THE RIOT WORLD SUITE A Suite of Folk Dances
Written for the Les Mis Shipping Showdown 2026 @lesmisshippingshowdown
Download and print in PDF or MIDI free sheet music for Violin, Viola, Drum group, Strings group (Mixed Ensemble)
Download and print in PDF or MIDI free sheet music for Piano (Solo)
The Riot World Suite takes its name from Bahorel and Feuilly, two of the Friends of the ABC whose lives, though shaped by vastly different circumstances, find common ground in solidarity and purpose. The suite is conceived as a sequence of folk dances, a form chosen with deliberate intent: this is music that belongs to the people, that carries within it the memory of collective life, of bodies in motion together, of tradition passed from hand to hand across generations. It is, in that sense, the natural idiom for these two characters.
The suite was planned to be a set of five or six folk dances, but only two are written for now. Throughout the suite, the notes B and F (and their chromatic neighbors, B-flat and F-sharp) serve as the work's twin centers of gravity, one initial for each character. These notes and keys were chosen deliberately as a way of weaving the two names into the fabric of the music itself. The two movements also speak to each other in their time signatures; Bahorel's movement is in 2, reflecting the two syllables of Feuilly's name; Feuilly's is in 3, reflecting the three of Bahorel's.
I. Branle String orchestra with violin and viola solos and percussion, B major
The branle is among the oldest of the surviving European folk dance forms, with roots reaching back at least to sixteenth-century France. It is, at its heart, a group dance in which movement is transmitted from one dancer to the next, each participant simultaneously following and leading, the collective momentum greater than any individual contribution. (For examples, you may listen to the Branle de l'Official or the Branle des Chevaux from the Historical Dance Society on Youtube!)
In its most essential character, the branle is a dance about connection: the way energy passes between people, the way a community finds and sustains its own rhythm. Its very name carries an edge of roughness, deriving from a word meaning, roughly, to brawl, to jostle, or to shake; it is difficult, knowing Bahorel's fondness for a revolution (or a riot), not to find it fitting.
This movement takes its principal inspiration from the Jig of Gustav Holst's St. Paul Suite, which you may find performed by the Novosibirsk Philharmonic Chamber Orchestra here. Like the Jig, the Branle starts in unison and then breaks apart into constituent parts. The scoring is for string orchestra, with prominent solos for violin and viola and the punctuation of percussion. This is a combination that keeps the texture lean and kinetic, never allowing the music to settle into mere prettiness. B major, the movement's home key, is associated with brilliance and extroversion, qualities that suit its subject. Bahorel is a man of peasant origins who has made himself at home in every stratum of Parisian life, and something of that background is legible in the directness and vigor of the musical material.
The movement's most characteristic feature is a call-and-response motif that recurs throughout: a musical enactment of the way Bahorel moves through the city, encountering different groups and factions, drawing them into conversation with one another, serving as the connective tissue of a broader revolutionary community. The dance form itself embodies this: no one in the group moves alone.
II. Polonaise Solo piano, F minor
The polonaise is a dance of considerable gravitas and ceremonial weight. Of Polish origin, it is a processional form in triple meter, its characteristic dotted rhythms lending it a quality that is at once stately and urgent, dignified and volatile. By the nineteenth century it had become inseparable from questions of national identity, particularly in the work of Frédéric Chopin, for whom the form was a vehicle of profound political and emotional significance. (If you have seen my other Riot World steal, Perfect Fourth, you will already know of my fondness for Chopin!) His Polonaises in F-sharp minor (Op. 44) and A-flat major (Op. 53) are the direct influences of this movement in tone, harmony, and rhythm.
The choice of the polonaise for Feuilly is not incidental. He strongly identifies with a people fighting for sovereignty and self-determination against overwhelming force, which is one of his most distinctive traits in Les Mis. In the Polonaise, it is treated here as a frivolous curiosity but as a serious political and moral commitment. The time that Chopin was in Paris coincides with the years of the June Rebellion, following the November Uprising in Poland. To compose and perform a polonaise was a political statement. The movement honors this by taking the form on its own terms, neither exoticizing it nor treating it as mere stylistic color.
The piano is the sole instrument, and this is another deliberate choice. The polonaise as Chopin conceived it is already a self-accompanying form — melody and accompaniment, bass and inner voices, all contained within the span of two hands — and this quality of self-sufficiency is deeply resonant with what we know of Feuilly. He is a man who has educated himself entirely through his own effort and determination, who has come to everything he knows without the benefit of teachers or institutions. The demanding technical requirements of the writing reflect that achievement: this is not music that makes things easy for itself (nor for the composer, who would also like to perform this someday!).
The opening measures of the movement are chromatic in character, the harmonies shifting and layered, the melodic lines ornamented with a degree of intricacy that rewards close attention. This is a deliberate evocation of Feuilly's craft; he is a fan painter, a maker of objects that are at once decorative and painstaking, where beauty is inseparable from precision of execution. There is also a second motif that the Polonaise returns to, starting in measure 19. It is a two-note phrase consisting of the notes B and A, an abbreviation of Bahorel, because where else would one find Bahorel?
