CD Review: Music for Quadrilles

Fans of Regency-era quadrilles will definitely want Music For Quadrilles, a CD by Kevin Smith and Green Ginger (Cas Sloan and Ian & Meryl Thomson), an excellent dance band which frequently plays for Regency balls in England.  The album includes three full quadrille sets as well as two Regency waltz tunes and several pieces for later Scottish country dancing that are also quite usable for nineteenth-century dance. 

This is one of the rare Regency (mostly) dance CDs that I can recommend without reservation.  The music mix is three violins (or two and a viola) and piano, which is both beautiful and very appropriate for Regency-era dance unless one is offended by a modern piano rather than a Regency-era pianoforte.  The music is for the most part documentably late eighteenth- or nineteenth-century, and sources are listed for all of it, though some are not dated and thus are something of a pain to track down.

The three quadrille sets are:

Paine's 1st Set (c1815), which is a six-figure set for the "First Set" of quadrille figures (Pantalon-Eté-Poule-Trenise-Pastourelle-Finale).  It includes both the possible fourth figures (Trenise and Pastourelle).

Paine's 12th Set (c1815), which is another set of tunes which can be used either for the figures given with it or for the First Set.  This one is only a five-figure set that includes music for Pastourelle but not for Trenise.

Hart's Lancers (c1819), five figures, is one of the two early Lancers sets (Duval's is the other).  It matches the versions of Hart's published by both Thomas Wilson and G. M. S. Chivers other than having an extra eight bars of music at the end of the fifth (Lancers) figure.  This can be easily trimmed with editing software.  I'm not sure what Green Ginger's source for the figures was; their structure might be matched to a slightly different version of Hart's.

The quadrilles are recorded at the faster-than-period modern tempo, but that is easily fixed with appropriate editing or playback software.

The two waltzes are:

"The Duke of Kent's Waltz", from one of the Cahusac collections (1801).  "Duke of Kent's" is very popular in the modern English country dance community and is recorded frequently.  The Green Ginger version is in the modern AAB (32-bar) structure seven times through, which is an awkward number for historical country dancing (which requires specific numbers of repeats -- none of which are seven -- for each number of couples), but it could be used just for waltzing or trimmed or looped to a useful length for country dancing.  There are two change tunes, minuets played as waltzes, both from the late 18th century.

"The Pavilion Waltz", which is from Thomas Wilsons A Companion to the Ball Room (London, c1816).  This is a much rarer tune (I know of no other recording), and is conveniently recorded as 32 bars six times through, which is perfect for a three-couple set.  The change tune is "Miss Barrett's Waltz", c1799.

Both waltzes have four-bar introductions.  Both are also rather brisk (150 bpm and 141 bpm); I would slow them down to around 125-130bpm for Regency use.

The remaining five tracks on the CD are all structured for modern Scottish (RSCDS) country dancing and have single-chord introductions.  I am not enough of a musical expert to tell an eighteenth-century reel from a nineteenth-century reel or, for that matter, a twentieth-century reel, and I am not familiar with all the composers listed in the liner notes, so I can't document them completely, though given the general parameters of this CD I expect all of them are pre-1900. 

Here's what I do know:

"The Queen's Quadrille" tunes are period for Regency; all three are by well-known eighteenth-century composers Niel Gow and Robert Mackintosh. 

Two of the four tunes in "Quadrille Country Dance" are by William Marshall, also a Regency-era composer.  One is from the 1884 Athole Collection, but the tune might be older.  I'm not sure about the fourth.

"The New Scotia Quadrille" has one tune from the late-eighteenth century Aird collections and one that I have not been able to source. 

Two of the four tunes in "Clutha" are late nineteenth-century compositions by James Kerr and William Honeyman.  One is from the 1804 Moore manuscript.  One I do not know the source of. 

I have no idea when or where the "traditional" tune ("Danish Double Quadrille") used for "The Jubilee Quadrille" came from.

All five of these tracks are labeled as reels, but one ("Jubilee Quadrille") doesn't have much of a reel feel to me.  All but "Jubilee" would work well for Scotch reels and all five would work for country dances if they were edited to a workable repeat structure.  I frequently use the first track, "Clutha", for a shortened version of the nine-person Bumpkin.

Extensive liner notes include general dance information, a brief comment on steps, a list of figures, and specific figures for all the dances.  The quadrille figures are accurate other than my quibble above with the fifth Lancers figure.  The waltz figures are modern adaptations and not quite right for historical dancing.  The figures for "Clutha" and "New Scotia Quadrille" are taken from late nineteenth-century Scottish dance books which I do not have copies of, so I can't judge the modern RSCDS reconstructions given relative to their original versions.  "Quadrille Country Dance", "The Queen's Quadrille", and "The Jubilee Quadrille" are purely modern choreographies.

(Edited 9/23/13 to add: I've since found the original source for "New Scotia Quadrille" and discuss the differences between the RSCDS and the original dance here.)

I highly recommend Music for Quadrilles.  You can purchase your own copy as a whole album (CD or download) or track-by-track here: