One of my students asked me at class last night whether he owned all of the dance trio Spare Parts’ CDs.  Apparently not, as he was surprised to hear about the ten-year-old Dancing by the Shore: Victorian Music from Nahant.

This album seems to get less attention than their others, perhaps because the music on it cannot be pigeonholed into a single era.  The word “Victorian” in the title is a bit of a stretch; more than a third of the tracks are technically pre-Victorian.

The tunes for Dancing by the Shore were pulled from sheet music in the archives of the Nahant Historical Society, and the recording was originally advertised as for its benefit.  Each piece has some connection to the town of Nahant, Massachusetts, which was a popular island resort in the nineteenth century.  The cover image, at left, is a depiction of the Nahant Hotel in the 1850s.

Spare Parts plays as a trio (of varying components), and they make high-quality, musically-engaging recordings good for both dancing and listening.  That this album is great for the latter is a given.  I will discuss the details of the tracks purely in the context of their usability for historical dancing.

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The very short version of this review is: historical dance band Spare Parts‘ The Regency Ballroom is one of the very best and most diverse recordings available for Regency-era dance music, and everyone should go out and get their own copy to support the making of such recordings.

The longer version follows.

But first, a disclaimer: the musicians of Spare Parts are personal friends, the band has played for my Regency Assemblies for the past several years, the selection of dances on this CD parallels the program of those Assemblies, and I served as one of the dance consultants for the recording and thus received a copy of it for free.  Unsurprisingly, I am very pleased with it.  I do not, however, receive any financial benefit from its sales or anything like that.

So what’s on the CD?

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