G'day again,

Shambles: .... Why were the dances not shorter or the tunes longer? Dances have form and tunes have form - sometimes they fit together perfectly - but usually this is when there is a specified tune for a dance of distinctive form.

Most social dances have a fairly standard length - often 32 bars and the tunes most used are also of that lengths. The set is not to fit a number of tunes to the dance but to provide a variety of tunes (most to circumvent boredom among the musicians ... most of the dancers don't notice tune shifts and would dance to the beat of and old tin drum ... if it was spot on beat!).

Sometimes dances are split between different rytrhms - or work best played that way. The Virginia Reel (at least the way we do the Australian variant) works best to successive 32 bars of reel, 32 bars of jig and a 16 bar march (with options of squeezing in extra 4 bar segmants if the dancers are slow or inexperienced. That said, there are some musicians who play reels straight through ... but vary their playing to suit each section (and some who don't!).

There are quadrilles and other 19th century 'set' dances that may use as many as 5 different types of tunes during the 'set', but these can really be thought of a 5 different dances loosely associated by being in a 'set'.

There is also an old tradition of doing dances to song tunes, where the length of the dance was the length of the song ... and the singer had better develop the shanty singer's knack of dropping or adding in verses to make the length match the expectation.

In Australia, we have a composite dancing tradition that has, over a scant two centuries, blended traditions ranging from peasant dances of Britain and Europe, ballroom dances straight from the salons of Paris, National traditions of our many varied settlers and a body of new composed dances from the explosion of publishing in the Industrial Age. What comes out the other end is perhaps a new national tradition ... if we can tell the difference!

Regards,

Bob Bolton