LiveCeilidh

In which I attempt to livecode some music to do ceilidh dancing to.

How does ceilidh work?

Ceilidh as I play for it is a kind of social folk dancing, done to traditional English/Irish/Scottish (or trad-style) tunes, as instructed by a caller.

Dances are (usually) some multiple of 16 bars long, and dancers do sequences of moves which usually take something between 4 and 8 bars each. The whole dance is repeated (with the dancers in a different order) some number of times, at the discretion of the caller.

Why does this need live music?

It kinda doesn't, people have done silent disco ceilidhs and dancing to recorded music and it works ok. BUT, live music makes a whole bunch of things more fun for the dancers and easier for the caller, particularly when things go wrong.

Some rooms will want the dance to go faster or slower (during the course of a single dance as they work out what's going on, or globally because they are particularly old/young/keen).

Sometimes the caller will want do the dance a different number of times, depending on how many dancers they get (4 or 5 couples, each going twice etc), or how much fun it looks like they're having.

Sometimes the caller/dancers mess up, and you need to give them extra music to sort themselves out (usually an extra 8 bars and then a really super clear START THE DANCE AGAIN NOW signal). If the whole room messes up, adding extra music helps everyone. If only one set messes up, just changing how you play to make the beat/start of a move/start of the dance clearer works better.

All these things really need a musician live in the room, watching the dancers and working with the caller, and they make the whole experience way more fun and engaging.

There's also more fun things you can optionally do as a musician if your dancers are doing super well, for example leaving them musical space for them to clap in, playing with texture and instrumentation, and deciding when/if to change tune.

What does the music need to do?

I have OPINIONS about what job dance music for ceilidh needs to do, and could talk for many hours and probably be somewhat controversial. But for me, in rough order of importance, music at a ceilidh needs to:

• Make the dancers have a good time
• Tell the dancers when to start dancing
• Tell the dancers when the dance they are currently doing is about to start again (probably every 32 bars)
• Tell the dancers when the next move/phrase in their current dance is about to start (probably every 8 bars)
• Relatedly, tell the dancers how their body needs to move - am I asking them to bounce or walk or go fast or slow or in a circle or stamp or clap at a particular time (or at least make it as easy as possible for their body to do what the caller is telling them)
• Tell the dancers when to stop dancing
• Let me enjoy myself playing tunes I like with friends

There's a whole bunch of tricks for helping the dancers move their body in the right way, but broadly if I want to push them to walk forwards with purpose, I want to emphasise on-beat rhythms (emphasis as they put their foot down), and if I want them to bounce (gallop, hopstep etc) I want to emphasise off-beats (emphasis as they are in the air). They always need to be able to find the beat, and there needs to be 2 beats per bar. Trad tunes are variously in some kind of straight 2 time (2/4, 4/4, polka, march or reel), or some kind of triplet time (6/8, jig), and sometimes that correlates with how I want them to move (jigs are often easier to give bounce than reels).