Entrée
Opening dance or entrance music.
What it means
Entrée is the French word for “entrance” and designates in music a movement that accompanies an entrance or opens a work. The meaning has several layers.
In French ballet and opera of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, entrée designates both the entrance of a group of dancers and the music that accompanies it. A ballet consisted of a sequence of such entrées. From this a type of movement of its own developed: a solemn entrance march, often with dotted rhythms and in duple time.
In the more general sense, the term also designates the opening movement of a suite or introductory music in general. In this use it stands close to the prelude or the overture.
In the notation
As a type of movement, the entrée is usually notated in duple time, with dotted rhythms, measured tempo, and solemn character. The designation stands as a movement heading. In ballet scores, entrées appear as numbers with indications of the characters who appear.
Musical use
The entrée belongs to the French stage music of the Baroque and is met in ballets, operas, and the suites compiled from them. In the nineteenth century the designation lives on in ballet as a name for entrance numbers. In circus music the entrance of the artists is likewise designated in this way.
In French Baroque opera and in the ballet de cour, entrée designated two things: an entrance dance with which a group of dancers entered the stage, and a whole section of a ballet, comparable to an act. Musically the entrée is often solemn, in duple time and with dotted rhythms, related to the French overture. In suites it occasionally appears as the opening movement. In the nineteenth century, entrée in ballet meant the entrance of the soloists before a pas de deux.
Performance practice
Play solemnly and measured; an entrée accompanies an entrance and needs dignity. Bring out dotted rhythms sharply. Keep the tempo steady, especially when dancing or processing. And check whether the movement is meant more as a march or as a dance — the heading alone does not always say.