association on French Baroque music, and he called it great teaching material. I agree with him, and this post explains why I think Rameau is a good place to start.

Rameau’s career took an unusual shape. He was born in Dijon, traveled to Italy as a young violinist, and held organ posts in Avignon, Dijon, Lyons, and Clermont-Ferrand before settling in Paris in 1723. He was considered the leading French organist of his day. After the age of forty he began composing opera, and that brought him even greater fame with his contemporaries.

Gordon’s A History of Keyboard Literature points out that Rameau is remembered mainly as a theorist and an opera composer, even though his harpsichord music is significant. As a theorist he gets credit for codifying a system of harmony that went virtually unchallenged until the twentieth century. That includes building chords from stacked thirds, classifying chords and their inversions, and clarifying how roots move from one chord to the next. Your child’s theory workbook owes him more than it admits.

Rameau’s harpsichord writing is more intense and more virtuosic than that of his countryman François Couperin, and the textures are heavier. Gordon notes that those fuller, more sonorous textures foreshadow the idioms of the piano. That’s one reason the music sits so comfortably under a modern student’s hands.

The pieces with the most personality come from his 1731 collection. “Les Trois Mains” (The Three Hands) has the hands crossing so virtuosically that it sounds as if a third one has joined in. “La Poule” (The Hen) and “Les Sauvages” (The Savages) appear in the second suite of that set, and Rameau reused “Les Sauvages” in his opera Les Indes galantes. An earlier set, from 1724, includes “Le Rappel des oiseaux” (The Call of the Birds). Students remember pieces with titles like these, and they tend to practice them more willingly.

This is the part I find most interesting as a teacher. Rameau’s 1724 collection carries the title Pièces de clavecin avec une méthode pour la mécanique des doigts, which means pieces with a method for finger technique. According to Gordon, the pedagogical material in his 1724 and 1731 publications includes short discussions of how to use the fingers, wrists, and elbows, plus general advice on tempo and interpretation.

So a man who wrote the book on harmony also sat down and wrote about the body at the keyboard. I like that. It matches how I teach, where the arm, the wrist, and the fingers each have a job, and where good sound starts with the body before it starts with the notes.

For students at the right level, I’m adding the Rameau Menuet en rondeau from the Suite in E minor, “Le Tambourin,” and “Les Niais de Sologne.” Alongside those I’m adding Daquin’s “Le Coucou” and Couperin’s “Les Barricades mystérieuses.” Gordon says Louis-Claude Daquin (1694-1772) is remembered especially for “Le Coucou” (The Cuckoo), from a set published in 1735. Couperin (1668-1733) used descriptive titles even more than Rameau did, and he also wrote a treatise on harpsichord playing, L’Art de toucher le clavecin (1717), with directions for executing ornaments and a system of fingering.

Taken together, these pieces give a student a real picture of French style. Most of Rameau’s pieces follow the dance suite format, and the titles give each one a character.

Rameau didn’t leave his ornaments to guesswork. His 1724 collection opens with a table that names each sign and shows how to play it. Svetozar handed out a copy at his talk, and I wrote plain-English notes in the margins. These are the ones students run into most.

• Cadence. A trill. It starts on the upper note, on the beat.
• Cadence appuyée. A trill that leans on the upper note first.
• Double cadence. A trill with a turn attached.
• Doublé. A turn. Upper note, main note, lower note, main note.
• Pincé. A mordent. Main, lower, main, and quick.
• Port de voix. An appoggiatura from below, on the beat.
• Coulé. A slide down from above that fills in a third.
• Son coupé. Cut the note short and leave a silence.
• Suspension. Delay the note so it sounds just after the beat.
• Arpègement. A rolled chord, sometimes with extra passing notes slipped in.

The table covers touch, too. A slur over two notes means you don’t lift the first finger until the second one sounds, so the notes overlap. A slur over many notes means you hold every one of them down to the end of the slur, which works like a finger pedal. A note tied into a trill or mordent is where that ornament starts. Rameau even marks where the thumb goes in one figure, and he adds a first finger exercise to repeat often and evenly, without stopping.

The trill is the one that trips up piano students. Most of them learned to start a trill on the main note. Rameau’s trills start on the upper note, on the beat. In “Les Sauvages,” the mordent sign shows up on almost every downbeat, and the trills in measures 7, 8, and 23 all start from above. Get those two signs right and the piece already sounds like Rameau.

All of these pieces are in the public domain, and IMSLP has them free. A tip from experience. Look for a clean, typeset edition rather than a manuscript scan. Old engraved and handwritten pages are interesting to look at, but they’re hard on young eyes, and a student shouldn’t have to decode the notation before learning the piece. If you’re a Clearwater or Palm Harbor student and you’re not sure which edition to print, ask me at your next lesson.

These pieces are small, but they’re demanding in a useful way. French Baroque music is full of ornaments (Couperin’s treatise, mentioned above, is largely about how to execute them), and the trills and turns have to be clean and in time or the dance falls apart. Look up each sign in Rameau’s table, then work the ornament on its own, slowly, with the same fingering every time. Then put it back into the phrase.

They’re also a good place to build finger independence. Rameau titled a whole collection after finger technique, so treat it that way. Keep your hand relaxed, let the fingers do small, precise jobs, and don’t pound. A crisp, even line sounds better on these pieces than a big one.

Finally, treat the titles as part of the assignment. If you’re playing “La Poule,” think about the hen. If it’s “Le Coucou,” think about the cuckoo. Character is half of French Baroque music, and it gives a student something to aim at besides “play it right.”

Gordon, Stewart. 1996. A History of Keyboard Literature: Music for the Piano and Its Forerunners. New York: Schirmer Books. Chapter 5, “The Galant Style,” pp. 69-74.

Rameau, Jean-Philippe. 1724. Pièces de clavessin, table of ornaments. Handout from Svetozar Ivanov’s talk on French Baroque performance practice, October 2026.