G'day Dulcimer,

Here in Australia there are many collected schottishes that have come from Europe, UK and (to a lesser degree) from Ireland. One set that I played at my Workshop last night, collected from an old bloke named Mick Pilley, obviously has some "Irish" content, because it starts off with the "Stage Irish" song tune Paddy McGinty's Goat.

We tend to see schottisches as either plain schottisches or Highland schottisches ... most obviously separated by whether they use a lot of triplets, in the original German fashion or have a lot of "Scotch snaps", presumably flowing across from the Strathspey tunes that must have been adapted for the Highland Schottische - and then "leaked" over into more general schottisches.

One collected tune we call the Whistled Schottische, because Rita Baker, an old Gulgong area fiddler, could no longer manage to play it ... so she whistled it to John Meredith, the collector, is traceable to a published tune of c. 1848 called the Little Dorrit Schottische. In the original published form, all the decoration is in the form of triplets. The tune collected in 1981 has, within its 32 bars, 27 Scotch snaps ... something of a record!

Many of this tunes survived as tunes for the Barn Dance, a sort of degenerate descendant of the Military Schottische and were still popular where the dancers remembered the more complex stepping of the schottische, rather than the "one, two, three, kick &c" of the (post 1924?)Progressive Barn Dance.

Regards,

Bob Bolton