Marian Rose provides some fantastic calling tips as well as suggestions for dances to do when accommodating young children as part of your dancing community
From the CDSS News
Crankies in the Music Classroom
This article outlines how Eleanor Lincoln learned about crankies and started using them in her elementary classroom. It also includes tips to support other teachers in doing so!
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!
A collection of more then 40,000 North American, British and Irish tunes with new ones being added every month.
From Andrew Kuntz & Valerio Pelliccioni
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
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
This website contains hundreds of tunes with MP3 audio clips, sheet music and ABC notation. The tunes come from several regions around the North Atlantic: Scandinavia, the British Isles, Quebec, Cape Breton, Métis (Saskatchewan & Manitoba), New England, Appalachia, and more. The website also includes some of the Vermont Fiddle Orchestra tunes which often have harmonies included.
From North Atlantic Tune list
SPUDS are an open/all comers dance band. Their website contains a large number of tunes in abc format and standard notation, along with links to other tune repositories.
From SPUDS
Jeremy Child explores positional calling as a way to expand the boundaries of choreography.
Colin Hume gives his detailed thoughts and tips on composing dance music.
From Colin Hume
Thanks to the Massachusetts Cultural Council for their generous support.