Encouraging Musicians To Play For Dance Classes a local class. After about six months, they dragged me along (under protest!) to my first summertime dance in suburban Washington, DC. I was hooked on the first night! In our last year of school, we had a gang of teens that went dancing every Tuesday night, dancing mostly with each other and sitting out the dances we felt didn’t merit our interest and participation.
Susie Petrov
When there is dancing, the RSCDS Boston Branch offers weekly classes, monthly parties, formal balls and a summer school with ‘live music.’ Why might your group want to encourage local musicians to play? I cannot use the old motivation for teachers, for all our music is digital and you don’t have to lug records and machinery to class every week. Teacher Ed Rawson once said, “It’s SO much more fun to clap to a person on stage than it is to clap to a tape recorder! ”
Fiddler Nora Smith began dancing as part of the century-long university folkdance tradition in the Delaware Valley Branch. She had learned violin in school. One night, she ’tweaked’ her ankle at an Irish dance and went along to the Scottish dance to listen to the music, do homework and socialize at tea. A Swarthmore College grad was leading a weekly music practice before the dance class. Nora and her friends who were nervous about playing for dancers would get together to practice the music before the weekly session to prepare! It helped her to be part of a group of students who played together. Nora moved to Boston in 2010 where I promptly invited her to come play for my Fundamentals class. She writes, “Moving to a new place brings out all kinds of insecurities (“what if I don’t belong?”). Getting out and meeting the local RSCDS
Susie Petrov is passionate about Scottish music and believes that dancing to musicians is much more fun that dancing to a machine. She has taught Scottish music and dance across the USA and Canada, as well as in Scotland and many other European countries. Greetings dancers! What an exciting opportunity I have to write to you about something that has been an important part of my life for the last almost 50 years. As I write this, I am enjoying the music of Glasgow’s Celtic Connections exported around the world as so much of Scottish culture has been. Our music and dance activities lay fallow this season. Perhaps it is a good time to contemplate how we are going to restart our dance groups and how we might attract more people to our most pleasurable pastime. People may well emerge from our current isolated situations hungry for a chance to participate in social dance. I would like to focus on musicians who play for local classes and dances outwith Scotland. Did you know that many of these musicians are members of the RSCDS? So many of us found our way into dancing first and then picked up our instruments and figured out how to play our highly specialized form of music. So, how did I fall into this subterranean current of Scottish dance that led to my life’s professional work researching, playing and teaching Scottish music? Like many of you, I had friends who discovered
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Boston Branch musicians performing remotely in June 2020 Here are stories of five RSCDS Boston Branch member musicians. It has been a 40-year effort, but now dancers insist that a party at our Pinewoods summer school is not complete unless our friends are playing on stage and then bringing their instruments along to enliven the afterparty gatherings. Many players in North America have crossed musical paths with RSCDS member Barbara McOwen, including your humble author who moved to Boston to play in her band Tullochgorum in 1983. Her teacher, C. Stewart Smith, suggested she learn to play after she had become an accomplished dancer in the San Francisco Branch. She received an invitation, assembled an ensemble, practiced assiduously and made a triumphant début at the Asilomar Weekend. Barbara and Robert moved to Boston in 1979, but not before creating a dedicated group of musicians in California.
Barbara McOwen folks first thing made me feel like I had a place and community here.” She learned the importance of swing as a solo player for classes. She makes an interesting point.
