English Country Dance Music
I play concertina, mostly for English Country Dance.
In its heyday (1650-1850), if you lived in the country, you saw people
a) at church or b) at a dance or c) your immediate neighbors when you
bumped into them. No telephone, no cars and travel was over rough
dirt roads by horse or carriage.
So dances were a big deal.
English Country Dance was the way you met people,
got together, showed off, gossiped, flirted with your friends. The dance
was designed to do all that, and you danced with everyone, men and women.
If you've seen any of the Jane Austen movies,
you'll have seen the dance, for it was social life then...and
Ms.
Austen loved it and made it an integral part of her novels
Here's a video of a
dance from BBC's Pride and Prejudice.
It is still danced: here are three YouTube videos of current dancing.
Twenty Year's Waltz:
the visual quality may not be the best, but the dreamy, balletic quality
of the dance form comes across
February Flower:
This dance is done in a circle of sets
Roses Among the Thorns:
This is a three-couple waltz mixer, choreographed by Fried DeMetz Herman to a
contenmporary tune by John Stapledon
As I love the dance and its music, with wonderful period melodies in a
protoclassical style. Each dance has its own tune and there are thousands
of them, many of them using popular songs of the day. Much of
what we listen to as baroque classical music was either dance music or
based on dance music: this music.
Current ECD and its music comes from both original period sources
(1650-1850) and contemporary creation, (from the 1930's on).
Every summer (when I'm lucky and get in) I go to two music camps,
Northern Week at Ashokan
http://www.ashokan.org/ashokan/campnw.shtml
and Pinewoods, usually English Week
http://www.cdss.org/camps/index.html
The Early Morning Consort
I often get together in the morning before breakfast at Ashokan
and play with my friends of the Fine Companions ECD band from Binghamton,
NY; they are, here left to right, Charlene Thompson (piano) and Lee (violin)
and Julian (cello) Shepherd.
Here's some of our music from these mornings:
Floating from
Skerry (contemporary, Lynn Tocken composer, 2.5MB)
McKinley Air (contemporary,
Charlene Thompsen, 1.2MB)
Irish Lamentations
(period, 1.6MB)
Turning by Threes
(contemporary, Machlis, 1.1MB)
Streams
of Lovely Nancy (period, 1.9MB)
Sleeping
Lady Mountain Waltz (contemporary, Charlene Thompsen, 1.2MB)
Enjoyment - For Al (contemporary,
Stapledon,1.4MB)
The concertina is pretty obvious in the music; if it isn't string
or piano, it's a tina. Also, I'm playing two unusual Lachnal Edeophone
concertinas: a baritone (in my lap in the picture above) which transposes
down an octave and a soprano or piccolo that transposes up an octave.
I'm using the soprano a lot here, playing a descant backup to the
cello in the high register.
Adlai and I
Adlai Waksman is a gleeful wizard on the keyboard...piano, organ, accordion,
like that. One of the realities of being a musician is that partnership
is so rare...the people you play with need to be very close to your level
of musicianship, very close to your particular musical imagination/style and
able to click with you as a person (while it may seem puzzling to the outside
world, musicians know why all those
great bands break up....the wonder really is that they stay together at all
or for very long!). It is my great good fortune to have a good bit
of that with Adlai and to make music with him.
Every once in a while, Adlai (who, alas, lives far to the south in Philly)
is in the neighborhood and gives me a call...just a few hours or a few days
in advance...and we get together for a few hours or an evening in the Bard
College Chapel, a wonderfully resonant space.. We'll just pick tunes
from the wonderful ECD canon at random and play them. No planning,
no practice, no retakes...we just play the tune a number of times through,
alternating on melody and counter-melody backup until it seems done....and
then go on to another; we don't redo . I roll a recording and, as the
years go by, the percentage of pretty good takes has risen.
The Merest Bagatelle (4/29/2009)
The organ had a stuck note, so Adlai took the big beautiful Steinway concert
grand. These tunes are for contenporary ECD compositions, they are
mostly modern and all but two are waltzes. Waltzes, of course, are
slower and have more "room"...so you more readily get them right and there's more room and time for harmonization....
We had about 3-4 hours together and both of us were tired before we
began, but we did well enough. The title refers to my sense of ECD music...that
it should seem so easily done as to appear effortless, to seem trifling,
a mere bagatelle...
Turn
of the Tide - Moonlight Moorings (Heather Bexon) 04:32
Mistwold (Laufman) 02:52
Enchanted
Place - Planxty Hewlett (O'Carolan) 04:00
Autumn
in Amherst - The Red Star Line (Kathy Talvitie) 03:18
The
Molly Andrew - Saturday Morning Waltz (Dave Wiesler) 03:31
Winter Dreams (Jonathan
Jensen) 03:16
Winter Memories (Colin
Hume) 03:09
Back at the Beginning (2001)
During the summer of '01, the organ in the lovely stone chapel
at Bard College was being restored. I practice there daily; as
with singing in the shower, there are lovely reverberations that make
my music sound better than it is…besides, it's such a beautiful and peaceful
space.
One of the fellows working on the restoration, Adlai Waksman,an
ECD enthusiast from Philadelphia, asked if he might accompany me on
the organ. I was delighted, then stunned by the lovely running
accompaniment he produced with the three keyboards of the organ.This
happened during a brief opportunity…we only played together three times….I
finally decided I wanted a recording, which only barely happened on
the third time. Earlier the same day we had played the second time
and managed to get together again at 10PM that night. I was wasted,
there was only one copy of Barnes, this was the first time Adlai had seen
many of these tunes and I had to play standing up,reading the music over
Adlai's shoulder, all of which leads up to this: This recording was very
much a spur-of-the-moment happenstance with imperfections (and recorded with
a Sony video camera!)….but the overall effect when things clicked was so
gorgeous that I thought others would like to hear it.
The Old Mill (contemporary) [3.5MB]
Fenterlaurick (contemporary)
[2.3MB]
Waters Of Holland (period)
[4MB]
Jack's Maggot : 1703 [3MB]
Never Love Thee More
: 1686 [2MB]
Orleans Baffled :
1728 2.4MB]
Hole In the Wall : 1698 (Purcell)
[3.4MB]
Dick's Maggot : 1703
[1.9MB]
Well Hall : 1701 [3.4MB]
Mount Hills : 1721 [4.9MB]
To give you an idea of what this music looks like, here is the sheet music for the A secton of
Jack's Maggot. For what it's worth, in the 1700's a maggot was
a fast spirited dance, in addition to the other less attractive meaning....
To learn about playing this music, see here.
And a side issue....Religious self-righteousness and intolerance is much
in the air these days....but why is Stewart bringing this up on a page
about an archaic dance form? Because, in its day, this dance was
thought of as ungodly by Puritans and even by the Roundheads of the Glorious
Revolution....witness this Puritain diatribe
from 1633
Back to my home page
© COPYRIGHT 2001,2002, Stewart Dean, Adlai Waksman, Peter Barnes.
Peter Barnes has published the definitive sheet music book of the core
canon of ECD music,
The Barnes Book of English Country Dance Tunes.
It is available
from him (click here)
or through the
good offices of the Country Dance And Song Society in America
much to my surprise, EFDSS, in England, doesn't seem to carry it.
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