The Contra Dance Musican’s Collaborative

The Collaborative is a support organization for musicians wishing to play for local contra dances. The Collaborative will offer information about dances in the greater southern Berkshire County area as well as opportunities to learn the craft of providing music for these venues.

 

The Caller’s Club invites the Contra Musicians’ Collaborative to their Dance and Dessert series.

Second Sundays at the UU Meeting House in

Housatonic, MA from 2pm - 5pm

Sliding scale $10 - $20 provides for rental space and coaches

Each month, an experienced coach will guide the instrumentalists through the 3 hour dance session.

As a “student musician” in the band, you will learn how to:

  • match tunes to dances with specific elements in them

  • vary the presentation of instruments (not everyone plays the whole time)

  • create arrangements on the fly (hearing someone do a catchy rhythm then doing it yourself, and harmonizing the melody)

  • orchestrate the band into all rhythm or all melody for sections of the tune, and “minimizing” the melody to create drama, interest and variation

Aldo Lavaggi and the Musicians’ Collaborative at the October 8th Dance

Next dance will be on Sunday, March 10th

PLEASE RSVP BY CLICKING HERE

Aspiring contra dance musicians can use these music sheets to give you ideas for medleys. We worked largely with tunes from this group at the dance in October. Other tunes are also being played, primarily from the Berkshire Strings Jam Collection Edition 3. We have also been using single tunes more than medleys. Click on the brown box for printable pdf files.