Hi Y'all,

Regarding medleys and such. I am not sure how much this has to do with dance tradition. Just dealing with Irish/Scottish/English/Colonial type dances, it seems to me that each dance had a corresponding tune (i.e. The Chorus Jig was danced to the tune of the same name--not a jig by the way; Rufty Tufty could only be danced to Rufty Tufty; etc.) A lot of the Irish set dances like The Black Bird have not only have specific tunes that go with them, but the tunes themselves are bent, i.e. they don't fit into the standard 32 bar, 64 beat, AABB framework. These older dances have certain figures in them which require specific musical phrasing to fit them.

That said, I don't think that the making of medleys is a modern convention either. Just looking at the names of certain tunes backs this up. There are a lot of tunes that have the word "rakes" in them, The Rakes of Mallow for example. I used to think this referred to rakish young men. In fact, a rake is a medley of tunes. Similarly, the word "humours" as in the Humours of Ballyloughlin. To humour a tune is to play it thru several times with different variations. So I think there is evidence to show that the players of traditional music have been using medleys for quite a while. But I think it is more a way of showing individual virtuosity as a traditional player, than to accomodate longer dances.

BeauD