WHAT IS a galliard?
The galliard, from gagliardo, meaning robust, is an Italian courtly dance of 15thcentury origin.
The music is based on six beats in the bar. God Save the Queen has the basic galliard rhythm. Typically, the galliard consists of three repeated sections.
The dance consists of five steps over those six beats. There are three grues, when the dancer hops on the ball of his foot, while kicking the other leg forward, then a saut majeur, a leap, bringing him back to ground with a ‘posture’, one foot in front of the other. It was often paired with another, more stately dance, the pavan.
The earliest surviving English galliard is from 1540, but its period of greatest vitality in this country was roughly 1590-1625. Elizabeth I did much to popularise it. A privy counsellor in 1589 wrote, ‘Six or seven galliards in a morning … is her ordinary exercise.’ By the 1590s, such exercise would have been quite beyond her most senior courtiers, like Lord Burleigh, who was 70 in 1590 (this year is the 500th anniversary of his birth). That area of the Queen’s interests was left to the youthful Earl of Essex.
The greatest composers of the age – John Dowland, William Byrd and Orlando Gibbons – wrote galliards, exploring the form’s rich musical possibilities. The six beats of the bar can be divided into double time, as well as the