One thing that might be worth considering in the context of the debate here over the past few days is that in at least one another tradition, the way a dance-based genre was originally danced need not determine how it later came to be played. I'm referring to "classical" music (or "Western art music", "mainstream music"... whatever you care to call it).
Bach made great use of dance forms, for both harpsichord and other instruments, but not with a view to his music being danced to. The minuets in Mozart's symphonies are well away from the social dance from which they derive. Wagner called Beethoven's 7th Symphony "the apotheosis of the dance", but he didn't mean that it was actually music for dancing. The Strauss family's waltzes can (perhaps) be danced to but are in fact subtle concert pieces. Mahler makes much use of marches and dances but how the Austro-Hungarian armies actually marched or danced in the pub is only relevant in that it underlies Mahler's ironical use of these forms. My point would be that traditions develop in all kinds of ways under all kinds of influences - they go their own way. What they were like originally may come to be irrelevant. That said, returning to the roots may well be valuable and refreshing: thank God for "historically informed performance" of Baroque music, for example, and for Allan MacDonald's approach to piobaireachd. But we are not likely to want to hear the Blue Danube played as if it were a "Laendler", the folk dance from which it derives. Sorry to rant on about posh stuff like this. I shall reel off to the pub for a quick clog dance. Paul Gretton (Schimmert, Holland) -- To get on or off this list see list information at http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~wbc/lute-admin/index.html
