After my experience with the first Pride & Prejudice Collection from the Pemberley Players I wasn't in a big hurry to get their second CD, The Pride & Prejudice Collection Volume II, which is subtitled "The Jane Austen Dance Kit". Once again, the music is beautiful and the playing expert...and the selection of tunes bizarre (though better than the first collection) and the repeat structures unusable for actual historical dancing without modification. Since I knew what to expect this time, I was not as disappointed as before, but I remain exasperated at the gap between the advertising and the actual music. This is a nice collection for modern English country dancers doing dances modern-style from a wide range of eras, but it is not by any stretch of the imagination a "Jane Austen Dance Kit".
The good parts: once again, the music is absolutely lovely with a very good mix of instruments (two violins, cello, piano, and flute) for the Austen era. It's a fabulous listening CD. And the music is, for the most part, played at a steady tempo by musicians who obviously know what they are doing with social dance music.
The CD also comes with a bonus: dance instructions for this and the first one, which are useful to me primarily as an explanation of why they made some of their choices. The CD insert is also useful that way: "Jane Austen film and TV dances", it says bluntly. Ah, the Hollywood/BBC version of Austen-era dancing, which is notable mostly for its perennial failure to display any period accuracy. I can't blame the Pemberley Players for going with the movie tie-in marketing opportunities, but it doesn't make for the best experience of the era. So the bad parts are also as before: the music mix is distinctly odd for the Austen era and the repeat structures are modern rather than historical.
There are seventeen official tracks on the CD plus one hidden track, which turns out to be a re-play of a tune from the first CD that was played with the wrong number of repeats.
To get the non-Austen parts out of the way quickly, nine of the eighteen tracks are deeply out of period: "Mr. Beveridge's Maggot", "Gray's-Inn Mask", "The Hole in the Wall", "Gathering Peascods", "Jacob Hall's Jig", "Jenny Pluck Pears", "Rufty Tufty", "The Juice of Barley", and the hidden track, "Never Love Thee More". Some of these (like the infamous cult favorite, "Mr. Beveridge's Maggot") were obviously chosen because of their use in films. Some of them are completely inexplicable: "Rufty Tufty" and "Jenny Pluck Pears"??? Once again, this would be a nice selection for anyone wanting to dance in the late 17th century style; all of these are from 1650-1700. They are not remotely suitable for a "Jane Austen Dance Kit", however.
The other nine dances that are reasonably period, for values of period ranging from 1757 to 1779, which is to say before Jane Austen would ever have set foot in a ballroom, let alone set a novel, but they have the correct sound and feel for the later era. Of those nine:
Four are played only three times through ("The Lasses of Portsmouth", "Wildboar's Maggot", "The Happy Captive", and "The Barley Mow") and are thus entirely unusable for Austen-era country dancing without looping in more repeats, except as sixteen-bar dances in three-couple sets if one is willing to ignore the AABB repeat structure. "The Happy Captive", "Wildboar's Maggot", and "The Lasses of Portsmouth" are lovely reels, though, very good for that kind of dancing, and have a schottische-like feel to them that would make them usable for that dance in some context where being wildly out of period tunes for the mid-19th century wouldn't matter.
Four other tunes are played seven times through, which means they just need one repeat trimmed off to fit a three-couple set, or looping for a longer set: "Mutual Love", "Trip to Highgate", "Lord How's Jig", and "Auretti's Dutch Skipper". "Mutual Love" is also a good reel, or potential out-of-period schottische.
The ninth tune, "Shrewsbury Lasses", is a problem two ways. It's a 28-bar tune, with 8b and 12b strains. So figures have to be set carefully to match it. That isn't a big issue. But unfortunately, to fit a modern adaptation that substitutes "honours" for setting, the first strain is played with a ritard at the beginning of each repeat of the "A" strain, a tempo change that plays havoc with anyone dancing actual steps. And, of course, it's played only seven times through.
The tempo range on the nine more-or-less period dances ranges from the very slow (75 bpm for "The Lasses of Portsmouth" and "Wildboar's Maggot") to fairly brisk (116 bpm for "Auretti's Dutch Skipper").
Overall, I am still frustrated to not actually get out-of-the-box-usable Austen era country dance music from this CD, but getting four workable pieces of reel music does help reconcile me to the amount of editing I'll need to do to use any of these tracks for Austen-era country dancing. And hey, now I have some very pretty recordings of "Hole in the Wall" and "Mr. Beveridge's Maggot", just in case I ever decide to play around in the 1690s.
The CD can be purchased from CDSS in the USA or from Fain Music, the Pemberley Players' umbrella company, in the UK. The Fain Music website also offers a downloadable version of the album and sheet music for this CD and the first one.
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