Well this is pretty low-grade bickering. Actually, Leonhardt's
performances there of 2 Sarabandes (not Courantes) *do* have
inegality, or whatever one might call it in English, in the very few
places - pairs of melodic quavers - where expected.
Louis Couperin also often writes out forms of inequality so far as
they are consistent with his notation (ie dotted long-short, dotted
short-long) and there is no reason to think he did not expect players
to fill in the gaps - meaning, to further adjust the degree of
inequality of these and other, equally notated, pairs of notes.

Leaving birds out of it, there is plenty of history among human adult
musicians of extensive, not to say endemic, use of inegales in France,
though I don't have much of a handle on when and where the history or
the practice began.

> you need to play it continuously when they are freshly hatched.
> Otherwise they may become vunerable to musical inspiration & develop
> autonomous insight

This is quite fallacious. Children learning to perform imitate their
elders (generally not well) and later 'develop autonomous insight',
but it doesn't follow that their mature behaviour will be totally
different from what they imitated. Most musicians don't break
traditions.

Inegality might well have been, probably was, a habit unconsciously
imbibed by children and music-pupils over the decades and thus seeming
and being normal and natural in most musical contexts. Obviously it is
possible to play both inegale and well and inegale and badly, I would
not expect any necessary correlation between the degree or ubiquity of
inegality and the quality of performance. Would you? Though, if - if!
- music were composed with the sound of inegality in the mind's ear it
would be hard to acquiesce in a non-inegale performance.

One depressing deduction: it may be necessary to practice inegality
for several years before getting it halfway right.

For those who moved between French and another musical culture
(Froberger, Muffat, French musicians of the English Restoration, the
Celle band...) a shock or unusual stimulus would be in store, partly
corroborated by a fairly famous quote - something like 'Unlike the
Italians, we Frenchmen don't play the rhythms as written, we actually
do something like this...'
of course one French musician would not have to say that to another, I
can't remember the actual context.
~~~T~~~
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