English Dance and Song December 2023
This news item is based on articles in English Dance and Song, the magazine of the English Folk Dance and Song Society. The world’s oldest magazine for folk music and dance, EDS was first published in 1936 and is essential reading for anyone with a passion for folk arts.
Janet Maile, founder of the Authentic Playford project, encourages you to explore Playford dances – and offers advice on how to tackle playing the music.
Between 1651 and 1728, John Playford and his successors published several editions of The Dancing Master, containing hundreds of dances, each with their own tune. Folk dance clubs who do not put Playford dances on the programme are missing out.
Many Playford dances are lively and interesting, and as suitable for today’s dancers as they were hundreds of years ago.
As a folk musician, if you have not been asked to play any Playford tunes at a club session before, there can be many challenges. Even if you are a good sight reader, do always look at the music in advance! A time signature of 3/2 or 6/4 is common and requires some thought if you have never met them before. Care should be taken to play in a way that reflects the dancers’ movements. 3/2 has three beats to the bar, but is not a ballroom waltz. 6/4 has two beats to the bar divided into groups of three, but is not a Scottish or Irish jig.
Some of the tunes have the familiar eight bars of A music and eight bars of B music, but others are different. The Whim has six bars for each section; Lady Williams’ Delight has five bars for A and eight for B. Usually the A music and B music is repeated, but there are exceptions. If you have been given a modern score it may be marked accordingly, but unfortunately this is not always the case, so ask the caller in advance what repeats you should be doing.
The Authentic Playford project I love early music and I love dancing. What better than to put the two together and start constructing some of Playford’s dances from the original instructions?
Many have not been done at all, while others have been, but are not true to the original instructions.
Dances can be difficult to work out.
Playford used a kind of shorthand, brief notes that are open to interpretation. Sometimes they need a different perspective. Language is used differently from today: what is the meaning of ‘go the figure’, for example? There is nothing more rewarding than when I have cracked the case, especially if it is a dance that has foxed others for decades, such as Whimbleton House. It was first reconstructed by Douglas and Helen Kennedy in 1929, but they did not follow the original instructions.
Having successfully reconstructed Whimbleton House, I was hooked. I went on to do other dances, and so the Authentic Playford project was born. It is still in its infancy, but new dances are being added all the time.
Some Playford dances are a little dull for today’s dancers and, without all the fancy footwork of the past, there is often too much music for the available steps.
I address this problem in the project’s twin, Contemporary Playford. I write new versions of the dances that are more interesting for the modern dancer, while keeping as much of the original as possible. To distinguish between the two, only the original dance has the original name.
View the tunes and the dances at juiceofbarley.weebly.com/authentic.html
If you can help the project by reconstructing a Playford dance using only the original instructions, please contact me via the website.
My thanks go to Alison Ede of Pastime (Historical Dance), Chelsfield, for her insights into early dance.
The Mystery of Whimbleton House
Getting the phrasing right, as in any dance music, is essential.
For those who are not familiar with early music, one of the most confusing of Playford’s tunes is Whimbleton House.
This is what Playford gives us for the A music:
The first thought is that the time signature is wrong. There are four segments, comprising three beats, two beats, two beats and three beats, or two five-beat phrases. A mistake surely?
Some attempts to reconstruct the dance give the music an extra two beats, but this strips the soul out of this gem of a tune. Playford was a composer, not just a publisher. He knew what he was doing, so what is going on here?
To appreciate the tune, you need to set aside all you know about time signatures and bar lines. Early music did not have them. That’s right. No bar lines. Without the regimented system of bars of equal length we have today, people such as Giovanni Gabrieli, Thomas Dowland, William Byrd and Orlando Gibbons, to name a few, wrote fascinating and brilliant compositions. These days the modern scores contain bar lines, but these are not necessarily an indication of where the phrases begin and end.
A system of bar lines and time signatures came into use about the middle of the 17th century, but it was not the rigid system we have now. Whimbleton House was published in 1701, but we can assume the tune is much older than that. Faced with A music with ten beats, and an expectation that the music will have bar lines, Playford solved the problem by dividing the bars into 2 beats.
Back in Playford’s time, they would have taken this in their stride. Musicians, used to having no bar lines at all, were not thrown by bar lines which fell in the middle of the phrase. They knew where the phrases began and ended and played accordingly.
For the modern musician, working out the correct phrasing in early music can be a challenge. It means looking at things from a different perspective, but it is rewarding when it ‘clicks’ and you realise what the composer was trying to say.
Today, the A music of Whimbleton House is written like this. I hope you enjoy the tune as much as I do.
Illustration: Whimbleton House in the 16th edition of Playford’s English Dancing Master volume one, 1716, from the Vaughan Williams Memorial Library
