JC's Klez-Contra Dance Tunes
JC's Klez-Contra Dance Tunes
A bunch of us around Boston have been
playing klezmer music for contras for a few years now. This
directory contains many of our tune medleys. Single tunes are in
files in the subdirectories. You are welcome to borrow the sets
here and use them for your contras. If you see a set you like you
might want to copy it now. This is a "working" directory, and
anything here may change tomorrow if we decide to rearrange things.
Let me know how it goes
over with your dancers. My prediction: The stuffier fuddy-duddies
in your crowd won't approve of using "strange" music for the dance.
The rest will like anything as long as the tempo, beat and phrasing
are right for the dance. But you should be aware that there's a
very long tradition of using any music that fits for contras.
It turns out that there is much precedent for klezmer music in
contras. In eastern European Jewish communities, the sher is
the common term for a set of dances very similar to what is known
in other countries as a quadrille or a square dance
(though some shers are done in circles of couples). There are
documents describing contra-like dances, too, either as longways
sets or as circles of couples with a progression.
Also, an important part of the history of klezmer muscians has been
playing for dances and other events in the larger Christian
community. In much of central and eastern Europe, people have long
had the attitude that the best dance musicians were either Jews or
Gypsies. Part of the Jewish musician's job has been keeping up with
the latest fashions in music, and providing dance music as needed.
When a dance teacher came through teaching the latest dance craze
(minuet or quadrille or waltz or polka or whatever), the klezmer
musician would learn the music for the dance, and also adapt other
tunes to fit. At several times in the past several centuries, the
hot dance has been a form of contra, and there are relics of this
scattered all over Europe.
It is easy to decide whether a tune will fit for contras.
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You must be able to play the tune at about 120 beats per minute, plus or
minus a bit. This is about the tempo for the hora/freilach/bulgar type
dance, so any of those tunes will work for contras. Just try not to get it
going too fast for the dancers. These tunes are rhythmically like the
marches and polkas in the standard contra repertoire. There aren't as many
klezmer tunes of the "busy reel" sort, but there are some
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Most contra dances have a 32-bar pattern, with four 8-bar dance phrases. If
the tune can be fit into this mold, it will work. This includes many of the
64- and 96-bar tunes that are common in the klez repertoire. These tunes
mostly have 16-bar phrases that are repeated, giving 32 bars for each
phrase. They work just fine for a contra, with once through the dance for
each phrase. There are some tunes in the standard contra repertoire that
are longer than 32 bars. The Jig of Slurs and the Atholl Highlanders are
two examples of 64-bar tunes, where once through the tune is twice through
the dance.
48-bar tunes take a bit of modifying to fit, but they can work if
you experiment with the repeat pattern a bit. One well-known tune
like this is Yoshke (Tanz, Tanz, Yideleh), which has three 8-bar
phrases. It's 24 bars without repeats and 48 bars with repeats.
We've found that the patterns ABCB and AABBCCBB both work well for
contras. Again, there is much precedent for arranging tunes like
this. Some of the tunes in the standard contra repertoire, such as
Scollay's Reel and Maggie Brown's Favorite Jig, were not 32-bar
tunes originally, but have been modified to fit the dance.
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If you don't have ABC software, you might like to try
a tool that I'm working on that returns the tunes in various formats:
CLICK HERE.
This will return the page you're looking at now, but the ABC files
will be expanded to show all the tunes, and each tune will have a
line of links to return it in a number of different formats.
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