Capering & Kickery

Susan de Guardiola, Social Dance Historian

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Tag: Victorian dance

  • Howe’s “Rats” Quadrille (1 of 3)

    RatsLogoLes Rats Quadrilles is a set of five tunes composed by G. Redler as alternate music for the first set of French quadrilles. The tunes are unusually good, and the set became enormously popular and was reprinted for many years, not only in England but in America and Australia as well.  In 1854 a  piano-duet (four hands) version arranged by J. C. Vierec was published in Philadelphia.

    Some editions featured the “tree roots” version of the title shown at left, and others a small orchestra of rats with various instruments.  American editions seem to have credited the composer as “J. Redler”, but English sources consistently give his first initial as “G”.

    I do not have a definitive initial date for the first publication of Les Rats, but in 1846, A. M. Hartley, in his The academic speaker, a system of elocution (Glasgow) mentions on page 319 the inclusion of “Redler’s popular Rat Quadrilles” in Volume I of the collected Hamilton’s Cabinet of Music, a sheet music series, which puts Les Rats into the first half of the 1840s.

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  • Late Nineteenth-Century Variations for the Five-Step Waltz

    • Era: 1880s & 1890s America

    Back in May, I described one of two versions of the mid-nineteenth century Five-Step Waltz and promised a later continuation looking at some of the variations that appeared in the last decades of the century.  Mr. Saracco’s version of the dance, discussed in that earlier post, continued to appear in later American dance manuals: Allen Dodworth (New York, 1885), William DeGarmo (New York, 1892), M.B. Gilbert (Maine, 1890), C.H. Rivers (Brooklyn, c1885), Judson Sause (Chicago, 1889), Cartier (New York, 1882), Cartier & Baron (New York, 1879), Lucien Carpenter (Philadelphia, 1882), and M.J. Koncen (St. Louis, 1883).  Most of these manuals are compilations and offer no new information, but Dodworth, Gilbert, and DeGarmo were actual dancing masters, and the three of them offer a few simple variations on the original five-step waltz that may be useful to those recreating the dances of the 1880s and 1890s.

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  • Lamb’s American Schottische

    English dance teacher William Lamb, in his Everybody's Guide to Ball-Room Dancing (London c1898-1900), published quite a few short dance sequences, most of limited interest to the average dancer.  His American Schottische has more potential than most of these because it does not involve any reverse-line-of-dance movement and thus can be easily used as a simple variation when dancing a late 19th-century schottische. 

    Despite the name, there is nothing specifically American about this particular sequence, and it does not seem to have been taken up by other writers/compilers of dance manuals, even those who otherwise plagiarized Lamb quite freely.  I suspect it was not a particular hit, perhaps never having any life in period outside the pages of Lamb's book.  Nonetheless, I find it quite danceable and an interesting break from more typical schottische patterns.

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Capering & Kickery

Susan de Guardiola, Social Dance Historian

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