I welcome everybody to this webinar, A dance band for Playford.
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This webinar is linked to a wonderful display, The Dancing Master, at the Bodleian Weston Library until Sunday, the 21st of January.
Do you come and see it if you can. Our presenter today is Dr. Alice Little, Research Fellow at the Bate Collection of Musical Instruments,
part of the Music Faculty of the University of Oxford. Alice's
research focuses on collectors and collecting particularly 18th century tunebooks and their compilers,
looking at what sources the collections were gathered from and what the selection
of music says about the people and cultures that collected and used them.
So I'll hand over now to Alice. Welcome to this evening's talk.
I'm so pleased to welcome Jeremy Barlow to speak to us tonight on the topic of A dance band for Playford.
I first came across Jeremy's work, as many of you did too,
with this book, his edition of Playford's Dancing Master, which incorporates all 18 editions and shows how the tunes vary from book to book.
I was pleased to have him among my guests on the podcast, Folk tunes and Englishness, in 2021,
which is still available to hear online if you'd like to look it up.
Today we'll be focusing on the bands that played music for dancing between the 17th and 19th centuries.
A little about Jeremy. Jeremy Barlow specialises in English popular and dance music from 1550 to 1750 and also has
a particular interest in the illustration of music and social dance over the centuries.
He has lectured on various subjects for organisations such as the Arts Society, U3A, the Art Fund and the National Trust.
He is president of the Dolmetsch Foundation. His books include The Enraged Musician: Hogarth's Musical Imagery and The Cat
and the Fiddle: Images of Musical Humour from the Middle Ages to Modern Times.
Jeremy is well known for his work on Playford, and I'm delighted to welcome Jeremy to speak to us today.
Thank you, Alice. If we can go to the next slide.
The frontispiece to the final edition of Playford's Dancing Master, shown here, features a band of three musicians accompanying a country dance.
My aim is to determine if the line-up - fiddle, bassoon,
oboe - constituted a typical accompaniment for country dancers in the ballroom, not only during the period of The Dancing Master, but before and after too.
In the first part of the talk I'll provide a little background on John Playford and on the editions of The Dancing Master that he initiated. I'll examine
the three frontispieces that appeared over the volume's lifetime
For further musical information and I'll also say a bit about the role of the dancing master as a person.
In the second part, I'll compare the band here with other historic images of ballroom dance bands to see and how if they match.
Finally, I'll investigate how musicians might have arranged country dance tunes and play a few recordings to show
how the music might, or might not, or sounded to dancers in the 18th century. Born 400 years ago in Norwich,
John Playford probably received musical training at Norwich Cathedral before coming to London as an apprentice stationer.
On gaining his freedom in 1647, he started to publish tracts and following Charles I's execution two years later,
these tracts came to include execution speeches of Royalist supporters.
The authorities issued a warrant to arrest Playford,
but we know nothing more except that he changed course and began to publish music books.
In doing so, he's been called the founder of modern music publishing.
One of his first ventures was The English Dancing Master from 1651.
You need to go to, yes there we are. The volume comprises tunes and dance instructions for 105 country dances
and it was the first collection of its kind.
Playford published it in a hurry because, he wrote in the preface, quote, 'There was a false and surrepticious Copy at the Printing Presse'.
England then was two years into Oliver Cromwell's Interregnum
and Playford also wrote that he published the work 'knowing these times and the nature of it do not agree'.
Puritan opposition to public music and dance is well known, but that didn't necessarily extend to private events.
Cromwell himself organised a lavish wedding feast at Whitehall for his daughter Mary in 1657, and a guest reported that, quote,
'They had 48 violins, 50 trumpets and much mirth with frolics besides mixt dancing, a thing heretofore accounted profane, till five in the morning,
yes, the 5 of the clock yesterday morning'. By 48 violins, the writer meant a string orchestra of 48 players.
That's enough for a symphony orchestra today and exactly twice the number of Louis XIV's
famous 24 violins as copied by Charles I,
Charles II on his restoration. More than enough to form a dance band for Playford,
though the guest didn't indicate how many instruments accompanied the dancing or if the expression 'mixt dancing' included country dances,
however likely that must have been. John Playford
went on to publish many music books without any hindrance during the Interregnum, and having rushed to get The English Dancing Master into print,
he brought out a second edition a year later, stating that it had been 'Enlarged and corrected from many grosse Errors, which were in the former Edition'.
He also retitled the work as just The Dancing Master.
However, not all errors from the first edition were corrected and plenty of new mistakes were introduced in the tunes.
The Bodleian's copy, shown here, is on display as part of the exhibition showcase in the entrance hall to the Bodleian's Weston Library.
By the time of his death 34 years later, John Playford had published seven editions of The Dancing Master.
He added new dances to each edition to attract buyers and omitted older ones.
This process continued when Henry Playford succeeded his father.
He published another five editions and the Bodleian's copy of his last, the 12th in 1703, is on display. ,
And as you can see, it has a different frontispiece and I'll come back to that.
Henry Playford was succeeded by John Young, who described himself as a musical instrument maker,
but who nevertheless published a further six editions, the last being the 18th from the late 1720s or early thirties, the one we saw at the start.
By that time, the volume had swollen to contain 358 dances, with just 28 surviving from John Playford's
original edition. Young also added a further two volumes to the collection, making eventually around 900 dances in total.
I have here my own copy of the 17th edition from 1721, bound together with the Young's volume two.
I shall open it at random.
You can see at the top, the tune, the title of the dance and how many dancers are required, and they're nearly all 'Longways for as many as will'.
Then you see the line-Up of the dancers at the start, the tune beneath and beneath that you can see the dances' dance instructions.
As I said, almost all the dances are by now 'Longways for as many as will'.
John Playford's first edition of 1651 included many more round dances and also dances for a fixed number of performers.
The thin oblong format meant that the slimmer early editions could go into a gentleman's tailcoat pocket, impossible with this bulky volume,
but you can see from the worn corners to the cover that
it's been much used. In fact, it was falling apart
so I've had it re-backed rather smartly. I mentioned a gentleman's tailcoat pocket.
This may seem incongruous since today many of you view country dances and their tunes as part of English folk tradition.
The dances were certainly performed across society, but John Playford aimed his collection at the middle and upper social ranks.
He wrote in the Preface to the first edition that quote, 'The Art of Dancing ..is a commendable and rare Quality fit for young Gentlemen,
if opportunely and civilly used.' He took for granted of course, that in order to dance civilly, his gentlemen needed genteel women partners.
Dance was an expected social accomplishment for the gentry and Playford's very title
The Dancing Master describes the person who taught the gentry to dance, and more importantly, or as importantly, how to behave in the ballroom.
I say person, although the expression Dancing Master implies that the role was exclusively male.
female dance teachers are documented from the mid-18th century onwards
but there is little information earlier. Playford, in a later publication, advertised the girls' boarding school run by his wife,
Hannah, as a place where, quote, 'young, gentlewomen might be instructed... in dancing'.
The instructor, male or female,
would not only have taught country dances. At higher levels of society country dances took place during the latter part of the ball.
Earlier in the evening, one couple at a time performed a French dance to the assembled company,
principally the courante in John Playford's time and the minuet in the 18th century.
Perhaps one reason that Playford called his first edition, The English Dancing Master,
was to demarcate its contents from the French dances that preceded it in a high-class ball.
Samuel Pepys described this format in a ball given by Charles II at Whitehall in 1662,
although the king, after exile in France had opened the occasion with a branle, the French equivalent of the English country dance.
But after the branle, Pepys wrote that quote, 'The King led a Lady, the single Coranto,
and then the rest of the lords, one after another, other ladies; very noble
it was and great pleasure to see. Then to country dances
the king leading the first, which he called for; which was says he, 'Cuckolds all awry', the old dance of England'.
That dance had appeared 11 years earlier in Playford's English Dancing Master, and it survived through all subsequent editions.
Pepys doesn't mention the band,
but the description dates from the time that the King was forming his orchestra of 24 violins in imitation of Louis XIV.
Presumably the band, whatever its size, size played for the country, dances as well as for the preceding courantes or courantes, courantos.
I want to bring Alice briefly in here again,
I believe she has a question. Thank you, Jeremy.
Could you say a little more about the Englishness of the tunes in the early Dancing Nasters that Playford printed please?
You mentioned that he dropped the word English from the second edition onwards,
and I want to know why that was and where the tunes were actually from,
do you think? Well, perhaps Playford dropped English from the title of the second edition because he mentions country dances in
the text below and the King's description of 'Cuckolds all awry' as 'the old dance of England' shows that even then,
country dances were linked with Englishness and English tradition in people's minds.
The earliest references to country dancing, which mention some of Playford's tune and dance titles, date back 100 years earlier.
It should be said, though, that not all the tunes in the English Dancing master were English.
Some came from Scotland, Ireland and across the channel. Not all were that old either.
The long and complicated Gray's Inn Mask, for example, had been composed by John Coperario for an entertainment 40 years before.
Also, some of the choreographies resemble those found in Renaissance dance treatises compiled for the Italian nobility.
Thank you. You mentioned 'Cuckolds all awry'. It's quite a bawdy title.
I wondered are there words that go with the tune? It surprises me that such tunes were being used for dancing by the nobility and even in court.
Well, there is a moderately bawdy song called 'Cuckolds all' with words that fit the tune in
Henry Playford song collection Pills to Purge Melancholy. Charles II's
choice of 'Cuckolds all awry' fits with his reaction generally against the puritanism of the Interregnum.
It also demonstrates a tension that had long existed in the ballroom, tension between decorum and licence.
Sexual attraction and the rhythmic impulse of faster dances had long threatened to upset the restraints of dance etiquette, bearing and gesture,
as talked very strictly by the dancing master to his genteel pupils.
These restraints were threatened when the pupils got excited by a new dance from outside their milieu that threatened the propriety of the ballroom.
Two widely separated examples of dances that had to be tamed in the ballroom include the sedate sarabande,
originally banned by the church for its wildness in 16th century Spain, and the tango in the 20th century.
Both originated in Latin America, but it seems that our native country dance had less restrained origins, too, before being gentrified in the ballroom.
And that tension between decorum and license brings me to John Playford's choice of frontispiece for the English Dancing Master.
Although Playford advocated dancing for young gentlemen if opportunely and civilly used, for its frontispiece
he adapted an engraving originally designed for a salacious work called The Academy of Love,
in which Cupid guides a young gentleman through that institution.
The author describes the activities there metaphorically by using, through a series of laboured
double entendres, the terminology of subjects studied at a proper academy such as grammar,
rhetoric, geometry, music and so on. The frontispiece illustration shown now in better quality,
shows Cupid, we seem to have got two slides on the screen,
there we are, this shows Cupid with his bow, introducing the gentleman to a young woman at the academy.
In Playford's adaptation for The English Dancing Master
Cupid still has his wings and quiver but he no longer holds a bow.
He plays the lute instead. But the lute doesn't constitute a band for country dances.
To maximise instrumentalists as well as dances
and he advertised The English Dancing Master quote 'to be played on the treble Violl or Violin.'
The treble viol, unlike the violin, was not associated with dance,
but the viol family formed the basis for music-making in consort among the gentleman amateurs that he chiefly targeted.
His later publications include A Brief Introduction to the Skill of Musick,
which gives instructions for playing the bass viol or viola da gamba. The Bodleian's copy
is in the display case down below in the Weston Library. In the ninth edition of The Dancing Master, 1695,
John Playford's son Henry stated in his Preface, 'most of the tunes being within the compass of the flute', meaning at that time the recorder.
The recorder had by then largely supplanted the viol as an instrument popular with gentleman amateurs.
But again, it was not an instrument associated with dance.
I'll move on now to the second frontispiece of The Dancing Master
which had appeared in the seventh edition, published in 1686, not long before John Playford's death.
By then, Henry had taken over the business. The example here comes from the Bodleian's 12th edition, which we've already seen.
The print is titled The Dancing Schoole, a more appropriate venue than the Academy of Love for a book titled The Dancing Master.
Also, the clothes in the Academy of Love frontispiece dating from 1640 must have looked very old fashioned by 1686. In the new frontispiece
men and women are no longer chatting together in the background,
but are separated, and in the foreground they line up formally opposite each other for the start of a longways dance.
Nevertheless, Cupid is still there, reminding us that behind the dancer's regimented appearance lies his potentially disruptive power.
He's now swapped his lute for a violin. The rubric above the image which had been included on and off
since the second edition states quote 'Directions for Dancing Country Dances with the Tunes to each Dance for the Treble of the Violin'.
Mention of the flute i.e recorder has been dropped by this 12th addition,
perhaps because many of the tunes don't actually fit the range of the treble instrument.
Before John Playford, the violin had largely been preserved, the preserve, of professional musicians and had been strongly associated with dance.
But by now amateurs have taken to it, and among them a frequent customer at John Playford's shop, Samuel Pepys.
On the far left and right in the frontispiece, we see two further fiddlers, both men.
I take them to represent the dancing masters who were musicians too, and taught the dances from their fiddles separated, separately to men and women who,
although at some point in the tuition as here, the two sexes must have been brought together.
The fiddles were often miniature kit fiddles, or pochettes, who could slip into the dancing master's tailcoat pocket.
There's one from a private collection on the display in the Weston.
It's odd to me that the dancing masters are sitting.
Perhaps that's artistic license to allow a view of the company in the background and to make a contrast with the upright dancers.
But again, these fiddlers do not constitute a band for country dances
in the ballroom. It's in the 18th and final edition of The Dancing Master that as we've seen,
John Playford's successor, John Young,
replaced the stiff formality of four couples lined up for the start of a dance with four couples actually dancing
and what's more, dancing to a band. It must be said that the event looks a pretty tame affair.
Again, a major reason for changing the frontispiece
must have been to update the clothes. Notice how, for example, in the late 1720s tricorns replaced the boater style of 1686 for men.
And then we go to the next slide. In the second part of this talk, we'll see if the line up here
was typical for ballroom dancing generally, not only in the early 18th century, but before and after, too.
And as you look at the images below, I'd like you to try and identify a feature of this band that's not present in any of the other illustrations.
We'll have answers in the next break. So time now for questions and comments.
Thank you, Jeremy. So there is only one question in the Q&A box, so I shall start with that for you.
This is from Ann, it's lovely to have you with us Ann.
She says if Playford intended to present country dances as comparatively decorous and for the gentry,
why did he include easy romps like Half Hannikin, Jack a Lent, Goddesses,
An Old Man is a bag full of Bones, etc. Such dances don't really need instructions, do they?
Well, I'm not an expert on the dances, but of course, these dances can be danced in many ways, decorously or indecorously.
And I imagine that any dancing master worth his name would want to make sure his genteel pupils behaved themselves in that dance.
Thank you. And a second from Mike, welcome, Mike. Can you comment on how the musicians are holding their violins in 1703 image?
Are they fiddlers rather than violinists? The 1703,
I'll have to look at my volume. Would you like me to share again
briefly? Well, I can do that quickly.
I hadn't really looked at that. And thank you for asking the question.
Well, that is. Oh, yes. They're holding them down sort of below, by their armpits.
That is how people held baroque fiddles at that time.
And the more folky they were or the more informal, the lower they sometimes held them.
There you go the 1703 image should be on the screen now. There is a kind of 3 to 4 second delay every time I click your
proceed slide, I'm sorry about that, Jeremy. Don't worry, it's fine, don't
worry. You can see they are holding them quite low, but that was just a little higher,
that was the normal holding position for baroque violinists.
Perfect. Thank you. So that's all that's in the Q&A box at the moment
so do keep them coming for next time. Back to your slide.
So let me just progress forwards. The question is, does the instrumentation shown here show a typical dance band for Playford?
If we take the essential components of two treble instruments and a bass, the answer is yes.
But what's more, it had been so in the ballroom for nearly 200 years and continued to be so until the end of the 18th century
and not only in England.
The two treble instruments might be violins or oboes or one of each as here, and the bass might be a cello, a bass viol, a double bass or a bassoon.
Forces were expanded to special occasions. The earliest example I found of a dance band was two treble instruments,
and a bass, dates from around 1550, nearly 200 years before the final edition of The Dancing Master
and it features one of two contrasting strips of dancers by the Flemish-born engraver Theodor de Bry.
The top strip shows sedate, courtly dancers, lavishly dressed,
performing indoors to music from a band, far left, which consists of two fiddles and a bass viol plus a lute.
We go back to the dancers. In contrast, the lower strip displays peasants dancing outdoors with complete abandon.
This is rustic dancing, but not country dancing as envisaged by John Playford.
The music comes from a duo playing a raucous shawm and bagpipes,
both double reed instruments that carry well outdoors.
The next print from a little later in the 16th century,
and probably French, shows two high ranking couples performing to a band similar to that playing the courtly dancers just seen.
In fact,
it's so similar not only in the instruments but in the clothes and disposition of the players that it looks as if the artist had copied Theodor de Bry's band.
Artists did copying each other. And that fact should caution one against taking iconographic evidence too literally.
I'm moving on now half a century to a print that shows a classy French ball in the 1630s.
Such were the restraints imposed by the dancing masters on the upper ranks of society
that the couple approaching us down the centre of the ball might be walking,
not dancing. But the band in the background on the left and the verses underneath
remove any doubt. As in Pepys's description of Charles II's ball,
we have one couple at a time performing to the assembled company.
The line-Up of the band again consists of two violins and a bass instrument.
There's no lute this time or any of the later images.
I can show several more illustrations of people dancing to the same line-up from the years before the 18th edition of The Dancing Master.
But I'm going to move forward now to the period that followed.
John Young, the publisher of that final edition, faced increasing competition from rival country dance publications
and after his death in 1732, new collections appeared in quantity year by year to the end of the 18th century.
The Bodleian display includes this example from 1744.
Here we see five couples dancing while to the left of them, a woman seems to be facing off competition from two gentlemen pestering her to take part.
Above them top left is the band.
The basic line-up remains the same, two treble instruments and the bass, but it's expanded now with two oboes reinforcing the two violins.
The oboe is a refined descendant of the raucous shawm that we saw earlier.
The bass instrument is indistinct, but there appears to be the neck of a cello or double bass.
Notice that the text above the image markets the collection to appeal across a wider social spectrum.
A Choice Collection of two, 200 Favourite Country Dances performed at Court, Bath, Tunbridge and all Public Places.
Balls were no longer exclusive private occasions.
Moving forward to 1760, we have another collection from the Bodleian that claims to be, have been performed at Court, Bath, Tunbridge,
etc., with the tunes apparently playable not only on the violin and flute,
but by now the transverse, that's the transverse flute now, but on the oboe too, another
instrument that like the violin had earlier been the preserve of professionals.
However, the line-up of the band upsets my two melody instruments and a bass theory.
We have two fiddlers, but instead of a bass player, there's a man on pipe and tabor.
Renaissance imagery shows the pipe and tabor accompanying dance for the gentry and nobility but by now the
instrumental combination had moved down the social scale and had come to be associated with outdoor rustic dance.
It's impossible to rule out such a line up in the ballroom, but it would have sounded thin without a bass instrument to provide harmonic foundation.
I suggest that the pipe and tabor maybe be there symbolically to demonstrate that country dancing still had rustic, rustic associations.
If I had time, I could show more images from the period in which the pipe and tabor may be interpreted as an emblem of rusticity,
not as an actual instrument playing for the scene
shown. There is written evidence that the two melody instruments and the bass remained the essential line-up for ballroom dancing,
at least to the end of the 18th century. When Haydn came to London in 1791, he went to a Lord Mayor's lunch in the City, after which
he noted there was dancing to quote, 'a wretched dance band consisting of two violins and a cello.' In another room
quote, 'the music was a little better because there was a drum to drown out the misery of the violins'.
Although to my knowledge, no functional dance arrangements survive for two violins and a bass
there are collections of more ballroom minuets for that combination
and as said, minuets would have preceded country dances in a high-class ball.
After 1800, collections of country dances appeared less frequently, and from 1815,
the quadrille increasingly took over as the dance for groups of couples.
A valiant attempt to keep the country dance going came from dancing master Thomas Wilson and his book, An Analysis of Country Dances from 1811.
It's on display in the Weston. Notice that the figures on the left demonstrate the five positions of classical ballet and that
the book includes, quote, The Complete Etiquette of the Ballroom.
Thomas Wilson was determined to maintain the dancing master's rigorous standards.
Although the country dance dwindled in popularity it didn't die out entirely in the ballroom
and there's one that survives right through to my adolescence in the 1950s, when after waltzes, quicksteps, and foxtrots at local dances,
the 'Roger the Coverley' sometimes ended the evening as Thomas Wilson himself had recommended 150 years earlier.
The tune remained recognisable from the version in the ninth edition of The Dancing Master
but the band, line, band line-up, was usually sax, piano, double bass and drums.
We're coming up to another pause now, so let's return to that unique feature of the band in the 18th edition of The Dancing Master.
Has anyone spotted it? Here's the image again
bottom right along with the other bands we've seen
for comparison. So, Jeremy, you have got one person's got it in the, in the chat it was Ann, trust Ann, she says 1728 band have sheet music, correct.
Oh brilliant, well done. The answer is it's the only band playing from music.
Musicians in all the other bands appeared to be playing from memory.
When Charles II asked for 'Cuckolds all awry' would the musicians have shuffled quickly through their parts to find it? I very much doubt it.
They'd have known the tune. Just as jazz musicians today have a huge repertoire of standards from memory.
I mentioned earlier that no scores or parts survive for functional dance music, country dance music.
The nearest we get is John Young's tantalising statement beneath his frontispiece,
that where his books are sold are, quote, 'also to be had, the Basses to all the Dances contain'd in this First Volume'.
But sadly the basses were not to be found or were never published.
Given the absence of surviving scores, parts or basses, after the break I'll
ask how dance musicians might have arranged and harmonised the tunes and with a
few recordings demonstrate how their arrangements might or might not have sounded.
Time now for more comments and questions.
Lovely. So we do have a few more in the chat and pouring in. It's lovely to see some familiar names.
Rhodri Davies asks Jeremy, I believe you said that your copy of The Dancing Master had volumes one and two bound together.
So do you want to clarify that first. And the question is, was that normal?
I think I've seen other copies in libraries where volumes one and two were bound together. I don't know if I can show, it's far too thick for 358 dances but
if I can go through, the last pages
we then get the last dance in the first volume and then we get the frontispiece to volume two, which is the same as for volume one.
So yes, I think it did occur more than once.
Thank you. Marelli Elize would like to know, was dancing in schools a way of socialising among young people,
young people at the time? Well, Hannah Playford, that's to say John Playford's wife taught in, had a girls' school,
so it would have only been girls that were taught to dance.
And I have no idea if boys were then brought in at the last moment for a ball, or whether the girls. I think a mis-spoke slightly there and said, dancing in schools.
I should have said dancing school, sorry. Oh sorry,
so say this question again, can you? Were dancing schools a way for young people to socialise?
I suppose they were, I don't know to what extent. I mean, the country dance is a way of socialising though,
if it's, some of the longways dances involve you meeting other people of the opposite sex as you go down the line.
So I mean, I really can't answer that question with any certainty.
The Academy of Love certainly was a place to socialise. Lovely.
And a final one for this section from Howard. How widespread do you think these dances were?
Were they used by ordinary village folk? That,
that's a question which is very hard to answer.
All I know is that when, when Cecil Sharp started collecting dances, he claims to have collected country dances from various parts of England,
and they are included in his first volume of country dances to tunes like Pop the Weasel, which is a 19th century tune.
So I think the answer must be for what we know in the, way back in 1550,
and what we know in the late 19th century, Cecil Sharp, the answer must be yes, they were.
To what extent I don't know. Lovely thank you. And then I've got a question derived from Andy's to lead us back into your talk.
If the standard ballroom dance band from much of the 18th century consisted essentially of two melody instruments and a bass,
then how were these tunes arranged? Well, for me, there are two plausible options.
Either the melody instruments play in unison to a bass that provided the harmonic outline, or the second instrument filled out the harmony.
In this lovely painting by William Hogarth of a country dance
the band is instantly, indistinct up in the Minstrels gallery on the left.
But in the print that is derived from the painting
he shows a bassoonist and part of a badly drawn fiddler.
And you just see that. One can imagine there's an oboist or another fiddler out of sight.
On the face of it, it seems likeliest that the second treble instrument would have played in harmony with the first. In
surviving scores of minuets that I mentioned earlier, the violins often do play in thirds and sixths.
Surely country dances would benefit from a similar type of arrangement?
Lovely, thank you. I'm just going to reappear briefly to ask,
I would love to know how the music sounded and I understand you've got some recordings to share with us.
Yes, I do. I've got three and the first is from an album that I devised more than 30 years ago called Musick at the Wells.
It includes several country dances. To arrange them
I followed the fiddle-oboe-bassoon line-up from the 18th edition of The Dancing Master and had the fiddle playing
the tune with the oboe harmonising beneath it. In the first half of the tune 'Hay to the Cooper'
the oboe harmonises with the bass line and in the second half with the, it harmonises with the fiddle.
I now think the first half sounds awful.
The second half is a little better, though it would have been better still for the two melody instruments to play in unison and then diverge with
their own extemporised embellishments and harmonies. Tunes are repeated many times in dances for as-many-as-will,
depending on the number of couples taking part. Repetition encourages embellishment and harmonising and stops the musicians falling asleep.
So here's my missguided arrangement of 'Hay to the Cooper' from a collection of country dances published in 1738.
At least you can hear the instruments depicted in the 18th edition of The Dancing Master. Roddy
Skeaping on violin with Matthew Dixon, oboe and Mike Brain bassoon.
[music playing]
The second tune I'm playing is Charles II's 'Old dance of England', 'Cuckolds all a row'
and here we have the City Waites with two fiddles in unison
and just a little divergence through embellishment. Roddy and Lucy Skeaping from their album, The English Tradition.
For me, this is a much stronger sound. [music playinng] Thank you.
The extent to which the melody and instruments diverged from a unison through embellishment or harmony
would of course depend on the players' familiarity with each other and with the tune. Also players,
then as now, would have treated the tunes in country dance collections as bare bones to be fleshed out with embellishments and their own variants.
The process is visible in the many changes made to tunes
in successive editions of The Dancing
Master. My third recording comes from YouTube and has caused a little problems in getting it to play it for me.
And it is a recording of the Warleggan Village Band who will be playing for the exhibition ball on the 13th of January.
Here they are playing, I hope The Fox from a manuscript of 1785. Fiddlers
Richard Heacock and Matthew Coatsworth clearly know the tunes and each other well.
First time through, they play in unison, but the second time they harmonise.
The guitarist is Chris Green. [music playing]
So despite the lack of surviving functional country dance scores for two melody instruments and a bass, there is comparable material to support
my argument that the two melody instruments in a ballroom dance band played for much time in unison for country dances, if not for minuets.
Country dance tunes pop up frequently as songs in ballad operas.
More than half of the 69 hours in The Beggar's Opera, for example, had appeared as tunes in The Dancing Master. The scoring to accompany those
airs in The Beggar's Opera doesn't survive, but in a set of manuscript orchestral parts for three subsequent ballad operas
first and second violins were scored in unison throughout.
Further support comes from Mozart of all people, whose score for the ballroom scene in his opera Don Giovanni,
in which a contredanse dance is performed to a band consisting of two violins and a bass.
Here again, the violins play in unison throughout, yet for a minuet in the same scene, the violins harmonise.
To conclude, I'm not suggesting that a dance band for Playford today should necessarily consist of two fiddles and a bass.
Expectations have changed. I mentioned earlier the one country dance that survived in the ballroom through through to my youth, the 'Roger de Coverley'.
so to finish here is a recording of the tune by The London Dance Orchestra from 1920
even before my time. Here's the tune in the 17th edition of The Dancing Master.
It's not quite the same in the recording, but recognisable.
However, the fiddles still play in unison. [music playing]
Thank you, Alice, and everybody else very much for listening to me.
Brilliant. Thank you so much, Jeremy. Now, I believe there's a little time left for a few further questions.
And also, very kindly, Matt Coatsworth of the Warleggan Village Band popped the link in the chat, but it's disappeared now.
Matt did you get rid of it or is that my error.
Ah I put it under the answered thing. I'll see,
I'll ask you the first question, Jeremy, and then I'll see if I can load that on my computer to share it with people because
it would be lovely to hear that recording. So the first question for you now is from Ann Kent.
She asks, are you still of the opinion that the musicians played the first strain of the music before the dancing began?
Yes, I am. I think, one thing I really dislike, I can't express myself too strongly on this, is the way that in country dance sessions,
the musicians play the end of the tune as the introduction to the dance.
Now Cecil Sharp, to bring him back in again, he noticed that if the dancers didn't hear the beginning of the tune,
they simply did not know how to do the dance. They must have.
So that is further back up
for the idea that you play the first part of the tune to introduce the country dance and when you go into church and sing hymns,
what does the organist usually play? He plays the beginning of the tune that
you've got to to sing, because then the, the congregation know what to sing.
Though I have to say I have noticed, lamentably, that sometimes organists who play the end of the tune, which I think is, it's a habit that's sprung up
I think, since the Second World War in musical comedy of playing the end of the tune to introduce the thing, it simply didn't exist before.
It doesn't exist in operas or any kind of light musical shows before either.
Yes. So I am very much of that opinion. Sorry to sound so vehement about it.
No, wonderful, thank you very much. And from Jane, we have another question.
When did the musicians begin to use sets of pieces instead of endlessly repeating the same tune?
Yeah, I don't know the answer to that, but I do know that in the 18th century, when you get overtures to light operas, you do get medleys of tunes.
So it may, that may be following something that happened in the ballroom, but I don't know if that's the case or not.
But you don't get medleys of tunes any earlier than that in overtures.
Lovely. There is another question, my YouTube is just loading, so I apologise if you suddenly get a blaring of music from my end.
So the question from Mary in the chat, in the Q&A box, she says, Jeremy,
before my question, I'd like to thank you for the old English nursery rhythm CD,
nursery rhyme CD, which my mum and I love listening to.
I'm curious whether in your research of Playford and English country dance,
if you have ever come across any writing about hurdy gurdy players or paintings or illustrations of hurdy gurdy players in music.
Oh, well, there are certainly plenty of illustrations, particularly when you go back to the 15th,
14th centuries and the 16th century too, you do see illustrations of hurdy gurdy players accompanying dance.
So, yes, I mean, certainly iconography shows
hurdy gurdy players and and there's one by Hogarth of one that's a bit satirical because she turned out to be a mistress to an aristocrat.
So but, you know, yes, there are.
So from Ann. Ann asks, Is there any evidence of early modern singing for dancing rather than instrumental, for example, images?
There are, but it depends how you define the early modern period, I suppose from sort of printing up to 1800.
But there are images of choirs, when you get a little later on, when you get the church choirs coming back, the village
church choirs, and you see some quite satirical images of them with their mouths wide open.
And Hogarth also did a wonderful print called A Chorus of Singers performing an oratorio, oratorio Judith by Defesch.
So there's that. And I don't know of, I'm not, it's not my special subject, really,
choirs, but I do know certainly of some.
Wonderful. Mike has popped in the chat that there, in answer to a previous question, that there are
19th century accounts of the same tune being played for 20 or 30 minutes in the dancing booths at fairs,
goodness me. But I think my record is playing 30 times through a country dance tune for dancers,
yes. So more than 30 minutes there is quite a long time.
I don't see, no current questions in the chat, which gives me space to ask, to ask you to tell us.
It's my favourite anecdote that you've told me, or Playford fact that you've told me, which is about his accidentals.
Would you, would you share that with us? Do you know which, which one I mean?
Why there, there's endless controversy in English folk music about the raised and lowered
seventh of the scale in folk tunes and whether it's more authentic one way or the other.
And Jeremy, I know, has a theory about this, which I'd love for you to share with everybody,
would you mind? Well it applies to the first edition of The Dancing Master.
I mean, Playford being the first person to get publishing going again after the, after the Civil Wars and even before that,
it had really fallen into abeyance. So he managed to get, is his name East, the man who did the printing?
He had these old fonts and they, I think they must have been incomplete.
Well, I know they were because there are a lot of flattened sevenths without sharps.
In the first edition of The English, the first edition, The English Dancing Master,
and then in the second he must have got some more sharps because he sharpens these leading notes.
So I think that is the case. But some of the tunes did remain what we call modal.
I mean, I don't know if you notice that score of 'Roger de Coverley' in the second half was a C natural, which sounds quite, quite modal. Actually
it's a slightly Scottish tune and that was much more accepted in Scottish tunes that they should be modal,
but whether they were, always were in English tunes
I don't. There's an amusing description of a choir from the 17th century trying to sing hymns and some of them sung the sharper leading note
you know, and some of them sang a flatter leading note which produced the most hideous results.
So you know I think it was, I think it probably might have been a kind of social rank distinction that the higher up you were and were learning from posh music,
from printed scores and so on, the more likely it was that you sharpened the leading note, but lower down, singing folk songs and so on,
then it was less likely that you did. Fantastic
thank you. So if there are no more questions in the chat, it only falls to me to say thank you so much to Jeremy.
There's one more snuck in at that very moment. Ah, it's
Ann again, brilliant, thank you Ann. She says, varying tunes by harmony,
do you think rhythm would also vary? For example, playing just the first beat and then rest, or third / off-beat as the Warleggan Village Band did on 'Fox'?
Shall I read that again? So.
Say it again. Do you mean Ann, you can clarify if you can.
So varying tunes by harmony. So in the Warleggan Village Band, in that example, did the first time through in unison and
then harmony the second time and Ann asked Do you think the rhythm would also vary?
For example, playing just the first beat and then rest. So like de der de de de de der, that sort of thing. The successive editions,
sorry, can you hear me? Yeah. The successive editions of The Dancing Master shows tunes that, you know, are varied in meter you know,
as if some people heard it in 6/8 and others in 4/4. The one thing, the one thing that, you know, you get
Da da da, da da da, da da da, you get da da dum, da da dum, da da da daladum
in common time happening with the few tunes.
Well, I think, as I'm sure you did and and probably, well and in the same way
with a jig well you know, dadala, dadala, dadala, dadala can finish something that's quite a lot slower.
You find that in scores of, of tunes.
So yes, I think I'm sure they did as well as varying the harmony and embellishments,
I'm sure they would have varied rhythms probably with a signal to each other to go into a jig-type rhythm as they were getting really bored at the very end.
Even during a dance with, I once went to a ceilidh. It may even have been Boldwood playing, which is a band that both Matt and Richard used to play in.
And they went from, was it 9/8 into 3/2?
They warned us in advance that they were going to do this.
And it was very, it was very interesting, but it would have thrown us if we hadn't been warned as dancers, I would have thought.
So you think they did vary the rhythm that much in the middle of a dance? Well rhythm, but perhaps not tempo,
you know, you can, you can play a tune that's in 4/4 and where dum
pom pom pom, pom pom, becomes da da da, da da da, da da da.
You still keep the beat the same.
I think that, that could have happened and I think there's some evidence of that in successive editions of The Dancing Master.
Yes, so Rhodri's come in on this very same thing and says, is it possible to change times during the dance? Done right
it gives the dance a real kick. Sometimes it's done in modern contras.
Yes. So that's the same experience I had many years ago with Boldwood. Yeah,
so it can. I, I believe it is possible. And Jeremy saying it would have happened historically as well, so
yeah, fantastic. And anything further to add on that, Jeremy, before we close up?
No, I don't think so, but I very much enjoyed the questions, I must say, and they make me think and I'm sorry I couldn't answer them.
Lovely, no, you did it excellently. Thank you very much.
So thank you to you all for your questions. Thank you to Jeremy for his paper this evening.
I'm just going to hand it back to Helen for the closing notices. Thank you.
I'll just add my thanks firstly to everyone for joining us today.
I know that people booked from all over the world, so it's wonderful to have you with us and to have your curiosity and enthusiasm for this talk.
But thank you, of course, to Alice Little and Jeremy Barlow for a wonderful talk.
And also to our behind the scenes technical team
Karen. And please do take a moment, everyone, to fill out the quick feedback form so we can continue to offer free events like this in the future.
And we do have a second webinar, The Dancing Master in Context on the 28th of November.
So if you haven't already booked for that, do sign up via our website and that's with Professor Rebecca Herissone and Alice again and otherwise,
we hope to see you again soon. But for now, thank you very much and have a good evening.