If all goes well, a MIDI file for an old country dance (1650 or before) will appear here. It's a good tune for November (November in the northern hemisphere, I mean.) It's sad and wistful, and when I play it, I picture a cold mist outside and cold, gray walls inside. It is called Dissembling Love, and it has been used as a dance tune, but I doubt if that was the original purpose for it.

I found this song because I had been ruminating on Greensleeves. The version of Greensleeves which our gang plays is from 1595, and it has the unusual feature that it employs both G and G# in the tune. I decided to look in Peter Barnes' book of country dances and see if other tunes did anything like that. I found "Dissembling Love", which uses both D and D#. In other words, these are both tunes which are afraid to commit.

The bass part is absurdly simple, but I don't have time to polish it. When I try, the results are null, because the basic sound is so simple. So don't be put off by it - get out your instruments and start working on cold, misty fields and stone walls.

The chords are:

Em Em G/Am B
repeat the above
Em/Am G   Am/B Em
repeat the above

Since MIDI doesn't seem to store repeat signs, let me say that the A part consists of 2 sets of four measures plus a pick-up beat, and they are identical. The B part has four measures plus two pick-up notes (sixteenths) and they are also identical. Somebody wrote a dance which requires the B part to be played three times, but I think that is too repetitious, so I decided to drop the third repeat.

I hope that the MIDI shows up and that people will play it.

PS I refuse to enter into any debates about whether it is Italian. Get our your instruments instead.

Oh yeah - there was a twiddle in the penultimate measure which just wouldn't come no matter how much I practiced, so I re-wrote it to something more natural. I suspect it was a misprint from 1650. (I remember an editor remarking that the second edition of Playford corrected the errors of the first edition and introduced many new ones.)