'House Dance' is a phrase familiar to the Irish ear but in a worldwide context refers to a rural social house dance: houses, barns, crossroads, woolsheds, and in frontier areas 'even on wagon sails on the ground under the stars.' Bush dance is another description. Being a digital book in cd-rom format, it is possible to have musical samples throughout and this makes for fascinating reading and listening… This book is so much more than its title suggests, and these words hardly do it justice. Suffice it to say, it is a fascinating experience of reading and listening and although you may not be able to pick I up and physically browse through it, you will find yourself coming back to it again and again.
For anyone interested in the history of Irish traditional music, the recordings presented here of these 'lost' (ballroom) dance forms are essential listening. And while these old ballroom-style tunes may lack the excitement of a fast Irish reel, it is abundantly clear from the musical examples presented here that there is still plenty to admire in them, and those who played them. Indeed, English musicians like me who play in functional social dance bands will probably find it much easier to relate to these tunes: they are tunes not just to admire, but which one can imagine actually playing at a Saturday night dance. Most people today, if asked to exemplify the differences in English and Irish anglo-concertina styles, would probably think of players such as John Kirkpatrick and Noel Hill - each of whom plays the same instrument in a very different way. But listening to the musical examples here you can see that English and Irish styles were not always so different - nor so different from playing styles on the opposite side of the world.
There are some recordings here which are commercially available, on Topic and elsewhere, but the majority are either hard to come by, or simply have not been available before. For readers outside South Africa this certainly applies to the recordings of Boer concertina-players from the 1930s. And there's actually some pretty rare stuff among the English recordings too - the recordings of Ellis Marshall, Eric Holland and Bill Link are all from private sources, while even the majority of the William Kimber tracks, from the Peter Kennedy archive, are currently unavailable elsewhere.
We live in an age in which modern technology is taken for granted. And yet every so often something pops up which seems to use technology in a new way and makes one feel so glad that we live in the 21st century. This disk is just such a product. It is, as it proclaims on the cover, a digital book with embedded sound files, dedicated to an exploration of the use of the Anglo- German concertina in the house dance era. I have to tell you that it is a stunning product. It is the ability to read the book on screen and listen to the audio samples at the same time which turns a first-class piece of musicology into a very special experience.
It makes for a wonderful experience to read though the generally brief chapters and to listen to the audio files, an experience I would recommend to every concertina player interested in the historical dimension of the instrument, its repertory, and its contexts. With this CR-Rom, Dan Worrall has made a striking contribution to the world of the Anglo-German concertina and its enthusiasts.