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:

    Fashionable women regard themselves, and are regarded by men, as pretty toys or as mere instruments of pleasure; and the vacuity of mind, the heartlessness, the frivolity which is the necessary result of this false and debasing estimate of women, can only be fully understood by those who have mingled in the folly and wickedness of fashionable life ...
    Sarah M. Grimke (1792–1873)

    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)

    I lay my eternal curse on whomsoever shall now or at any time hereafter make schoolbooks of my works and make me hated as Shakespeare is hated. My plays were not designed as instruments of torture. All the schools that lust after them get this answer, and will never get any other.
    George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950)