Caledonian Country Dances

This directory is my first attempt at transcribing all of John Walsh's "Caledonian Country Dances" publications. This is now somewhat a relic, as the collections have been merged in the JohnWalsh directory. This directory should disappear eventually.

Starting around 1740, a number of collections by this name were published by John Walsh in London. These were compiled by a number of different editors, and as was Walsh's practice, they rarely included any information about their sources. These are among the earliest known "Scottish" collections. I've been working on collecting all the tunes, and sometimes the accompanying dance descriptions.

This is a collection that's "under construction", as I find time to hunt down copies of the music and transcribe it. The files here mostly contain single tunes in ABC notation, with the "_CCD_" files at the end a single file that contains all the tunes transcribed so far.

The publications with the title "Caledonian Country Dances" are somewhat a mess. They typically have no publication date, and are referenced by various terms (Book, Volume, Edition, etc.) in no consistent manner. Versions of a tune appear in more than one of them, sometimes identical, sometimes different in various ways, and sometimes with different dance descriptions.

Transcription Notes:

While working on one publication, the file names will start with a number that has a digit to indicate the source file, plus a 3-digit page number. When a publication is complete, I strip off the numbers, and the resulting _CCD_ file has the tunes in alphabetical order. Since this is a transcription of a confusing set of books that repeat a lot of tunes and dances, this scheme will put those with the same name next to each other for easy comparison.

There are some problems with the dance descriptions. The text is often not of good quality. Punctuation is often lost, periods and commas are difficult to distinguish, and random specks can look like periods. The thin parts of letters often fade or disappear. In the worst cases, "??" is used to indicate an illegible portion of text.

In many cases, there are explicit statements or clues in the dance to determine the tune's repeat pattern. When this isn't possible, I've generally transcribed the repeat symbols as-is, which is usually different from modern practice. Initial double bars or begin-repeat symbols are used for full first bars, as is common with some publishers (but not others).

Initial "the" and "a" are omitted in file names, and are lower case in the T: header. This is recommended for computer files, since it makes correct alphabetization easy in different languages by using the rule "Sort on the title starting with the first upper-case letter".

There is also a cache subdirectory that contains transcriptions of some of the tunes from other people. I've found a few of these, and sometimes incorporated them into my files. I may eventually collect more tunes from other transcribers, and include them here as part of this collection.

The sources that I've used are:

1
IMSLP 74348first colelction, edited by John Johnson, called "3rd edition" and also the collections labelled 1 and 2.
2
"Vol.II. PART I." and "Vol 1st, in 4 Books"
IMSLP #98359, second colelction, 84 pp.
3
labelled "3rd Edition", but not the same as #1 above.
IMSLP #173105,
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[TXT]titles.txt 2013-01-25 09:45 1.8K 
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