Tunes only

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Another Fast Packet       

Music: Colin Hume, 2007.

Bob Lilley's excellent dance “The Fast Packet” was published in CDSS News and has become one of the very few step-hop dances to enter the American repertoire.  American musicians who play for English Country Dance are convinced that every English dance has its own tune and are thrown into confusion if the caller asks for “32-bar hornpipes” which would be very normal in England.  So they had to put a tune in CDSS News, and Bob suggested an undotted hornpipe which has now become “the” tune for the dance.  I much prefer a dotted hornpipe, so here's my suggestion.  Try it and see whether you prefer it — and don't listen to anyone who tells you it's the wrong tune!

Maggie's Moving On       

Music: Colin Hume.  Date unknown.

Maggie Grant of New Jersey asked me to write a waltz for her, and I was very pleased with this one (though I struggle to play it).  As written it's a 64-bar waltz, so if you're playing it at the end of a dance and don't want it to go on too long (in England, I'm talking about) you could play it AABBCCDD and then ABCD.

Pat's Tradition       

Music: Colin Hume.  Date unknown.

The dance was written by Cor Hogendijk for Pat Shaw, who had close links with The Netherlands, and published in “English or Double Dutch” in 1973.  There's not much live music for dancing in The Netherlands, and for this reason (I assume) dances are often written to existing recorded tunes.  Cor set this one to the Scottish jig “My wife's a wanton wee thing”.  Mick Peat and the Ripley Wayfarers used a different tune, and Mick told the dancers that the last phrase of music said “Move up, move up, move up”.  “No it doesn't”, I thought, so I wrote one that did!  I also felt that a dance this good deserved its own tune.  Later when Wild Thyme were recording the “Dutch Crossing” CD they used my tune for the reprise of “Pat's Tradition”.  This came in for some criticism from people in Belgium and Holland who felt that it was not right to use a different tune, and by this time Cor was dead so I couldn't ask him.  The same criticism was applied to my tune for Ernst van Brakel's dance “Dutch Crossing” (for which he had used a recording of the Scottish reel “Merry Lads of Ayr”), though in this case I had asked Ernst and he had said it was fine.  He told me that people who were used to the old tune preferred that, whereas people new to the dance preferred mine.