The Colonial Music Institute(tm)
Bringing History to Life Through Music
The
Dancing Master, 1651-1728: An Illustrated Compendium
A
Data Base of Images and Indexes
by Robert M. Keller
Annapolis, MD: The Colonial Music Institute,
2000
*DM-cdr: $35.00
System requirements: Windows
95®, or Mac OS 7.6® plus MRJ 2.0, CD-ROM drive, Netscape 4™ or
Internet Explorer™
Database is also on the web at http://www.izaak.unh.edu/nhltmd/indexes/dancingmaster/
This database contains indexes, images, and
figure descriptions of all the country dances, tunes, and songs in The
Dancing Master published by John and Henry Playford and John Young
in London from 1651 to 1728. It lists all the 6,217 dances published (including
duplications, 186 tunes without figures, and three songs) and contains
facsimiles of 1,053 individual dances or tunes, as distinguished by their
combination of title, music, and dance figures.
For this publication every dance was reduced to a code, enabling comparison
with similar dances. The unique or “Ur” dances were identified and collected
into a database where each dance’s printing history and other information
is summarized and a facsimile of the dance and its music is included. The
Index presents every item by title with links to the Urdance Index. The
Title/Link takes the reader to a bibliography of the sources. Searches
can be made on all text entries as well as on the dance coding to find
instances of specific dance figures in juxtaposition with others.
This CD-ROM was published by The Dolmetsch Historical Dance Society in
cooperation with The Colonial Music Institute on the occasion of the 350th
anniversary of the publication of John Playford’s The English Dancing
Master (1651). It is published with cooperation from the English Folk
Dance and Song Society, the University of Glasgow, the British Library,
the Library of Congress, the University of New Hampshire and the Country
Dance and Song Society who gave permission to include images from editions
of The Dancing Master in their collections.