The workshop ‘Sonatas-Dances: Domenico Scarlatti and the Eighteenth-Century Spanish Keyboard Music School’, held in Barcelona on 25–29 June 2012 by the Festival Internacional de Música de Tecla Española (FIMTE), aimed to suggest how we can link certain Scarlatti sonatas with traditional Spanish dances. This is a novel aim for our time since we are not accustomed to thinking of a sonata in connection with traditional dance. How, for instance, could we differentiate a danceable piece from one that is not danceable? Guided by the harpsichordist and scholar Luisa Morales alongside the professional dancer of traditional folklore Cristóbal Salvador, the course featured the study of boleros, seguidillas and jotas.

During the course the player was taught how to manage expression and tempo so as to suit dance structures. As a result, when played with a dancer, the sonatas chosen for study breathed beautifully. It is important to note that such music was originally taught within an environment in which music and dance were not so clearly separated. Nowadays we have abandoned this practice, leaving harpsichord players with little knowledge about the dances they are playing, and unable to feel the steps of these while they are performing, resulting in a player who feels that the piece has to be performed only on the instrument and not extended to a dancing body.

Thus the workshop combined harpsichord with dancing classes, and while we may not be great dancers, our bodies understood the rhythms in a richer way when they were played afterwards at the keyboard. The player learnt to assimilate the pauses where the dancer needs to breathe and relax, and the moments when the castanets begin to sound and the rhythm needs to be sharper.

The working method consisted of fragmenting the sonatas according to the structures of the respective dances. One of the most interesting examples was the bolero. In this case the harpsichordist begins with an introduction that will bring the dancer in at a certain moment (salida y desplante), but it is not until the dancer starts playing with castanets that the mudanza begins. The three mudanzas create a roughly tripartite structure to the dance. With such works there was no doubt that they were conceived with the original dance structure in mind: a symbiosis between music and dance.

The workshop also specialized in Spanish repertoire, which remains unnoticed or very little discussed in most current harpsichord instruction, even in Spanish institutions. Instruments on which we can play this repertoire were dealt with during the course. This included analysing the features of those Spanish harpsichords and early pianos preserved nowadays at museums and private collections, together with documentation concerning lost instruments like the amazing harpsichord with five registers that Diego Fernández built for Queen María Bárbara, with ten-foot pommels to change the registers, some of them divided, offering an unsuspected world of variations to the interpretation of the repertory of that time.

I greatly enjoyed attending the FIMTE course, gaining a deeper understanding of these sonatas from the point of view of their dance roots. Furthermore, when we are told that a piece of music from this period can be danced to, we might imagine that we are dealing with dances from the suite such as a minuet or a courante, but as a matter of fact these sonatas by Scarlatti – k209, k376, k380, k454 and k491 were the core works for study – are linked to dances that have luckily survived into our time and are still danced today. Why should we ignore them?