Das Lovelace Manuscript:  eine neue Quelle für frühe englische Countrydances
(Carol G. Marsh)

The Lovelace manuscript, now at Harvard, is apparently unknown to scholars working on early and mid-seventeenth-century English country dance.  The manuscript contains detailed descriptions (but no music) for 32 dances, 12 of which appear to be unique to this source.  Twenty dances are also found in early editions of The Dancing Master:  16 in the first edition, 1 in the second, and 3 in the fourth.  In contrast to the “Moot-Book,” in which two of the four dances seem to have been copied from The Dancing Master, the dances in this source are described in greater detail than in Playford’s publications, and the terminology used to describe the figures is often different from contemporary sources.   

The lecture will provide an overview of the contents of the manuscript and will examine in more detail some of the dances for which concordances exist, comparing them to the better-known versions published by Playford. Reconstructions of a few of the dances unique to this manuscript will be presented.

Carol Marsh, Greensboro, North Carolina, USA:

Carol G. Marsh has recently retired from the UNCG School of Music, where she taught music history and viola da gamba and was director of the Collegium Musicum.  She has been on the faculty at a number of early music workshops in North America and Europe, teaching both viol and Renaissance notation.  An internationally recognized authority on Baroque dance and dance notation, she has published extensively in this field and has lectured and given dance workshops at numerous universities in the US and abroad.  Two articles on the Ferrère manuscript appeared recently in The Grotesque Dancer on the Eighteenth-Century Stage: Gennaro Magri and His World (Studies in Dance History, 2005).