Country Dancing - Instruments

Instruments

Shawms and sackbuts or the bagpipe were popular instruments for outdoor dancing because of their loudness. Every European country, not just Scotland, used their own local variant of the bagpipe for country dancing. From the late 17th century fiddles began to take over, and dancing moved indoors. The main impetus for the development of the concertina, the melodeon and the accordion in the nineteenth century was to satisfy the market for a loud instrument for country dancing. Jane Austen, Charles Dickens and Thomas Hardy all loved country dancing and put detailed descriptions into their novels.

Read more about this topic:  Country Dancing

Famous quotes containing the word instruments:

    I rejoice that America has resisted. Three millions of people, so dead to all the feelings of liberty, as voluntarily to submit to be slaves, would have been fit instruments to make slaves of the rest.
    William Pitt, The Elder, Lord Chatham (1708–1778)

    Sound all the lofty instruments of war,
    And by that music let us all embrace,
    For, heaven to earth, some of us never shall
    A second time do such a courtesy.
    William Shakespeare (1564–1616)

    The form of act or thought mattered nothing. The hymns of David, the plays of Shakespeare, the metaphysics of Descartes, the crimes of Borgia, the virtues of Antonine, the atheism of yesterday and the materialism of to-day, were all emanation of divine thought, doing their appointed work. It was the duty of the church to deal with them all, not as though they existed through a power hostile to the deity, but as instruments of the deity to work out his unrevealed ends.
    Henry Brooks Adams (1838–1918)