Chapter 1. Introduction

House dance culture and the concertina

During the concertina's heyday, a rural 'house dance' culture existed in Europe and its colonies around the world. Rural social dances were held in houses, barns, woolsheds, or - in frontier areas - even on wagon-sails spread on the ground under the stars. The most popular dances at these occasions were the quadrilles, waltzes, polkas, schottisches, galops, varsovianas, mazurkas, and barn dances that were all the rage before World War I. Most of these dances were derived from local European folk dances that were introduced to high society ballrooms. They rapidly spread to middle and lower class urban haunts, and to rural and frontier areas. These dances are here casually termed 'early ballroom' dances to distinguish them from the jazz- and Latin-derived 'late ballroom' dances that came after WWI, and after the heyday of the concertina. Both types of ballroom dance were largely supplanted by the rock and roll phenomenon of the late twentieth century.

The advent of cheap, mass-produced musical instruments, chiefly fiddles, tin whistles, accordions, mouth organs and concertinas built in German factories, helped the latest dance music to spread from high society ballrooms to the musicians of working class urban, rural and frontier areas, where it thrived. The pace of early ballroom dance is typically relaxed, and hence its music lent itself very well to being played on concertinas as well as on closely related button accordions. The musicians who played these popular free-reed instruments played an oversized role in both the global propagation of early tunes for each new dance style (polka, schottische, etc.) as well as the local composition of new tunes for them. Musicians also drew upon other popular sources for inspiration, including tunes from English music halls and American minstrel shows. More than in any previous era, ballroom dance music was becoming global popular music, while still retaining some measure of local identity.

The German concertina

On the continent, the button accordion as well as Chemnitzers and Bandoneons were the free reed instruments most encountered among musicians playing for dances. In Great Britain and its Empire, however, the smaller, typically hexagonal-ended German and Anglo-German ('Anglo') concertina - the focus of this collection - was as popular or more popular than the accordion, especially in the middle to late nineteenth century. In particular, the concertina was a key part of social dances in England, Ireland, Australia, New Zealand, and in Dutch (Boer) portions of South Africa. It was also a popular instrument for dances in Canada and the United States, but to a somewhat lesser extent than were accordions and stringed instruments.

The octave technique

Although the musicians of various countries who are featured in these early recordings were separated by thousands of miles of land and ocean, and played in their youth for dances in an age that pre-dated broadcast and recorded music, they nonetheless exhibit remarkable similarities in their technical approach to playing dance music on the concertina. This similarity in approach mirrors an equally similar musical purpose: playing for dancing in noisy, crowded areas. House dances were lively affairs which often lasted all night, and the music was typically provided by a solo concertina player, or perhaps a concertina-fiddle duet. Musicians needed to play simply, accurately and rhythmically to meet the demanding needs of dancers, they needed to play their music loudly enough to be heard in an age before electronic amplification, and they needed to have the stamina to play for much longer periods of time than most dances last today. A style of playing evolved that consisted of playing the Anglo with double noting, with each hand playing the melody independently of the other, the left hand playing the melody an octave lower than the right. This so-called 'octave' or 'double-note' style, of which more below, was best adapted to these conditions, and evolved more or less independently in each of the four focus countries.

In contrast, in the global folk music revival of the past half century or more, most 'traditional' music is now played for listening in pubs, concert halls, and festivals rather than for dancing, and as a result the Anglo concertina has come to be played at a more rapid tempo and ever more complexly in terms of added ornaments, chords and/or phrasing in Ireland, England and South Africa, displaying a different take on such modernity in each country. As a result, the earlier and nearly universal 'octave' style that was employed for house dances a century and more ago has all but disappeared among most players today. Very few modern concertina players are technically proficient in playing the old manner, nor typically are most skilled in playing for dances; the world of the house dance has long since passed away. Hence, this collection of early recordings provides modern Anglo players a window into a largely forgotten world. Moreover, the close similarity in musical repertoire, dances, and concertina playing techniques across the globe that was so evident during the concertina's heyday is often overlooked today as folk revival musicians strive to mark the musical boundaries of each country's national identity.

The repertoire of the house dance

The house dance repertoire comprises a significant part of what is termed the traditional music of England, Australia, and Boer South Africa. Its ballroom dance music forms a large proportion of the so-called English country music genre, which also includes remnants of still earlier step dances and country dances. In Australia and among the Boers of South Africa, ballroom dance tunes comprise the majority of 'bush music' and boeremusiek, respectively. These were the dances of these countries' frontier and colonial past, as well as that of frontier America and colonial New Zealand, where recordings of early concertina players have not survived. In Ireland, on the other hand, the early ballroom dance repertoire is decidedly under-represented in modern traditional music circles. In the late nineteenth century, house dances that featured various ballroom dances were the dominant form of rural Irish social dance, largely supplanting earlier step dances in even the most remote parts of Gaelic Ireland. They came to be suppressed and even banned as 'foreign' and immoral in the early twentieth century by the Catholic church, the Gaelic League, and the young Irish government.

This anti-foreign crusade was well underway in the early years of the Irish concertina players whose recordings are presented in this archive. These recordings show a split between those (mostly women) who remembered the repertoire of the earlier house dances and those (mostly men) who cast their musical lot with the céilí dances that were designed by cultural authorities to replace them. As a result of the anti-foreign crusade, by today the traditional music repertoire in Ireland has become decidedly lean in schottisches, barn dances, mazurkas, waltzes, old quadrille tunes and the like relative to that of all other countries where ballroom dance had been popular. Instead, middle twentieth century and later Irish musicians have focused sharply upon the step dance music of the pre-Famine era, notwithstanding the obvious fact that reels, jigs and hornpipes were once equally 'foreign' imports.

Beyond the old-fashioned repertoire and the equally old-fashioned manner in which the concertina was played, there is a refreshing, pretension-free ethos of the musicians themselves that emerges from their playing. In general these were rural people playing in a simple fashion for a shared musical and community purpose. In this music there is none of the rapid-fire and technically ornate virtuosity that is to be found in so many performances of traditional music today, and little to none of the constant strumming of guitars or drums as accompaniment in commercial performances; rather, this was the era of solo instrumentalists playing for dancers. There were no competitions to inject complexity into the melodies, nor, one might imagine, would these players be much impressed if there had been. From the unusual and at times eccentric settings of many of the pieces one can get the feeling that aural transmission of tunes from other musicians, not standard settings taken from recordings or tune books, was king. It was the last hurrah for 'traditional' dance music (not that these musicians would have been familiar with that term) in the era when such music and dance was the recreation of the majority in rural communities, rather than of the minority that it has been in most places ever since. It is music worth hearing.

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