I received the CD North & South: Forgotten Music from the American Civil War (Gaslantern Records, 2013) and its accompanying sheet music as a birthday gift this year, and a very lovely gift it was! Sixteen new pieces of historical music, beautifully played by the Orchestra of the Gilded Age, conducted by Jeffrey Hunter, many of them suitable for dancing!
The actual disc features a gorgeous historical battle scene, but there are no real liner notes included. Happily, almost all the information one could want appears on the album website: not merely dates and lengths, but composers, background notes, and even the musical key of each piece.
This is a "listening" CD, not made specifically for dancers, but many of the pieces will work for dancing. As usual, I've gone through the album track by track and made notes about which pieces are danceable and for what.
Of special note: the album is divided into two themes, "North" and "South", with the pieces for each named in honor of particular Union or Confederate leaders or otherwise connected to one side. If one's dancers or listeners are apt to find such celebratory naming problematic, be careful which half you select from!
First, the three art pieces which, while fun to listen to, are not suitable for dancing:
"Battle of Gettysburg:
"I'm Going Home to Dixie"
"Improvisation on The Bonnie Blue Flag"
"Battle of Gettysburg" is particularly impressive, as it musically illustrates the battle from the Grand Army of the Potomac's entry into Pennsylvania to the Rebel prisoners being marched away, with a bit of Star Spangled Banner at the end. The full list of the events depicted in this piece is on the website.
There are five marches, ranging from slow to very brisk. The briskest, "General Lee's Grand March", is so brisk I wouldn't use it for a march, so I've not listed it in this category. The other four vary somewhat in their march-like quality, but the main problem with them is that they are all very short, the longest not even being three and a half minutes. That is not nearly long enough for the most common use for marches at a mid-nineteenth-century American ball, a Grand March. Possibly some clever looping could extend them. They could also be used as workable polkas.
"President Lincoln's Grand March" (100 bpm)
"Fort Sumter Quick Step" (106 bpm)
"Jefferson Davis Grand March" (111 bpm)
"Pickett's Charge March" (114 bpm)
There are two official galops and one march so brisk that it works as one. The "Ericsson Galop" is played at a killer pace, even by galop standards. The other two are in a more typical range for the dance.
"General Lee's Grand March" (121 bpm)
"Sherman's Advance on Savannah Galop" (122 bpm)
"Ericsson Galop" (143 bpm)
There are two polkas on the disc, both danceable, and, as noted above, the marches can also double as polkas in a pinch. Their tempo is more suited to relaxed sliding footwork than the more technically stylish (hop)slide-cut-leap. Note that "Dixie Polka" has some six-bar phrases, which will drive dancers accustomed to perfect eight-bar phrases for everything absolutely crazy.
"General Grant Polka" (104 bpm)
"Dixie Polka" (109 bpm)
The two schottisches are both fine for dancing, and it's a pleasure to have new ones!
"McClellan Schottisch" (65 bpm)
"General Forrest Schottisch" (70 bpm)
Alas, there is only one waltz, at a gentle tempo. It has a lengthy thirty-two-second introduction, but once one gets past that, it is quite danceable.
"Appomattox Waltz" (132 bpm)
And, finally, there is a mazurka, played very, very slowly with ritards I can only describe as "trancelike". I like my mazurkas slower than they are often danced nowadays, but this is too slow even for my tastes. It's beautiful, but it would take substantial speeding up with software to make it good for dancing. Given the ritards, I would keep it listening-only.
"Silver Bells Mazurka" (95 bpm)
Wonderfully, Gaslantern has also provided for those lucky enough to have musicians to dance to or to play in concert by making all of the sheet music for all of these pieces available in clean, modern format as well, in either physical form or PDF. I'm no judge of the quality of musical arrangements, and I don't have access to all the original sheet music to see whether they have exclusively copied the originals or added their own harmony lines, but the music is laid out clearly, easy to read, and includes details like the dedications for pieces that have them and the events meant to be depicted in each phrase of "Battle of Gettysburg". The physical book is spiral-bound for ease of use.
The one problem with the CD, website, and book is that nowhere in all of this can I find any list of credits for individual musicians or a list of what instruments were played for the recording. I tried contacting Gaslantern by email and got no response. It sounds inoffensive to me overall, but my ear for instruments is not good enough to catch something not-quite-period slipping through.
North & South (CD and sheet music) may be purchased at the Gaslantern Records website. Note that their shipping practices are aggravating: there is no shopping cart, so each item must be ordered separately and will be shipped separately. I highly recommend this album for anyone doing mid-nineteenth century couple dance, or who enjoys listening to the music of this era, and the sheet music for bands that play for it.
Special thanks to Serge for the wonderful birthday present!
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