Capering & Kickery

Susan de Guardiola, Social Dance Historian

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Category: Music

  • CD Review: The Grand Victorian Ballroom

    The Grand Victorian Ballroom: Waltzes, Quadrilles, Contras, Polkas, and Other 19th Century Dance Music (Gaslantern Records, 2012), with its accompanying sheet music, is the second of two CDs I received for my birthday earlier this year, along with North & South.  But unlike North & South, this album was designed for dancing, so it is both beautifully played for listening pleasure and entirely functional as dance music.  The musicians, once again, are the members of the Orchestra of the Gilded Age (I still don’t know exactly who those members are) conducted by Jeffrey Hunter.

    Edited 1/26/2026 to add: Sadly, this company seems to be out of business and the CD and sheet music book are no longer available for sale, though they might still be found used somewhere.  All links have been changed to archive links.

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  • CD Review: North & South

    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!

    Edited 1/25/2026 to add: Sadly, this company seems to be out of business and the CD and sheet music book are no longer available for sale, though they might still be found used somewhere.  All links have been changed to archive links.

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  • CD Review: Ragtime Dance Party

    Ragtime Dance Party Cover Ragtime Dance Party is the one and only album released by the Crown Syncopators, a San Francisco-based trio that performs at ragtime music festivals on the West Coast.  I’ve never had the pleasure of dancing to their music in person, which this album makes me very much regret.  Per the title, every single tune is danceable as well as a joy to listen to.  I highly recommend it for anyone who enjoys American music and dance of the 1890-1920 era.

    The Crown Syncopators consist of Frederick Hodges (piano), Victoria Tichenor (drums), and Marty Eggers (tuba).  They don’t seem to have a website. but their appearances are listed on Hodges’ event schedule here.  (Updated 12/30/25 because the schedule no longer exists.)

    The CD comes with ten pages of liner notes that contain the background on each piece and reproductions of the original sheet music covers.  Along with familiar favorites like Scott Joplin, James Reese Europe, and James Scott, I was especially pleased to see in the mix a couple of less-familiar female composers, Grace Marie Bolen and Adeline (or Adaline) Shepherd, both of whose careers were cut short by marriage.

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  • CD Review: The Robert E. Lee

    The Robert E. Lee cover art The Robert E. Lee (1997) is a neat little album of solo piano played by the famous musician Bob Milne, who is not only a top-notch ragtime pianist, music historian, and “national treasure” who performed at The Library of Congress in 2004, but also has the astonishing ability to “play” multiple tunes at once in his head, meaning that he can do incredible tricks like playing music in 3/4, 4/4, and 5/4 simultaneously.  There’s a fascinating article about his abilities at Mlive.com.

    The CD title and the famous tune “Waiting for the Robert E. Lee” both refer to the famous steamship which won a race from New Orleans to St. Louis in 1870.

    I have had The Robert E. Lee sitting around for over a decade but only ever used one track, “Trouble in Mind”, regularly, as an interesting change of style for when I DJ for modern blues dancers.  Until I started teaching ragtime more often than usual this year I hadn’t really gone through the rest of the album carefully.  The CD wasn’t recorded specifically for dancing, so some of the pieces don’t have the regular rhythm one would desire, but about half of them are quite good for dancing, a few others are workable, and the piano playing is invariably a joy to listen to even for the less danceable tunes.

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  • CD Review: Dancing by the Shore: Victorian Music from Nahant

    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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  • CD Review: Dance and Danceability

    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 (paid link) as well as the fictionalized pseudo-biopic Becoming Jane (2007) (paid link).

    Sadly, this is one of the frustrating CDs.

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  • CD Review: Grandview Victorian Orchestra

    I ordered the Grandview Victorian Orchestra‘s CD Elegant Music from Times Gone By in the wake of a pleasant email exchange with musical director John Reading about quadrille music last autumn.  The album is a mix of country (contra) dance medleys of various sorts mixed with a few other tunes and played on an interesting instrumental mix of piano, fiddle, hammered dulcimer, bodhran, shaker, banjo, and acoustic bass.  I’m not sure about the acoustic bass, but the other instruments are legitimate for late nineteenth-century America and provide a more “rural” sound than most of the music I use, very appropriate for country dance tunes.

    The music mix is definitely from “times gone by”, though not all of those times are actually Victorian and will need to be considered on a case-by-case basis for historical events.  The arrangements are really lovely, though, and it makes a great listening CD even if not every track is strictly correct and/or usable for historical dancing.

    My comments on the individual tracks follow.

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  • CD Review: Returning Heroes

    Brand new this month — the release party is coming up in a couple of weeks — is the dance band Spare Parts‘ latest CD of mid-nineteenth-century dance music, Returning Heroes.  After dancing for many years to music from their earlier CD, The Civil War Ballroom, it’s a delight to have new music for this era!

    The short review: it’s a great CD; buy it immediately if you enjoy dancing of the Civil War era.

    The longer version follows.

    Disclaimer: the musicians of Spare Parts are personal friends, and my advance copy of this CD was sent to me as a gift.

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  • CD Review: The Regency Ballroom

    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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Capering & Kickery

Susan de Guardiola, Social Dance Historian

Email Susan

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