Rantin' Pipe and Tremblin' String: A History of Scottish Dance Music 9780773592698

Table of contents :
Cover
Title
Copyright
Preface
Contents
Illustrations
1 The Dawn over Alba
Dance-song
Instrumental social dance
Puirt-a-beul and work-song
Erse musical tradition
`Bare names' from the Middle Ages
Early traces of Scottish dance tunes
2 Coming of Age from medieval times to the eighteenth century
Music of court and countryside
`Minstrelles and pipers at brydells'
Dancing and piping `in time of prayers'
The first Scottish collections
The burgh minstrels
The Country Dance in England
3 'Their Allegros and a' the rest': Scottish music-making in the eighteenth century
The Edinburgh Music Club
Scots tunes and ballad operas
Country Dances and music making
At the concert
The concert vocalists
`Their chief amusement is dancing'
The flower in the bud
4 `Sang abune a' sang': collections, composers and fiddlers
The manuscript collections of reel music
Printed dance music and the currency of tunes
The fiddler-composers and their collections
Hey-day of reels and strathspey reels
Dancing-masters and lesser composers
Robert Mackintosh
William Marshall
The Gow family
The appropriation of tune titles: priority and authorship
Dilettantes and distinguished amateurs
5 The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries
Survival of Scottish song
Nineteenth-century fiddlers
The Skinners of Deeside
Into the twentieth century
6 Accompaniment to the Dance
The dance orchestra
The nineteenth-century band and the pipes
The modern dance band and the accordion
7 The Elements of Scottish Traditional Dance Music
Reel and hornpipe
British traditional dance idioms
Triple-time hornpipe
The Scottish double hornpipe
The Scottish measure
Rants and reels
The strathspey
The jig
The ' Jacky Tar' hornpipe
Dance and measure
Music for Scottish country dances
The Reel
Tempo
8 The Principal Instruments associated with Scottish Traditional Dance Music
The fiddle
The fiddler's technique
The stock-and-horn (hornpipe or piobcom)
The bagpipe
The Northumbrian 'smallpipes'
The Highland bagpipe
Lowland or Border pipes
Heir to the clarsach
9 The Sweetness of a Scottish Tune
The Scottish idiom
Modality
Pentatonic survivals
Debatable tonality of Scottish tunes
The undying tradition of the Celt
Notes on The Text
Appendix A: Manuscript Collections
Appendix B: Bibliography
General Index
Index of Tunes