Issue 1443: figure and date and sources

New issue submitted

Assigned changed to »murrough« (previously »None«)
Disposition changed to »Needs help« (previously »New«)

Hello Bruce, I am a bit puzzled by your comment that the devised in 1982 is not shown. When I looked, the Overview tab for the dance entry in SCDDB tells me it was Devised by John Drewry (1982).

Regarding the two books, the database knows the Brodie Book was published in 1994 but has no publication date for the Summer Collection 11. A later publication would normally be considered the definitive one and can be made to appear first in the list by adjusting its “publication priority” (as its not an RSCDS publication which editors are sternly warned not to touch). But without knowing the date of the Summer Collection I am reluctant to change it. Do you have it and/or can you supply its publication date?

I do not think there are clear rules on what fraction of a well known figure counts when listing formations for dances in the present formation system - though there are guidelines for not adding “one off” new formations. I suspect that editors typically follow the text, so if Drewry had written “set and dance 6 bars of a chain progression” it would have been added, but if he described it differently then probably not.

Personally I tend to agree with you that 3/4 of what looks like a chain progression is enough to be added as a formation for the dance, but while waiting for confirmation of the Summer Collection publication date lets see if another editor has a different opinion. Cheers, Murrough.

In response to the following email from Bruce I have at least added the chain progression formation to the dance.

From Bruce:

I have no record of my submission, so I am not sure exactly what I said. But clearly from the db the dance was published first in 1982* and republished by the author in the Brodie Collection in 1994. Thus, the Brodie coll should be the primary source (* these ‘season collections’ were stapled together sets of leaflets with the seasons and date written by hand on the top of the first leaflet – at least so it is in the other ones in my coll, although the ‘Summer 82’ is missing from my coll. And in the other seasonal collections the db uses this format – see below**))

Scanning the db I find that WInter Park may be the earliest dance with a chain progression and I find that no other dances by Drewry contain that figure. So he may have invented it and felt no need to name it since it was a ‘one-off.’ It would have just been ‘the Winter Park’ figure. But now we have it as a figure and people like me may want to find where the figure came from, or if Mr Drewry ever used it. So I think the figure should be listed as occurring in the dance – certainly whether you turn 1/2 way in the middle or 1 1/2 varies from dance to dance, (and in at least one dance you start with the left from the improper side and turn in middle by the right) so I do not think that it is so rigidly defined that the 6 bar version in Winter Park should be excluded.

Interestingly, when he developed the figure Set and Rotate in 1986, he named the figure and wrote a jig, a reel, and a strathspey (** published in the Autumn 86 coll.) to illustrate how the figure works (which isn’t how the society chooses to make it work, but oh well…).

anyway, those are my thoughts, and I hope it is obvious how much I appreciate having the db at hand. Thanks again for the work of all of you,

Just for the record, the chain progression shows up in a few dances in the Birmingham Book from the early 1970s. I believe that’s where the formation entered the repertoire.

The interesting thing about the Birmingham Book is that it stipulates two different versions of the chain progression – one in quick time, which is the one that we do today even in strathspey time, and one in strathspey time which works subtly differently and which as far as I can tell nobody bothers with.

Finally, when prioritising publications of a dance we try to go for the most “accessible” publications first. This is why publications by RSCDS HQ tend to trump everything else. In this case, the Brodie Book is fairly popular and I think you can still get it new, but the seasonal collections probably exist mostly as photocopies of photocopies. Hence it makes sense to prefer the Brodie Book even if the other publication has temporal priority.