Dudley Laufman passed away last week at the age of 95. He's best known for his extensive contribution to the 1970s contra dance revival, and especially for fostering live music. Twenty years ago [1] I attended one of the "Wind in the Timothy" dances that he and his wife Jacqueline would host at their house in NH on fifth Saturdays, and it was clear he really enjoyed what he was doing.

As part of my project on understanding attitudes towards live music I thought I would read some of his own words. Most of his words were poems, though, and I generally prefer something more concrete and direct. He did co-write a 2009 book with Jacqueline, however, Traditional Barn Dances with Calls and Fiddling, which seemed more promising.

Our kids like listening to music on their tablets, and we decided it's worth it to pay some money so they can make playlists and don't need to listen to ads. A family account makes sense if you're more than one person, and we ended up with Amazon somewhat randomly. I've been poking around: the personalization features are pretty terrible, and they have a major artist conflation problem.

When you first show up it asks you to pick some artists to seed your experience with. I put in the first few bands that came to mind:

I like to play multiple instruments at once, and really enjoy how this lets me create a fuller musical picture. Sometimes this looks like mandolin + foot drums + bass whistle:

I've been reading a lot of older writing, trying to understand how and why contra dance ended up with a strong and near-exclusive live music tradition when many other dance forms switched over to recorded music. One of the more interesting ones I came across is a series of three letters (1985, 1988, 1992) from Enid Cocke, President of the Lloyd Shaw Foundation, tracing the evolution in her attitude towards this question.

I've lately ended up calling a bunch of parties and I've been happy with calling mostly longways whole-set dances. These are ones that are shaped like a contra dance in terms of having two lines facing each other, each person across from their partner, but your role doesn't matter and you're not grouped into hands-fours ("minor sets"). I want to be able to teach it in a single fast-paced walkthrough, match it tightly to the musical phrase, and be able to drop out after a few times through. This means I need most of the figures to be very simple, and a low piece count.

On the other hand, if I build every dance out of the same small number of building blocks (ex: reshuffles of Galopede), dancers will start to feel "haven't we done this one before"? So I also like dances that have a "hook": an interesting figure that we don't do in the other dances. Some examples:

In 1992 Tony Parkes, one of the best-known New England contra dance callers, wrote a book: Contra Dance Calling: a Basic Text. In 2010 he published an updated second edition. I found used copies of each and read through them, interested in both what he thought, and what he thought to change.

I read the whole 1992 first edition, then skimmed the 2010 second edition with the older one open at the same time, looking for changes. My notes: