Other Dance Tunes


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Nine nights away welcome hame my Dearie is a triple-time hornpipe from John Hamilton's Complete Repository for the German Flute. Another variant of the tune is known from manuscripts around 1700, mostly from northern England, as Three Sharp Knives or Punchinello, and from other Scottish sources as Old Age and Young.

College Hornpipe is a familiar English tune, usually played in B flat. Miss Lumsden seems to be a minuet. Both come from Andrew Small's manuscript. I have not found Miss Lumsden anywhere else.

Ardrossan Castle Hornpipe (by James Manson, editor of Hamilton's Universal Tunebook of 1844 and 1853), The Balmoral Hornpipe, and New Century Hornpipe are from J. Crichton Donaldson's manuscript. There is a whole page in this manuscript of tunes dedicated to Balmoral; perhaps they were played for Queen Victoria. Donaldson doesn't notate a hornpipe "swing", but it's probably intended; the dotted opening of the Balmoral Hornpipe seems to mean "carry on like this". Ardrossan Castle is in an unusually obsessive rhythm I don't recall hearing in any other tune, though some Scandinavian music uses something similar.

Lady Charlotte Campbell's Waltz is from the manuscript MS.3339 in the National Library of Scotland, inscribed on the flyleaf "to Mr Cumming from a poor devil going to push his fortunes in South America, R.A., Dunkeld, 19 January 1819". It was first published in a keyboard version by Nathaniel Gow in 1796.

The Dalkeith Palace Waltzes, by Labitzky, are from John Cameron's Cameron's Flute Music, published in Glasgow in the 1870s; they were originally published for the piano at the time of Queen Victoria's first visit to Scotland in 1842 (with two other waltzes, a prelude based on Scots Wha Hae and a finale). If there is any trace of Scottish idiom in them I can't see it, but they're entertaining pieces regardless.

The Moon Waltz is one of the first waltzes to be published in Britain: it's from Gale's Pocket Companion of around 1800.

Lovely Miss Weir, from Hamilton's Caledonian Repository, is an unusual piece; it's a minuet, and in six-bar phrases, but still has the feel of a traditional Scottish tune.

Gille Callum is the tune for the Highland Sword Dance; this long setting is from the 1812 flute version of the Gows' Repository.

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Old Scottish Flute Music
Copyright © 2003, Jack Campin