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Book: The Portland Collection (1)
The Portland
Collection: Contra Dance Music in the Pacific Northwest Reviews
This tune book contains jigs and reels from the Portland, Oregon contra dance repertoire. Irish, Scottish, Québécois, Appalachian, and New England genres are represented. The tunes are both traditional and recently composed, from local treasures to national contra dance standards. There is an extensive commentary on every tune including stories about the tunes from their composers. There are chord suggestions, a discography, a bibliography, and more. The tunes and their histories were collected from many local contra dance musicians who generously gave of their time and talent to help create this comprehensive musical resource. How the Tunes Were SelectedThe tunes in this collection are drawn from the repertoires of all the local musicians who play regularly for contra dances in Portland, Oregon. At the onset of the project (January, 1995), I asked these musicians to provide me with lists of their favorite contra dance tunes. The only stipulations: each tune had to be one that they have played in Portland, and that each tune had to be a "good dance tune." (The more exact components of that quality are explained by Clyde in his introduction and throughout the commentary.) Musicians supplied the titles of about 375 tunes. Click here to see sample pages of the music and commentary from Volume 1. From this starting point, I looked through a number of readily available tune books, and if there were many versions of a tune already in print, I eliminated it from the list. Because of this editing, many frequently played and wonderful contra dance tunes are not a part of this collection, e.g., "Morpeth Rant," "Lamplighter's Hornpipe," "Larry O'Gaff," and "Maggie Brown's Favorite," to name just a few. The "chestnut tunes," such as "Chorus Jig," "Hull's Victory," "Petronella," and "Rory O'More" have all been excluded for the same reason. (These tunes can be found in both Ryan's Mammoth Collection and The New England Fiddler's Repertoire.) Many other fine dance tunes commonly played elsewhere are not included in this collection simply because they are not often played by Portland musicians. "Silver Spire" and "Golden Wedding Reel" are two tunes in this category that spring immediately to mind. A few more tunes were eliminated because they could not be successfully played for many contra dances. ("Providence Reel" with its unusual chord progression throughout the A part is an example of this kind of tune.) The result of the above process is this collection of 318 jigs and reels, all thoroughly road-tested at our local contra dances. We have identified recent composers for 95 of the tunes and believe the remaining tunes to be in the public domain.
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