New Wine in Old Bottles

This directory contains music to 54 dances composed by Pat Shaw in 1971, set to various old Dutch tunes, and dedicated to his friends of the Nederlandse Volksdans Stichting.

To learn the dances, you'd do best to find a copy of the book. Many of them are online, but in early 2011 when I finished transcribing the tunes, they were scattered around and not easy to find. The Volksdansvereniging NVS had a copy when I just checked, so try their "Shop" link first.

These transcriptions came about because over the years, several dance leaders here in the Boston area had asked me to play for dances from the book. After a while, I had enough of these tunes that I decided to just borrow a teacher's book and transcribe the rest of them, so I'd be ready the next time I was asked for one of them.

You probably won't be surprised to find that many of these tunes are similar to English (or American) tunes. But they're usually different enough to show the results of adaptation to a related but slightly different language and culture.