Three from Ball's Musical Cabinet

Ball's Musical Cabinet, or Compleat Pocket Library for the Flute, Flaeolet, [sic] Violin &c. was published about 1820, according to its IMSLP page: link. I have no further information about it, but the date, if broadly taken, is plausible: many such inexpensive collections of well-known dances and songs were published in the first half of the nineteenth century. The evidently poor quality of the paper suggests earlier rather than later.

From this volume, I have extracted three dance-songs, all of which are very well-known. The "Exile of Erin" focuses on ^8, to which its figures continually return. The opening of B1 and B2 offer the "play in a register above" that one commonly finds in these subordinate form sections (not unrelated, in affective and functional terms, to the bridge in the American ballad standard). Here the repetitions of the rising cadence (boxed) carry particular weight, as their last appearance sets "Erin go Bragh."

The main theme phrase expresses a mirror figure, ^8 down to ^5, then up again:

"Kitty of Coleraine" would make an interesting study of the play of registers, but I will confine myself here to the main shapes of lines -- these are neighbor note figure about a constant ^8. In the main cadences—lines four and eight—a line returns to ^8 from below.

"Robin Adair" is a straightforward example of the case where a framing sixth, ^5 below, ^3 above, or A4-F#5 here, generates a wedge figure converging on the tonic note, here D5. I have sorted this out in the graphic below the score.

New publication: a second supplement to British Dance & Song essay

English, Scotch, and Irish Dance and Song: Supplement 2 was just published on Texas Scholar Works. Here is the link: supplement 2. And here is the abstract:

Another supplement to the essay English, Scotch, and Irish Dance and Song, which is primarily a documentation of rising cadence figures in dances, fiddle tunes, and songs from late eighteenth and early nineteenth century published sources. Gathered here are an additional 70 examples taken from files downloaded in May and June 2017.

New essay published: supplement to British Isles essay

I have published a new essay on Texas Scholar Works: English, Scotch, and Irish Dance and Song: Supplement. Link.

Here is the abstract:

A supplement to the essay English, Scotch, and Irish Dance and Song, which is primarily a documentation of rising cadence figures in dances, fiddle tunes, and songs. Gathered here are another 50 examples found in files downloaded on 2 May 2017. These were the coincidental result of a search for more information on Nathaniel Gow, the son of the famous Scottish fiddler Niel Gow.

Essay on British Isles Dance and Song

I have published an essay titled English, Scotch, and Irish Dance and Song: On Cadence Gestures and Figures. It can be found on Texas Scholar Works: link.

Here is the abstract:

This is a documentation of ascending cadence gestures in some 260 songs and dances from the British Isles, taken from eighteenth and nineteenth century sources, with some emphasis on collections for practical use published between about 1770 and 1820 and on the later ethnographic collections of P. W. Joyce and the anthology of Francis O’Neill.