Minuets Cotillons & Country Dances
composer: Ignatius Sancho
published in London, 1775
ABC transcription by John Chambers, 2020

This is a collection of tunes and dance descriptions, composed by Ignatius Sancho in the 1760s and 1770s, and transcribed to ABC notation by John Chambers in late 2020. There are 24 tunes and 18 dances in the collection. The first 6 are minuets, which are only music. The other 18 are a mixture of rhythms for several kinds of dances, with a brief description of a dance for each tune.

See the parent directory for information about the composer. See the Transcription Notes for information about how the tunes were transcribed to ABC notation.

In this collection, there were 19 pages, with at most 2 tunes on a page. The single-tunes files have names of the form PPN_Title.abc, where PP is the page number (3-19), and N is the tune's number on the page. Some tunes with N=2 have their final staff on the next page. The MCCD* files are the complete set of tunes and dances.

The suffix "_v1" and "_v2" indicate ABC 1.* and ABC 2.* notation. Only a few tunes require ABC 2 features, mostly multiple voices on a staff. Those tunes are transcribed "accurately" in the *_v2.abc version; the *_v1.abc version is a (generally fairly accurate) mapping onto the more limited features of the ABC 1.* standard. For many purposes, the ABC 1 version may be the more useful. In any case, you should be prepared to edit the files fo fit your group's needs.

Tunes 1-3 have "interesting" uses of clefs that were common at the time, but not very readable by modern musicians. In these, the _v2 versions are as faithful to the original as possible, while the _v1 versions have those voices redefined as modern clefs. (In ABC, this is mostly just a few characters changed in the V: headers.) So again, the v1 versions may be more directly useful to musicians, while music/dance historians might prefer the v2 versions for their historical versimilitude.

If there are *.ps and/or *.pdf files here, they are formatted at a small scale for proofreading, with all the header information displayed, and with margins for printing. Such files are large and will probably disappear soon, so if you like them, you should download a copy. Note that there's a Makefile, so you can easily recreate the .pdf files if you understand Makefiles.


List files with: Session lister - Collection lister - Tune lister