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Le Coucou (The Cuckoo)

Louis-Claude Daquin (1694–1772) · sheet music

  • Time 2/4
  • Levels 2–9
  • Passages 12

Your turn · both hands

 

 

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Louis-Claude Daquin, French baroque (1694–1772). The reading release has 12 passages from this piece at levels 2–9; the reader above opens on the easiest, bars 8–9 for the left hand alone.

Practice the hard bars →

The hardest stretch is bars 65–72 at level 9.

Your practice path

Learn it the way teachers do: each hand on its own, then together, then the hard bars. Each step is a real graded passage of Le Coucou (The Cuckoo).

  1. Right hand alone · bars 33–36 level 3
  2. Left hand alone · bars 8–9 level 2
  3. Hands together · bars 36–39 level 7
  4. The hardest bars · bars 65–72 level 9

How to play Le Coucou (The Cuckoo)

  1. Choose a tempo you can sustain to the end, since the running line never rests; aim for light, bright, harpsichord-like evenness rather than speed.
  2. Play the running notes close to the keys with a quiet hand and minimal finger lift, and give the falling cuckoo call a clear, slightly detached touch so it stands out as a separate voice.
  3. The awkward spots are where the cuckoo call and the running hand overlap or cross; practice those bars with a metronome at half speed until the two parts lock together.
  4. Settle a fixed fingering for each repeating figure and use the same one every time the refrain returns, because reliable fingering is what lets you read ahead instead of watching your hands.

Structure

It is a French rondeau: a lively refrain in E minor in the original comes back again and again, with contrasting couplets, or episodes, in between. The texture of running notes hardly stops from start to finish, and a performance usually lasts around two minutes.

About Le Coucou (The Cuckoo)

Louis-Claude Daquin was a celebrated Parisian organist, admired as a child prodigy and later organist of the Chapel Royal. Le Coucou comes from his first book of harpsichord pieces, published in 1735, and it outlived nearly everything else he wrote; pianists adopted it in the nineteenth century as an encore and a finger study.

Why the first passage is level 2

That passage is level 2 rather than 1 because notes come faster than one per beat, it leaps a minor third, it moves in eighth notes.

Daquin's harpsichord piece imitates a cuckoo with a two-note falling call that keeps returning in the left hand. Around it the right hand runs in constant quick notes, so the reading task is keeping the moving line even while you track the call underneath. It was a famous showpiece in eighteenth-century Paris.

Questions about Le Coucou (The Cuckoo)

How hard is Le Coucou (The Cuckoo) to play?
Its passages grade from level 2 to level 9 on Real Sight Reader's ten-level reading scale, so the full piece is intermediate to advanced reading. The hardest stretch is bars 65–72 at level 9.
Is there an easy part of Le Coucou (The Cuckoo) for beginners?
Yes. Start with bars 8–9 for the left hand alone, the level-2 passage in the reader at the top of this page; it is level 2 because notes come faster than one per beat and it leaps a minor third.
What key and time signature is Le Coucou (The Cuckoo) in?
The engraving on this page is in 2/4 time.
Who composed Le Coucou (The Cuckoo)?
Louis-Claude Daquin, French baroque (1694–1772). Louis-Claude Daquin was a celebrated Parisian organist, admired as a child prodigy and later organist of the Chapel Royal.
Can I practice Le Coucou (The Cuckoo) online for free?
Yes. The reader on this page plays any of the 12 graded passages from Le Coucou (The Cuckoo) in your browser, with an on-screen keyboard or a MIDI keyboard, and marks every note as you play. No signup.

Every passage, easiest first

The reading release grades 12 distinct passages of this piece. Open any of them in the reader:

Level 2
bars 8–9 left hand
Level 3
bars 33–36 right hand
Level 7
bars 36–39 both hands · bars 37–40 both hands · bars 73–80 both hands · bars 73–76 both hands · bars 77–80 both hands
Level 8
bars 33–40 both hands · bars 33–36 both hands
Level 9
bars 65–72 both hands · bars 65–68 both hands · bars 69–72 both hands

More pieces to sight-read

Score: public-domain engraving from the corpus (pdmx), graded by the piano-reading-v2-20261001-mutopia-ly reading release.

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