12 Minuets and 12 Dances


Michael Dabney (composer)
London, c.1760

Very little is known about the composer of these tunes, who may also have created the dances. He is associated with Nottingham, and was a dance teacher and musician in the 2nd half of the 18th century.

The individual tunes are in files with names of the form PPN_Title.abc, where PP is the page number, N is 1 or 2 for the (at most) two tunes on the page, and Title is the value of the T: header line with spaces replaced with '_'. N is 0 for a few files that don't contain tunes, such as the title page and section headers. The tunes have numbers, but the minuets and dance tunes are both numbered 1-12, which is used for the X: value but isn't used in the file name because it isn't unique or useful for the sequential order.

Some of the bass lines in this collection have figured-bass notation, which not all ABC software (or modern musicians) understands properly. For these tunes, two transcriptions may be present: The "-V2" version has the figured-bass notation inside the quotes as for the usual ABC "chord" notation. The "-V1" version has modern chords instead, derived from the figured bass and the two (or three) notes in the music lines. These modern chords should be considered the editor's interpretation, of course. Modern players are expected to not take these chords too seriously, but to improvise the harmonies as an 18th-century musician would have done.


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