The Imperial Book Mervyn Short supplies background to the republished Imperial dances.
Having qualified to teach Highland and Scottish country dance with the Imperial Society of Teachers of Dancing (ISTD) before gaining the RSCDS Teaching Certificate, I was delighted to hear that the Society had secured the copyright to publish the ‘Imperial’ dances. The ISTD is one of the leading examining bodies in the UK. It was formed in London in 1904 and offers amateur and professional examinations in all disciplines of dance. In 1953, the Scottish Country Dance Branch was formed by a number of Scottish dance teachers including Jack McConachie. Miss Milligan agreed to act as technical advisor and gave several lectures to the Imperial Society in its early days. In 1969, a Highland syllabus was added and the branch was renamed The Scottish Dance Branch. Examinations in Scottish dancing declined in popularity throughout the 1980s and, in 1992, the Scottish Dance Branch merged with the National Dance Branch. Scottish dance examinations continued to decline over the next ten years, and by 2002 the Scottish Dance Branch members and interests had been fully reabsorbed into the National Dance Branch where it had all started.
Jack McConachie died in 1967, and in 1968 the ISTD Scottish Dance Branch organised an annual competition for its members to devise a country dance in his memory. The winning dance was published by the ISTD and the deviser was presented with a magnificent trophy to hold for one year: a Wilkinson Sword donated by the Branch and usually presented by Jean McConachie, Jack’s widow. For many years, the dances were judged by all teachers attending the dance session, but more recently a well-known deviser was invited to do the judging. Usually a good number of dances was entered for this competition, sometimes as many as twelve. One of the requirements was that the dance should include a new formation or a variation on an existing formation; some of the dances also included Highland steps. Regrettably, original tunes were rarely assigned to the dances. Some devisers suggested tunes but these were often tunes for well-known RSCDS dances almost certainly based on recordings available at that time. Some of the dances, such as Alison Rose , The Blacksmith of Elgin , Mrs Stuart Linnell , and Whigmaleeries , will already be familiar to many. In 1966, the ISTD published a book of dances devised by Jack McConachie and
Edna Russell which was designated Volume 1. Between 1968 and 2001, over thirty competitions were held and four further volumes were published, including all those dances which had won or been placed second or third. This year the RSCDS has published an A5 size book which contains the dances from Volume 1 to 3, representing the years 1968–77, and this is now available to purchase. The project is intended to include both the two remaining volumes and additional dances left unpublished by the ISTD. It is hoped that these will be available in an A5 size book in summer 2015. Some of the original instructions were unclear and did not follow any standard terminology. Many hours have been spent putting the dances into current terminology and, with the assistance of a number of experienced teachers, the instructions have been standardised and clarified as far as possible. According to the introduction to the RSCDS booklet on Standard Terminology, ‘Dance is a physical art form which is notoriously difficult to put into words’, but I believe most of the uncertainties have been resolved. I hope you enjoy the dances: for some dancers the book will resurrect material from the past, but for others the dances will be ‘new’.
Origins of the Strathspey cont. might be by him or it might be a tune he heard and decided was worth publishing. In the field of music and dance the concept of intellectual property did not exist. What then were the Gaelic sources? Gaelic culture was and to a certain extent still is an oral culture. Even today you will hear songs – and styles of singing – which have been handed down from singer to singer through the generations. Gaelic has a long tradition of songs which accompany movement. The movement might be dancing and the music ‘puirt à beul’ – mouth music. I am sure many people will remember watching dancers doing the Highland Schottische to the singing of Johan MacLean at Summer School. More probably the songs will be the accompaniment to some form of work – grinding corn, spinning wool, waulking cloth, rowing, or a mother’s gentle rocking of her child as she sings a lullaby. Using recorded material from the archive of
the School of Scottish Studies in Edinburgh University, Dr Lamb has experimented with tempo. He has shown that when you slow down a Gaelic sung or piped reel, what you end up with sounds very like a strathspey. He has also found that the strathspey rhythm exists in a variety of Gaelic work songs when you speed them up to strathspey tempo. He has also looked at Gaelic instrumental music by ‘stitching together’ two recordings of piping and song: one a traditional strathspey, the other a slowed-down reel. The join is seamless. More surprisingly, he has taken a traditional Gaelic lullaby. Speeded up to strathspey tempo, the rhythmic similarities are striking. All of Dr Lamb’s musical examples above can be heard on a YouTube recording (LP188D6Phlo) to accompany his paper ‘Reeling in the Strathspey: The Origins of Scotland’s National Music’. He concludes that the strathspey rhythm underlies a large proportion of Gaelic movement
songs. Significantly for us in the RSCDS, he is convinced that the strathspey is almost certainly rooted in Gaelic song rather than in the eighteenth-century fiddle tradition. The vigorous waulking of cloth, the rocking of a baby, the rhythmic dipping and lifting of oars are all binary movements setting up a rhythm, clearly recognisable both in Gaelic song and in our strathspeys. Try it for yourself. Type puirt à beul into YouTube. Then practise your strathspey steps!
Reference Lamb, William. 2013. ‘Reeling in the strathspey: The origins of Scotland’s national music’, Scottish Studies, 36: 66-102. Jimmie Hill is indebted to Dr Will Lamb for his time and for making his research paper ‘Reeling in the Strathspey’ available to him. He would also like to thank Jim Healy for the examples from the Castle Menzies manuscript.
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