I'm always interested in suitable dance music for the Regency/Jane Austen era, but having expected that, I was very disappointed in The Pride & Prejudice Collection from the UK-based Pemberley Players that is subtitled "A Selection of Dances Popular in the 18th and 19th Centuries."
But first, the good parts:
The Pemberley Players are an English quintet under the leadership of David Fleming-Williams that specializes in playing country dance music. They have an absolutely lovely sound: a piano, two violins, a cello, an a flute. I suspect they aren't using an 18th-century piano, but I don't know enough about the difference in sound for it to matter for me. The strings are beautiful, and the instrument mix very suitable for the era. You can tell this is an experienced dance band: they keep their tempos steady and avoid artsy tricks that make things difficult for dancers. It's a lovely listening experience.
As a source of usable period dance music, however, it's got some problems.
First off, of the sixteen tunes on the album, ten of them are from 1703 or earlier, several going as far back as the first edition of Playford's The English Dancing Master in 1651. That's lovely if you want to dance 17th-century dances and don't mind a later-style sound, but it's simply bizarre in a CD that's aiming at the Jane Austen era. Pride and Prejudice was not set during the English Civil War. Austen was born in 1775; realistically, her days of dancing at balls started in the 1790s. Country dance fashions changed dramatically from the 17th century to the end of the 18th, and they were particularly enamored of fresh music. Dances that are a century or more out of date? Unlikely in the extreme.
So that immediately takes out the following tracks: "The Indian Queen", "Chestnut", "My Lord Byron's Maggot", "Jack's Maggot", "Sellenger's Round", "Upon a Summers Day", "Childgrove", "Hit and Miss" (actually "Daphne"), "Grimstock", and "Never Love Thee More".
What's left? Six tunes that are at least somewhat reasonable for the era, though leaning toward the early side:
"The Comical Fellow" (1776)
"The Touchstone" (1773)
"The First of April" (1773)
"Sprigs of Laurel" (1790)
"The Duke of Kent's Waltz" (c1800)
"The Pleasures of the Town", which is actually "Fair Maid of the Inn" (1776)
Tempos range from a sedate 70 bpm for "Fair Maid of the Inn" to a sprightly 118 bpm for "The Comical Fellow", all very danceable.
But then we come to the repeat structures. Dances in this era repeated a specific number of times, fixed by the number of couples in a set, starting with six times through for three couples and rising to twelve for four couples, sixteen for five couples, and so on. Those numbers are for triple minor progressions, the standard minor set length in this era. But even for a duple minor progresion, four couples requires nine times through the dance.
Of the six reasonably period tracks, two ("Fair Maid of the Inn" and "The Touchstone") are recorded only three times through, which makes them useless without doing some serious editing to loop more repeats in. If one ignores the AABB structure of the music, one could use them for a three-couple set for sixteen-bar dances, but that's not exactly ideal musically, and sixteen-bar figures aren't used very often.
The other four tracks have seven times through, which at least is long enough for a three-couple set and is easier to edit by removing one repeat. But to dance in a longer set, the music would still have to be looped. And the very richness of the Pemberley Players' sound makes it very difficult to loop the music cleanly without very good music-editing skills.
It makes me want to tear my hair with frustration: what beautiful music, and yet not a single track on the CD can be used as-is for Austen-era dancing.
I assume the weird repeat numbers are for modern formats, with the three-times-through dances having been warped into three-couple sets and the seven-times-through ones just following some inexplicable modern (UK?) tradition that demands seven repeats. That's fine if you're dancing in a modern context, but if you're trying to dance historical style, it simply doesn't work. And I can't begin to imagine what impelled them to choose ridiculously out-of-date music for ten of the sixteen tracks.
So it's hard to recommend this CD as a dance CD for its advertised era unless you have very good music-editing skills and are willing to do some substantial work on the six period tunes. It's quite expensive at import prices in the USA ($28 plus shipping for my copy from the Country Dance & Song Society). Had I taken a look at the tune list on the band's website (which may not have existed when I purchased this CD) I might well have skipped buying it.
It's much more use if you want dances for the 1650-1700 era, though the repeat structures will still be a problem for the dances for as many as will.
And, as noted above, at least it's a lovely listening experience. I had just hoped for more.
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