Country Dance & Song Society > Resources > Audience > Musicians

Category: Musicians

Women/Black/Indigenous/POC/LGBTQIA+/People with Disabilities Music Instructor Nominee Directory

This spreadsheet shows a list of recommended music teachers from marginalized communities. The list is the result of a survey form created in 2019 by A’yen Tran with the intention of making it publicly available, particularly to music camp directors. The goal is to increase representation for women, people of color, people with disabilities, and gender-diverse people in music camps and other musical learning opportunities.

CDSS Community Culture & Safety Toolkit

The CDSS Community Culture and Safety Task Group (CCSTG) aims to support local communities in their efforts to provide a safe environment for music, song, and dance events. We are working to provide advice and resources that will help organizers develop the policies, procedures, and supporting documents needed to understand and facilitate safety in their communities.

CDSS is not prescriptive in regard to what your community ‘should be doing.’ We recognize and value the range of living traditions practiced by our communities.

As such, we are working to develop a toolkit of resources.

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Starring Your Recorder

Starring Your Recorder is a free educational video series from GEMS NY. The recorder has been an important instrument worldwide for hundreds of years. It has often been played along with other beautiful instruments that are still played today. With these six videos, students can experience playing easy tunes on recorder accompanied by a Renaissance band.

From Gotham Early Music Scene, Inc.

Gigs from Heaven

This article by Carol Ormond gives excellent tips on how organizers can create a great gig experience for a caller. Much of the advice applies to other hired staff as well.

From the CDSS News

Shared Weight: Dance Musicians Discussion List

This mailing list welcomes dance musicians and those interested in dance music for any form of traditional social dance. This includes contra, English country, traditional squares (e.g., Appalachian, New England, Quebecois, Cape Breton, etc), community/family/barn, ceili, bal folk, and more. Dance musicians ask/answer questions, discuss issues that come up for them, and share helpful resources. This is a great way to talk to dance musicians from throughout North America and beyond. Join the discussion!

The Session

A collection of tens of thousands of trad tunes, contributed collectively by a strong community of musicians. There are updates to the tunes on a daily basis.

From Jeremy Keith

Cecil Sharp Piano Scores

Mickie Zekley has scanned many of Cecil Sharp’s piano arrangements of country dance tunes, originally published in 1912, and made them available online in PDF format. These scores provide ideas for piano players about how to accompany many popular English country dance tunes. Note that the key signatures of some of the tunes differ from those most commonly used by contemporary musicians.

From Mendocino ECD