Getting useable music for Regency-era dancing is a chronically frustrating problem, and there are very few albums I can recommend wholeheartedly. Many of the recordings advertised as "Regency" or "Jane Austen" suffer from a weirdly expansive idea of "Regency era" that goes back to the 17th century or forward to the 20th. Almost all have an incorrect number of repeats of the music for period dancing, which matches repeats to set length in a specific way that does not accord with modern recording habits.
Dance and Danceability is an Austen-themed album of country dance tunes from the Scottish dance band The Assembly Players (Nicolas Broadbridge, Aidan Broadbridge, and Brian Prentice). Aidan Broadbridge is a name that may be especially recognizable to Austen enthusiasts -- he was the fiddler for the 2005 film adaptation of Pride & Prejudice
Sadly, this is one of the frustrating CDs.
On the good side:
The selection of tunes is indisputably period. There are twenty-one pieces, all from Jane Austen's lifetime (1775-1817). Twenty are from English sources and one ("The Young Widow") from America. The Assembly Players know how to play for dancers, and all tracks are played at danceable tempos with no annoying art-music tricks to surprise dancers in mid-dance. Some of these tunes are frequently recorded ("The Duke of Kent's Waltz"), but many are pieces for which I have no other recording.
Modern interpretations of the dances are provided in the liner notes, and while those are mostly so altered from the original that they are unsuitable for historical-reenactment use, they happily include citations for the source of each tune or figures, which means that if one wants to dance the specific figures set to it in that source, one can look them up.* Or one can follow period practice and set whatever figures seem good.
On the annoying side:
Consistent with modern practices, the selections are recorded, variously, at three, five, or seven times through. Not a single one is a workable length for historical dancing, which needs repeats of six, twelve, sixteen, twenty, etc. One could ignore the melody and adapt the 32-, 48-. and 64-bar tunes played three times to 16b, 24b, or 32b x6 for three-couple sets, but that's not really ideal and leaves any longer set out of luck. Or one could hit the music-editing software and adapt them, but it's really irritating to have to do that for all of them. And this recording does not always have really clean breaks between each repeat that would make it simple to loop.
Some of the tracks also have long ritards at the end or pauses before the final chord which work poorly with historical footwork. One really can't hang magically in the air in mid-assemblé. These problems are also addressable with careful editing.
And the really bad news:
The insurmountable problem with this album is the instrumentation. The Assembly Players make heavy use of the accordion. The accordion is a very distinctive-sounding instrument. And it is one which happens to not be period for this era. While one could argue about precisely when it was invented (apparently in the 1820s, but there may have been earlier versions and it has much older Asian antecedents), in no way, shape, or form was it an English ballroom instrument (or even a quaint village instrument) during Jane Austen's lifetime. Just...no.
I can overlook modern pianos, which do differ in sound from the early pianoforte, on historical recordings. But accordion is very hard to ignore and to me when they are used for country dance tunes they just scream modern Scotland rather than late eighteenth century anywhere. There are many recordings for modern Scottish country dancing that have great period jigs and reels and are likewise laden with accordions. I don't recommend them for historical dancing because of this, and I have trouble recommending this CD for historical use for the same reason. It would be fine for modern English country dancing, or for listening if one likes this instrument mix, but that's not what I'm looking for.
If you can manage to get past the very modern sound of the accordion and loop the tracks so they are long enough to be useable and do not have odd end-issues, Dance and Danceability could be usable for practice purposes (never at an actual ball!) That's a lot of effort for an audibly ahistorical result when there are recordings available that don't have these problems.
If you want to purchase this CD, it is available directly from Nicolas Broadbridge in England (warning: website starts playing an audio track immediately upon opening).
* Okay, one can look them up if one is me and has a frighteningly large catalog of books of period dance tunes and figures or has a similar collection or access to top-notch research libraries.
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