Your Humble Blogger mentioned the other day that I was putting on my dancing shoes for some quadrille action in relation to the production of Lady Windermere’s Fan. Our Dance Captain (who is actually choreographing the dancing, and may not be taking part in it at all) found a nice set on YouTube; we are doing a modified version of the third round in this video. We have been rehearsing it, so far, to the music of the video itself: the Dance Captain plays the video on a laptop with some speakers, and we cavort. The sound is not terribly good, and the instrumentation is Not Period, but the melody is nice and suits our dancing quite well. I wanted to help out by getting a clean recording of the song.
Well. The first thing I did was to poke around the internet a trifle, doing no more than twenty seconds of research myself. Then I gave up and asked on Facebook; most of my FBFs who dance are Scottish Dancers, not English, and English Country Dancers don’t do the Quadrille anyway, as I understand it, but I tend to assume that any piece of music that is used for any English Dance is also used for a million other Dances, and hoped for some recognition. Worth a shot, I thought, and it was, although I did not come up with the title of the piece.
So. What did I do next? I asked a librarian, of course.
It took all of thirty minutes, perhaps, for the reference librarian at the music library to bring to my desk the sheet music for Les Moulinets from the Original Lanciers from Polite and Social Dances: a Collection of Historic Dances, Spanish, Italian, French, English, German, American; with Historical Sketches, Descriptions of the Dances and Instructions for Their Performance, compiled and edited by Mari Ruef Hofer; 1917 Clayton F. Summy Co.
He also linked to the Amazon site for the mp3 as recorded by Smash the Windows. So. No problem.
The best part is that I’m pretty sure I already own the Smash the Windows album with that track on it.
Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.