[SCA-Dance] "Drive the Cold Winter Away"

Tim McDaniel tmcd at panix.com
Wed Feb 18 00:18:01 EST 2015


"Drive the Cold Winter Away"
http://www.pbm.com/~lindahl/playford_1651/046small.html
http://www.pages.drexel.edu/~white/ECD/drivewinter.html
http://round.soc.srcf.net/dances/cdb/cdb6/drive

Does anyone have a good danceable version of this?  The second link
above has "Country Dances by the Broadside Band.  This tape's version
has an AABBBBx3 structure (the 'B's could just be very long, so really
only BB), which should work with this reconstruction."

Actually, what I just downloaded from Amazon, supposedly from
     The Broadside Band
     The English Dancing Master: Drive the Cold Winter Away
is AABB, 13 repetitions.  The total time is 6:13, which is way longer
than any USA ECD dance I've heard.  (I hear A as 8 beats, B as 16
beats, AABB is about 0:28.  I found it hard to distinguish A from B
without referring to the Playford reproduction music in the first link
above.)

Mind you, the tempo is good, which is much more than can be said about
the other renditions I heard, which tended to be for listening and
maybe half the speed you'd want to dance.

So I could do my usual struggles with the Audacity program to chop out
sections, but I'd rather not.  Also, I don't know how much B to have
for each chorus.  Dafydd Cyhoeddwr's saying AABBBB would give 16-beat
verses, which works fine for USA.  That would give 32 beats for each
sex's chorus, 16 beats for each half of each sex's chorus, but since
I've not tried with real dancers or ever settled on a way to turn, I
don't know how much time would be useful -- if I remember Picking of
Sticks right, we took 16 beats for person 1 to finish the sheepskin
hay and circle back to the head of their side (though that took a bit
of pushing it).  (Dayfdd says "the rest of the men in a line begin a
figure that they have four measures to complete", but he doesn't
bother to mention how long a "measure" is or give beat counts for
anything here -- if it's 4 beats per measure, our timings if not our
repetition counts agree.)

Danet de Linccolne
-- 
Tim McDaniel, tmcd at panix.com


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