Nigel Gatherer <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > Perhaps it was a rare occurrence, but he certainly wrote some. I have a > book - The Galloway Album - published by Foss in which are four of his > tunes. Strange from a musician's point of view, because all have four > 6-bar sections.
These tunes are somewhat special since they belong to an experimental dance, »Cairn Edward«, which consists of three-bar movements. Usual Scottish country dances take two bars for many basic movements, which combine into phrases of eight bars to fit »normal« Scottish dance tunes. Hugh Foss, who died in 1971, was a great one for all sorts of experiments, and among other things he played around with dances that use unusal kinds of phrasing. One other experiment of his, and incidentally a dance which is much more popular socially than Cairn Edward, is »The Wee Cooper o' Fife«, to the song tune of the same name, which is in ten-bar phrases. Presumably this has less of an uncanny feel to most dancers than Cairn Edward, where you change starting feet for every three-bar movement; C.E. is technically a much more difficult dance than the Wee Cooper exactly because as a dancer you have to disable that part of your brain that tells you to start each movement on the right foot as usual. While we're on the subject of Hugh Foss: Hugh Foss was a very interesting character in his own right. He was a mathematician by training and worked at Bletchley Park during WWII, cracking Japanese codes. He used to live in or near London but upon his retirement moved to Castle Douglas, in southwest Scotland. Although not Scots himself, he was an avid Scottish country dancer pretty much all his life, and he himself probably did more to extend the SCD tradition into novel areas than anybody else before him or after him. Some of his more outstanding works include, besides dances with unusual phrasing like the ones mentioned above, »The Waverley Fugues« (a collection of 12 dances of increasing difficulty that re-invent the musical idea of the »fugue« in terms of Scottish country dancing), »The Celtic Brooch« (a whole system of dance figures based on the triangular loop-and-ring, over-and-under pattern of the Celtic ornament), and ideas such as that of 5-couple dances with couples 1 and 3 starting simultaneously. Besides devising a considerable number of dances, many of which -- like »John McAlpine«, »Roaring Jelly«, or »J. B. Milne«, to name just three -- are now an indispensable part of the SCD repertoire, he also wrote copiously on various theoretical aspects of SCD and never stopped encouraging others to experiment and, by virtue of trying out new things, keep the tradition alive. Hugh Foss isn't really well-known for his composing but it seems that he could come up with a good tune if necessary, e.g., for Cairn Edward. As far as the original question is concerned, the DanceData database (which is at http://www.strathspey.org/dd/), doesn't contain anything useful, but Andrew Kuntz's fiddle music index (at http://www.ceolas.org/tunes/fc) lists a tune by the name of »Lilly of the Valley«. I don't know whether this is the one that Foss had in mind. Anselm -- Anselm Lingnau .......................................... [EMAIL PROTECTED] Microsoft's own focus group studies in Redmond do not speak well for the median intelligence level of a PC user. Results of these continual studies point in the direction of nearly Neanderthal abilities at the very most. [...] It must be wonderful for ordinary PC users to understand what Microsoft really thinks of them. -- Rick A. Downes, »InstallShield« Posted to Scots-L - The Traditional Scottish Music & Culture List - To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
