When in doubt, let the band play the tunes they most want to play. This is especially true for a less experienced band.
Because really, any dance works with any tune (assuming we’re not talking about some weird crooked dance or tune).
Lisa
Nelson, NH
Lisa Sieverts
603-762-0235
lisa@lisasieverts.com
On 19 Mar 2023, at 17:54, Katherine Kitching via Contra Callers wrote:
Hello from Halifax!
I will preface this by saying that I consider myself a relatively "beginner" caller. I have been working on it for about 15 years now and I think I've become somewhat proficient at calling a very beginner-friendly sequence of dances at our monthly beginner-friendly dances here in Halifax - but that is about the extent of what I do.
And we rarely ever dance anything as involved as a Hey, here :)One area where I definitely lack skill is communicating to our bands (we have 4-5 groups who play for us regularly), in a succinct manner that doesn't ruffle their feathers, about what sort of a tune I want for each dance.
This task is made more difficult by the fact that I write (or heavily modify) pretty much all our dances, so I can't look online to find recommendations or videos of tunes that fit.
As far as I know, I am a polite and caring human who never sets out to put anyone down or show them that I know better. I try to be humble about the fact that i'm just learning and doing the best I can. For example, last month, with apologies, I asked the band if they would mind quickly going through their planned tunes for the evening, so I could run through my dance program and try to assign a dance to each tune.
Because I lack the vocabulary and experience to tell a band "for this dance, I need a tune with characteristics X and Y" - having them play the tune one time through (sometimes even just half of it!) is so far the most effective method i've found to get a tune that works for each dance. It's also worth mentioning that our bands are not experienced contra bands - since we are the only contra group they work with - and most have limited sets to offer us - for example the last band came with 8 sets of tunes, to match up with the 8 dances I had planned.... so when I found one or two that weren't an ideal fit for anything, I did have to work quite hard rearrange things a few times to slot everything in!
Anyhow it took about 7 minutes to do this, and I thanked them profusely, and the dance-tune meld went well! I thanked them again after. But still, the lead musician told me after the event that she "didn't really appreciate being told which tune to play when" . And that deflated me for sure :(
Anyhow, I welcome any grains of wisdom on this process generally (and/or a link if one exists to this amazing cdss online workshop I took years ago on matching tunes to dances/communicating with bands)....
but my specific question is this:
A different band - the one whose feathers I most often seem to ruffle haha - has always played a tune set somewhere in the evening, the past few times they've played for us, that no matter which dance I called to it, I felt it was always a really bad fit.
I never said anything bad about it, to be clear!! But after a few dances where it bummed me out every single time, I finally asked the lead musician via email (as politely as I could, putting all the blame on myself: "I just can't seem to find a dance that i'm able to call to this tune, would you mind leaving it out in the future?" ).
I got this response:
"The Queteux Pomerleau set that you are quoting can be removed - the speed of the dancers never gets up to a level to make that set effective. They are Quebecois tunes that we learned from Sue, but in Quebec they are danced to quite fast."(This refers to Sue Songer who came as part of an amazing week-long workshop CDSS blessed us with about 8 years ago.)
Anyhow I was curious if anyone knows of this set, and could suggest some simple contra dances that would go well with it.
I confess I am not a fan of the feel of the tune for the context in which I call - most of the east-coasty jigs and reels that this band and our other bands play really get all the dancers cheering and stomping their feet, and this one never does....
But I want to be open minded about it :)
thanks!
Kat K in Halifax
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