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.
