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

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

 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....

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

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                  © 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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