"Little Carrie's Favorite Galop" appeared in the music book Howe's Drawing Room Dances, published by Oliver Ditson & Company in 1859 for the Boston musician-caller-publisher-author Elias Howe. The figures published with the music were intended as a single quadrille figure, which I was asked to reconstruct for a mid-nineteenth century performing group. The figures themselves are standard ones, but correlating them with the music makes coming up with a definitive reconstruction a bit of a challenge.
Here are the music and figures as they appear in Howe's Drawing Room Dances. Click the image to enlarge it.
There are two underlying problems in reconstructing the figures to "Little Carrie":
- The figures are laid out ambiguously on the score.
- The five eight-bar figures are not an obvious fit with music of sixteen-bar strains.
To get a workable reconstruction, one can either alter the figures to fit the music better or keep the figures the way they are and suffer poor correlation with the music.
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For the dance figures, we have:
- all galopade
- two couples galopade
- two couples right & left
- all balance & turn partners
- two couples ladies' chain
Each of those figures should take eight bars, which means a forty-bar figure, which would be played twice, so that head and side couples can lead it. According to the repeat signs and Da Capo above, the music ought to be played AABBA, which is a total of eighty bars, exactly what is needed. Mathematically, it's perfect. In practice, however, it has some problems.
Here's how the figures would line up with the musical strains:
A All galop Heads galop
A Heads right and left All balance & turn
B Heads ladies' chain All galop
B Sides galop Sides right and left
A All balance & turn Sides ladies' chain
That is an extremely strange and musically-annoying way to match quadrille figures to music. Even leaving aside whether one is dancing to the A or B strain, it would be very odd to have the initial figure (all galopade) start once at the beginning of a strain and once in the middle.
If one ignored the repeat signs, which were not always printed with dance instructions in mind in nineteenth-century sheet music, and considered the general idea to simply be "end the tune on the A strain", one could play the tune ABABA instead, but that does not help at all with the correlation issue.
I do not see either repeat structure as a good solution.
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Aside from the correlation with the music, there are two other issues to consider: (1) there is no music for honors, and (2) there is an anticlimactic ending, with two couples performing a ladies' chain and two not moving at all.
The lack of music for honors is a problem for a quadrille figure; there should be eight measures for bows and courtesies to partners and either opposites or corners. And in quadrilles, the music for honors is generally built into the music as written, with the honors performed during the first playing of the A strain. There are exceptions, like the single-chord introduction of the fifth figure of the Lancers, but there is no indication of that here.
The two-couple ending is not necessarily a problem; one could just have a badly-designed quadrille figure with a poor ending. But usually one doesn't. When a quadrille figure follows the pattern of having an all-eight figure (galopade, chassé-croisé, etc.) followed by assorted figures for smaller numbers, there's generally a repeat of the all-eight figure at the end, as a kind of choreographic coda.
But what if the all-galopade is meant to be at the end, instead? Perhaps the slightly unusual layout of the figures is significant?
Normally in Howe's layouts, the figures are either above or between the staves of music, and two figures on the same line would be for the first and second playings of that particular strain. But in this case, we have one figure (all galopade) above and on the far right, then two figures (1st 4 galopade and right & left) jammed together between them on the left, then a conventionally laid out balance & turn and ladies' chain. Is the odd placement of the "all galopade" meant to indicate that it should be played at the end of the figure (on the da capo repeat) rather than at the beginning? A two-couple beginning is better (and much more typical) than a two-couple ending, and there would be no need for an extra eight bars for a final galopade.
This is something Howe actually did, in a different book.
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Take a look at the first figure of La Gallopade Quadrille, which was published on page 76 of Howe's Complete Ball-Room Handbook in 1858:
No. 1 First four gallopade — right and left — balance and turn all eight — ladies chain — all gallopade — sides the same
The long dashes break up figures of eight bars each. That is exactly what "Little Carrie" would be if the all galopade were at the end of the figure:
8b Head couples galopade
8b Head couples right and left
8b All eight balance to partners and two-hand turn
8b Head couples ladies' chain
8b All eight galopade
Repeat all of the above with the side couples leading.
That takes care of the problem of the weak ending. But along with having no room for quadrille-style honors, it still leaves us with the same dreadful musical correlation. And not needing an extra galopade is not actually an improvement, since it leaves us lacking eight bars when the strains are sixteen bars long.
The simplest solution would be to add a repeat of one strain of the music, giving room for honors, with the extra galopade to fill it out.
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Solution #1: add an extra strain of music
Figures: 96 bars (8b + 40b + 40b + 8b)
Music: ABA ABA or AABBAA
8b Introductory honors (does not repeat)
8b All galopade completely around
8b Head couples galopade
8b Head couples right and left
8b All balance and turn partners
8b Head couples ladies' chain
Repeat last forty bars with the side couples leading and end with
8b All galopade complete around
That would be my preferred reconstruction of the dance figures given, if only I didn't have to match them to sixteen-bar strains of music. But, just as in the version without the honors and extra galopade, the correlation of figures and strains is terrible:
A Honors All galop
B Heads galop Heads right and left
A All balance & turn Heads ladies' chain
A All galop Sides galop
B Sides right and left All balance & turn
A Sides ladies' chain All galop
Switching to AABBAA does not improve things. Again, it's not physically impossible to dance it this way, but it does not look anything like a typical quadrille musical pattern. And that is why, despite this being an accurate reconstruction of the given figures, this is not my preferred reconstruction.
Going back to the odd layout of the figures, the squeezing together of the instructions for the "1st 4 galopade" and "right & left" figures leaves some wiggle room for unconventional interpretation of those two figures as well, and in a way that would let them fit into the music as written. This leads me to a different reconstruction which is a less strict interpretation of the figures but works much better musically.
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Solution #2: tweak the figures to match the music
Figures: 80 bars (8b + 32b + 32b + 8b)
Music: AABBA or ABABA
8b Introductory honors (does not repeat)
8b All galopade completely around
4b Head couples galopade halfway round
4b Head couples half right and left home
8b All balance and turn partners
8b Head couples ladies' chain
Repeat last thirty-two bars with the side couples leading and end with
8b All galopade complete around
Rather than adding an extra strain-repeat to make room for the honors and the extra galopade, I've chopped the two-couple galopade and the right and left into half-figures, based on the way they are squeezed together on the score. With the music played exactly as written (AABBA), this gives decent, though not wonderful, music correlation. Each couple starts their own galop at the beginning of a strain, though it's not the same strain:
A honors + all galopade
A heads galop halfway & half right and left to places + all balance & turn
B heads ladies' chain + all galopade
B sides galop halfway & half right and left to places + all balance & turn
A sides ladies' chain + all galopade
But playing the music ABABA correlates even better with the dance figures:
A honors + all galopade
B heads galop halfway & half right and left to places + all balance & turn
A heads ladies' chain + all galopade
B sides galop halfway & half right and left to places + all balance & turn
A sides ladies' chain + all galopade
Aesthetically, that's about as good as it gets, and a half-figure (of some sort) followed by a half right & left to places is a very typical sequence in quadrilles.
The only reason I cannot state definitively that this is the correct reconstruction is that I do not really think that "1st 4 galopade-right and left" was meant to be interpreted as galopade halfway around and then half right and left home. There are plenty of examples in Drawing Room Dances of the use of "half right and left" and similar constructions. If that is what they had meant, they could have just printed it that way. The layout isn't so crowded as to preclude adding two words.
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I think the underlying explanation for why "Little Carrie" is such a mess is probably that the figures were attached to this piece of music arbitrarily, without paying any attention to how the combination would work in practice. So it's just not possible to come up with a perfect solution with the music and figures precisely as written.
If one is determined to dance it anyway, which reconstruction to choose comes down to whether one prefers precisely-reconstructed figures, at the expense of musical correlation, or superior musical correlation, at the expense of altering the figures. I can't see any way to do a reconstruction without making one compromise or the other.
My personal choice, obviously, is the second solution: add the honors and extra galopade, sacrificing half of the two-couple galopade and right & left figures to make room, and play the music ABABA, since that gives the best musical correlation.
Music
Conveniently, there is a piano recording of "Little Carrie's Favorite Galop" by expert dance musician Jacqueline Schwab available. It is an eighty-bar recording, played ABABA; presumably Jacqueline did not believe the repeat bars either. This precisely matches my preferred reconstruction. There is an added four-bar introduction, which may be trimmed off with music-editing software or simply ignored when dancing.
A sample of the recording may be heard on its Amazon page
To match the ninety-six-bar reconstruction, one would need to either engage live musicians, commission a new recording, or doctor the Schwab recording. The easiest alteration would be adding another A in the middle for ABA ABA.
Performance notes
Whichever reconstruction one settles on, here are a few notes on the performance of the individual figures:
- Galopades are done by couples in closed ballroom hold, using a series of four-slide galops, making quarter-turns at the end of each to travel in a sort of diamond pattern around the set. When only the heads or sides galop, they should stay inside the other couples.
- I would perform the right and left, ladies' chain, and two-hand turn using forward galop steps (basically, low-key chassé steps). They could conceivably be walked, but this is a galop quadrille figure with fairly brisk music and the dancers may want the added speed of the galop steps.
- A quadrille right and left in America in this era would be done by passing right shoulders (no hands) and then giving left hands.
- Both the right and left and the ladies' chain use open turns by the left hand -- no modern-style courtesy turns! The two dancers just take left hands and change places, the gentlemen spinning in place at the end to face inward again at the halfway point and at the end of the figure.
- For the balance, I favor a four-slide galop to the right and then the same back to the left, facing partners throughout.
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Jacqueline Schwab's recording of "Little Carrie's Favorite Galop" is available from Amazon here:
This post is especially for Richard and his group.
Thanks for asking me to work on this, and good luck with the dance!
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