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Live music is an important Contra Dance tradition, and one of the principal attractions at our dances.
The music is based in traditional American fiddle and string band music, strongly influenced by Celtic, English and French Canadian folk music, but sometimes drawing on a wide range of sources. Different bands have different combinations of instruments; fiddle, mandolin, guitar, piano, pennywhistle, accordian, and other instruments are common.
This site is under development. I will add links below to bands and relevant music sites as I encounter them. Where available, webpages for the individual bands are linked on the Riverside Contra Dance Schedule page.
Contracopia is a company that sells Contra Dance Music CD's. An interesting place to start is with the Contracopia webshow, which is a streaming, sometimes-changing selection of contra tunes. When I listened it had a recording of a contra dance, complete with a caller calling the dance. You will need RealPlayer (see below) to listen to this.
Contracopia also features clips from most of the CD's they sell, most in RealPlayer format, but some in MP2 format recognized by Quicktime or Windows Media Player. Here are links to a few of these (for more detail or longer, named, RealPlayer links, follow the link to the album page , for MP2, follow the clip links
From The Reckless Ramblers CD Lowdown Hoedown: Clip 1 Clip 2
From Wild Asparagus CD's Wherever You Go and Waiting for the Perseids Clip 1 Clip 2
Great Meadow Music sells CD's of contra dance music (but no audio clips are available), and also many tunebooks with musical notation for contra dance tunes, as well as instructional books about calling and staging dances.
RealPlayer is a free web-based media player, that you can download here. Probably you will want to click the FreeRealPlayer Button, not the Download Now button that gets you a more feature-laden $30 version.
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