Pat Ballantyne has written this interesting blog for Tracs on playing for dance.
In my recently completed PhD thesis, I considered the attitudes of Scottish traditional musicians towards dance and dancers towards music, and assessed how these attitudes might have evolved. A common theme emerged from the musicians and dancers I interviewed: to play successfully for dance, musicians should also be dancers.
I interviewed musicians and dancers involved with Highland dancing, percussive step dance and ceilidh dancing. These styles of dance share a largely common musical repertoire through the use of strathspeys, reels and jigs. Each style places different requirements on how the music is performed in relation to tempo, style and rhythmic emphasis. My respondents identified that there is very little available in the way of training for musicians in any of these styles – other than developing their own awareness of the different requirements of each dance style.
Highland dancers concentrate on achieving technical excellence in their performance of each dance. This means that they concentrate on the beat of the music rather than on the melody. Two dancers described their experience at a competition where the piper ‘started playing a tune that we’d never heard of, and we couldn’t work out where the beat was […] And then the judges saw we were completely lost, and stopped the piper to get him to play a different tune’.