I just read the thread about german folk music. Very interesting. I am german, lived in Ireland for a year and started playing irish music there. After coming back I started to wonder about our own traditional music. I know there are some songs that are still enjoyed (some people gathering round a fire, someone with a guitar and everybody will sing along to "dat du min leevsten bist") but what happened to the dance tunes? I found some second hand sheetmusic-books with dance music but they are all arranged for piano. What are the traditional instruments in the different parts of germany? What was it like at a "country dance" a hundred, two hundred years ago? Have the musicians been organized in clubs/Vereine or did this only happen at the turn of the century (not the last one!)? You know -singing only in "Männergeangsverein" yodeling only in yodeling-clubs. I am pretty sure that the traditional music has been changed by the collectors who put my tune books togehter. They studied music after all so they might have "corrected some mistakes" that the traditional musicians made when arranging things for piano. I think that maybe some of the original music might have survived in america or maybe in east european places with german minority communities. Maybe it survived in germany and I just never heard it. Are there any web-pages, CDs, Books, tune collections etc. about german dance tunes? I am also interested in links to german folk song pages but it's mostly the tunes I'm after.