Play Dance Tunes
Tunes used for Morris Dance, in common with very many traditional tunes, are not generally written down in sheet music as they are actually played. Rather, the written score should be taken as an aide-memoire and not as a definitive statement as to how the tune should be rendered by the musician. This can cause problems for some classically trained musicians who are used to playing the notes exactly as written in the score.
The most common short hand technique in the written score is in the representation of pairs of quavers. These should almost never be played with equal duration of each quaver in the pair but rather by extended the duration of the first quaver at the expense of the second. This long-short pairing can be written as a dotted quaver followed a semiquaver.
Obviously, this would be tiresome to write out in full every time, especially when the intention of the writer was to produce something intended merely to remind themselves of how the tune actually goes.
I have attempted to illustrate this long-short quaver pair by taking a well known example (Cock O' the North - aka Auntie Mary).
Sheet Music
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