strathspey@strathspey.org:40418

Richard Goss

Strathglass House (was: Lead - Right hands or Nearer Hands)

Jan. 26, 2005, 9:16 p.m. (Message 40418, in reply to message 40416)

Easy answer regarding sub for "lead out at the sides" it was in my
notes from conversations with Miss M. The actual question was not mine
to start with, it came from the late Milt Levy who thought about this
stuff a lot but did not get out much from Cal Tech at the time. Every
year, I sent Miss M a list of questions I wanted to discuss over tea
at St Andrews as a part of my research (no surprise questions, except
those that arose from here answers).
 
In this case, when I mentioned the missing figure in Montgomery, and
the use of it in Waverly, she said that as with the case of ·"double
triangles" (which are neither double, nor triangular), there were many
figures in the old dance books that we simply did not understand at
the time we published the dances. After each session with here, I
typed up my notes for her comment, and after I left St Andrews after
her death, gave a copy of all my research to the Society. The "new
blood" until very recently (Summer 04) was unaware of this material. I
was only informed up stairs at a Younger Hall dance, that some of it
had been found. Unfortunately, this was towards the end of the course,
and I had no time to contact my university friends there (I had been
an employee) to get a usable archive copy downloaded since it
contained a data base of about 10,000 dances.*
 
As I understand it, what the Society has found is an enormous stack of
computer hard copy print out, redundant in that it contains several
sorts (date, alpha, choreography, etc.)
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*Depending on how one counts. For example Montgomery´s Rant (Reel -
RSCDS) and Montgomery´s Rant (Strathspey - Menzies) would count as two
since the figures are not the same, as would most RSCDS published
dances. On the other hand there Duke of Perth, counts as 4 even though
the choreography is the same (except for the missing coda), since
there are at least 4 names. Since there were often more choreographies
than tunes, and dances were often named after the tunes, this inflated
my numbers considerably, especially when you have guys like Wilson,
who in one book published three dances for each named tune (can´t
remember which, but one of our RSCDS published dances produced another
since it contains unrelated bars from two of these dances).