At my flute lesson the other day, I asked for a slip jig to learn, and the teacher gave me “Kid on the mountain.” It’s a five-part jig, so at a casual pace it takes a few minutes to play through twice. I remembered another slip jig that the Baltimore Consort play and looked it up in the Joyce collection (Bugga Fee Hoosa, but the Irish name has totally different letters). It’s got a gazillion parts. Well, like 9 or 10, and it takes about 4 minutes played through once. I showed this to my wife who said, “Oh, that must be one they danced to.” I pointed out that most session music is music that people dance to, or at least have danced to, and she said that maybe at one time jigs and reels weren’t strung together.
So, does anyone know the history of sets of tunes? The Joyce collection is from about 1850 and contains lots of jigs and reels with at least 4 parts. Might these be sets that eventually became one tune? Might sets be a reasonably recent (like the last 150 years) creation due to folks coming up with very short tunes? Also, for those of you who play for dancers, how long does a typical dance tune last?
As a dancer, I can say that many Scottish Country Dances (jigs, reels, hornpipes, strathspeys) are set to 32 bars of music, usually repeated four times through. The length of time is usually in the three to five minute range.
I’m not sure how various sets came about, but imagine it is someone’s personal preferences that became codified by a publisher at some point.
His ‘Dancing in ireland’ covers the subject quite nicely too though I don’t think it will be easy to find.
The length of tunes doesn’t really have anything to do with their purpose for dancing. Tunes are nowadays mostly used for the sets [as in dancing sets] they can be grouped in sets [this where the confusion sets in] of more tunes but dancers won’t mind if you play the same tune over and over until they are done with their figure. ofcourse that is extremely boring for the musicianers so there you have your reason for pairing a few different ones together. Sometimes you can pick a longer tune if that suits the particular figure but more often than not you have to stop playing in midtune because the dancers have finished their business.
Peter, such a cool photograph! I think I remember seeing that a while ago, but I didn’t remember it. I recognize Kitty in the foreground, but on the right, sitting infront of the musicians with their hands in their laps, are those the Crehan daughters?
Nah, the woman in the middle is Cissy, Junior’s wife. Himself is sitting in the corner of the bar [it’s a mid nineties sort of a pic], Ita crehan is playing the keyboard beside the stage and Angela is on the right of the stage playing the consherthiner. It’s a low res scan so not everybody is very recognisable. Some lovely setdancers in there though some have since given up on it.
Boredom on the part of the musicians is supposedly the reason that lots of Southern US dance tunes have words–and often not the cleverest words, either. Also, lots of repetition of verses from one song to another.
One thing about “Kid on the mountain”, even though it has 5 parts, the 4th and 5th parts are kinda just variations on the 3rd and 2nd part. The “Foxhunter’s Jig” does something similar. I’m not sure why the variations became standard.Though, It would make sense if, at one time, tunes weren’t strung together and the one tune was going to be repeated alot.
