Hello to Halifax! Some thoughts inspired by this:
I haven’t worked with bands that are heavily oriented toward Quebecquois music. I have, a few times, worked with bands that were largely or exclusively old-times or had no contra experienced and played for listening, with a mixture of old-timey and Celtic stuff. In those cases, I had pretty good luck asking for their tune sets and then looking up the tunes on YouTube and trying to pick things that would work for them. (I was lucky that the band that mostly played for listening and had constructed sets of disparate types was cooperative and willing to pick apart their sets; I wasn’t going to be able to set anything that worked well for a set that went reel/jig/march, even with generic enough figures that they could work for each tune type, it’d be a jar for the dancers. I feel for you having a band leader who doesn’t like being told which tune to play when but - I get the impression - doesn’t have the ability to pick good tunes from watching the walkthrough. In an established contra scene with multiple dance series going on this would just be unprofessional behavior, but I see that framing isn’t useful in your circumstances, and you need them, So in that case I wonder if you could ask them to provide the list of what they’re going to play in what order and you could set dances to them (after looking them up to see what they’re like). But even that isn’t good if their sets include stuff that’s just not good for contra dancing. Even highly experienced and professional dance bands often have something they want to play to end the set on a high, and I’ve had good results by asking them in advance what they want to end the set with and setting something to that, even if up to that I’ve been asking them for stuff that will serve the dance I want. In a very general sense, my rules of thumb for tune types supporting different dances are something like: Old-timey (reels, in general, sometimes not too strongly phrased) are good for drive but not so good for synching everyone up all the time, so better with dance figures that can blur together a little bit. Circle left 3/4, neighbor swing is fine if it’s 6 beats / 10 beats or 8/8 or whatever. Neighbor do-si-do and swing is more tolerant of ambiguity than balance and swing. Also good in general if you’re mostly on 8 count or 16 count figures, not synched up 4 count figures. (But Petronella turns can usually survive everything if the beat is clear even if the phrase isn’t.) If you want everybody to hit the balance at the same time, bouncy jigs are good. Not so much for floaty jigs, but those are great for trancing out in long flowing figures - whole heys. If there’s a down-the-hall a march is usually good. With experienced contra musicians you can tell them “there’s a balance at the top of each A” and they can pick something they can make work, without your specifying a tune type. If you have a flowy thing you can give them a choice of driving or slinky. — Alan ________________________________________ From: Katherine Kitching via Contra Callers <[email protected]> Sent: Sunday, March 19, 2023 2:54 PM To: [email protected] Subject: [Callers] Curious about a tune - what dance would go with it? - with longish pre-amble Hello from Halifax! I will preface this by saying that I consider myself a relatively "beginner" caller. I have been working on it for about 15 years now and I think I've become somewhat proficient at calling a very beginner-friendly sequence of dances at our monthly beginner-friendly dances here in Halifax - but that is about the extent of what I do. And we rarely ever dance anything as involved as a Hey, here :) One area where I definitely lack skill is communicating to our bands (we have 4-5 groups who play for us regularly), in a succinct manner that doesn't ruffle their feathers, about what sort of a tune I want for each dance. This task is made more difficult by the fact that I write (or heavily modify) pretty much all our dances, so I can't look online to find recommendations or videos of tunes that fit. As far as I know, I am a polite and caring human who never sets out to put anyone down or show them that I know better. I try to be humble about the fact that i'm just learning and doing the best I can. For example, last month, with apologies, I asked the band if they would mind quickly going through their planned tunes for the evening, so I could run through my dance program and try to assign a dance to each tune. Because I lack the vocabulary and experience to tell a band "for this dance, I need a tune with characteristics X and Y" - having them play the tune one time through (sometimes even just half of it!) is so far the most effective method i've found to get a tune that works for each dance. It's also worth mentioning that our bands are not experienced contra bands - since we are the only contra group they work with - and most have limited sets to offer us - for example the last band came with 8 sets of tunes, to match up with the 8 dances I had planned.... so when I found one or two that weren't an ideal fit for anything, I did have to work quite hard rearrange things a few times to slot everything in! Anyhow it took about 7 minutes to do this, and I thanked them profusely, and the dance-tune meld went well! I thanked them again after. But still, the lead musician told me after the event that she "didn't really appreciate being told which tune to play when" . And that deflated me for sure :( Anyhow, I welcome any grains of wisdom on this process generally (and/or a link if one exists to this amazing cdss online workshop I took years ago on matching tunes to dances/communicating with bands).... but my specific question is this: A *different* band - the one whose feathers I most often seem to ruffle haha - has always played a tune set somewhere in the evening, the past few times they've played for us, that no matter which dance I called to it, I felt it was always a really bad fit. I never said anything bad about it, to be clear!! But after a few dances where it bummed me out every single time, I finally asked the lead musician via email (as politely as I could, putting all the blame on myself: "I just can't seem to find a dance that i'm able to call to this tune, would you mind leaving it out in the future?" ). I got this response: "The Queteux Pomerleau set that you are quoting can be removed - the speed of the dancers never gets up to a level to make that set effective. They are Quebecois tunes that we learned from Sue, but in Quebec they are danced to quite fast." (This refers to Sue Songer who came as part of an amazing week-long workshop CDSS blessed us with about 8 years ago.) Anyhow I was curious if anyone knows of this set, and could suggest some simple contra dances that would go well with it. I confess I am not a fan of the feel of the tune for the context in which I call - most of the east-coasty jigs and reels that this band and our other bands play really get all the dancers cheering and stomping their feet, and this one never does.... But I want to be open minded about it :) thanks! Kat K in Halifax _______________________________________________ Contra Callers mailing list -- [email protected] To unsubscribe send an email to [email protected]
