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:

    Being the dependents of the general government, and looking to its treasury as the source of all their emoluments, the state officers, under whatever names they might pass and by whatever forms their duties might be prescribed, would in effect be the mere stipendiaries and instruments of the central power.
    Andrew Jackson (1767–1845)

    The worth of a State, in the long run, is the worth of the individuals composing it ... a State which dwarfs its men, in order that they may be more docile instruments in its hands even for beneficial purposes—will find that with small men no great thing can really be accomplished.
    John Stuart Mill (1806–1873)

    The universe appears to me like an immense, inexorable torture-garden.... Passions, greed, hatred, and lies; law, social institutions, justice, love, glory, heroism, and religion: these are its monstrous flowers and its hideous instruments of eternal human suffering.
    Octave Mirbeau (1850–1917)