Carolingian Dance Music Library

Introduction

Over the forty years of Carolingian history, the barony has acquired a large collection of dance music recordings. The sources have been diverse, ranging from professional musicians unaware of the SCA, to amateur synth pieces transcribed from manuscripts, often when there was no other source for that music. Each successive dance leader in Carolingia has been passed an ever growing and unwieldy library of recordings on various media. In recent years, we've worked to digitize and consolidate the library, so that it is available, in its entirety, on an iPod that the dance leader can use to quickly find and play any of the pieces.

The catalogue this note introduces was developed to bring some sense of order to this large collection. We wanted to provide guidance as to which tracks worked, and which didn't, as well as provide notes of repeat counts and timing, and sometimes offer commentary on pieces that were considered particularly pleasing, or not. We've also changed some of the titles to standardize the naming, such that all pieces used for a given dance have the same name, which makes it easier to access music for a desired dance.

Originally, this was planned as an internal document of Carolingia's Academia della Danza, to be shared no further than with the local dance leaders for whom it was meant as a reference. As such, some of the commentary may be a bit less than flattering to some of the pieces. We admire the creativity of all the artists catalogued here, and hope not to cause offence by not censoring our reviews of their work. It was later decided that this survey might be helpful to others that were seeking to organize or build their own libraries of music for SCA dance, and it is for that reason that we're releasing this publicly.

Our rating system was constrained to use zero to five stars, for compatibility with the iPod. The ratings we use break down as follows:

	0 stars - As far as we know, these aren't recordings of a period dance tune, and are usually given the 
                  genre "not a dance."  Alternatively, it's not a dance we're familiar enough with to say whether 
                  or not it works for the dance.  These latter examples are usually noted as "needs reconstruction."
	1 star  - This piece is broken.  The music doesn't work with any known reconstruction for the dance, and 
                  one shouldn't attempt to dance to it.
	2 stars - This piece is unliked.  It may have quirks that make dancing to it difficult, or it might be 
                  musically unappealing.
	3 stars - This piece is good.  It works with the dance, as we know it, and isn't unpleasant to listen to.
	4 stars - This piece is appreciated.  It works well for the dance, and is considered to have some 
                  combination of optimum pace or length, and is pleasing to listen to.
	5 stars - This piece is excellent.  As well as the four star criteria, these are pieces we enjoy listening 
                  to simply as music, even when not dancing.

As some of this music originally appeared on fragile media that is now old, it may have been degraded by time, or the process of digitizing it. Comments such as "needs filtering" or "bad tape" apply to the copies as we now have them, and don't reflect on the original work.

Some of the comments will refer to "our version" vs. an "other version" or the like. There are pieces with multiple incompatible reconstructions, and this is just intended to note which versions are used locally, and are not necessarily an endorsement of correctness. Alternatively, some tracks are labelled such as "ver A" or "version B." These are dances with variant reconstructions where we're just as likely to dance one as the other, but need to know which version the music matches.

As mentioned previously, the names of the songs have been standardized. Square brackets in the song titles contain an internal notation that relates to the album source. Comments that are within quotes come from the original name or album notes.

Some dances are noted with the comment indicating that it needs reconstruction. These are dances that we haven't checked against a known reconstruction of the dance, typically because it's not a dance we do locally.

Many of these tracks are available for download, some for free and others via iTunes of Amazon. A dedicated page is in Eric's Dance Pages with some of the recordings.

Available Queries