Contra Dance Instrumentation |
March 30th, 2014 |
| contra, music |
Using the same data as last time, six months of a weekly dance plus a year of dance weekend bookings, I looked up the instrumentations for each band. Here's the data as an ugly table:
| Fiddle, Flute, Guitar | 33 |
| Fiddle, Guitar | 18 |
| Fiddle, Guitar, Piano | 16 |
| Fiddle, Mandolin, Piano | 15 |
| Fiddle, Clarinet, Trumpet, Trombone, Guitar | 8 |
| Fiddle, Mandolin, Piano, Drums | 7 |
| Fiddle, Clarinet, Piano, Bass | 6 |
| Fiddle, Banjo, Piano, Bass, Drums | 5 |
| Fiddle, Flute, Guitar, Bass | 6 |
| Fiddle, Guitar, Bass | 6 |
| Fiddle, Accordion, Piano, Bass | 5 |
| Fiddle, Cello, Guitar, Piano, Drums | 4 |
| Fiddle, Mandolin, Guitar, Bass | 4 |
| Fiddle, Fiddle, Piano, Bass | 4 |
| Fiddle, Mandolin, Guitar, Drums | 3 |
| Fiddle, Banjo, Guitar | 3 |
| Fiddle, Accordion, Guitar | 3 |
| Fiddle, Piano, Drums | 3 |
| Fiddle, Accordion, Trombone, Trombone, Piano, Drums | 3 |
| Fiddle, Flute, Accordion, Piano, Bass, Drums | 2 |
| Fiddle, Flute, Accordion, Hammered Dulcimer, Piano | 2 |
| Fiddle, Guitar, Drums | 2 |
| Fiddle, Banjo, Guitar, Bass | 2 |
| Fiddle, Guitar, Piano, Drums | 2 |
| Fiddle, Whistle, Guitar, Piano | 2 |
| Fiddle, Fiddle, Guitar | 2 |
| Fiddle, Accordion, Guitar, Bass | 1 |
| Fiddle, Fiddle, Piano | 1 |
| Fiddle, Piano, Bass, Drums | 1 |
| Fiddle, Fiddle, Mandolin, Guitar | 1 |
| Fiddle, Flute, Piano, Bass | 1 |
| Fiddle, Clarinet, Guitar | 1 |
You can tell there's a lot of overlap between entries, though, and a table doesn't represent this well. It's easy to see that all the bands have fiddles, but is it more common to have a piano or a guitar? Or both? I played around with ways of visualizing this, and while I'm not completely satisfied with it, I do have something:
Fiddle 172
Guitar 117 Perpetual e-Motion, Uncle Farmer
Flute 39 The Mean Lids, Crowfoot, Maivish
Bass 6 Wild Asparagus
Piano 24 Great Bear Trio
Drums 6 Relative Harmony
Cello 4 Gallimaufry
Whistle 2 Wild Hair
Bass 13 The Stringrays, The Gaslight Tinkers
Mandolin 4 The Contrarians, On the Fly
Banjo 2 Euphor
Accordion 1 T-Acadie
Clarinet 9 The Figments
Trumpet, Trombone 8 Elixir
Drums 5 Contraforce
Mandolin 3 Notorius (quartet)
Fiddle 3 The Dead Sea Squirrels, The Cosmic Otters
Mandolin 1 Atlantic Crossing
Banjo 3 Sassafras Stomp
Accordion 3 Anadama
Piano 55
Bass 24
Drums 8 Arigana Highway
Banjo 5 Hotpoint String Band
Flute, Accordion The Clayfoot Strutters
Clarinet 6 The Latter Day Lizards
Accordion 5 Tidal Wave
Fiddle 4
Flute 1 Spare Parts
Mandolin 22 Nor'easter, The Free Raisins
Drums 7 Lift Ticket, The Syncopaths
Drums 6 Party of Three, The Coffee Zombies
Trombones, Accordion 3 Giant Robot Dance
Hammered Dulcimer,
Flute, Accordion 2 Swallowtail
Fiddle 1
This shows that once you've got a fiddle 117 of 172 times you find a guitar and the remaining 55 times you find a piano. Then if you got a guitar, the most common additional instrument is flute, followed by piano, and the bass. I've put in examples of bands in each category, but there are of course many others.
(One thing I don't like about this categorization is that it's not very stable. Imagine about a third of bands have guitar and piano, a third have just piano, and a third have just guitar. If guitar is slightly more common than piano this chart will put all the guitar+piano bands under guitar, exagerating its frequency, while if the piano is slightly more common we get the reverse.)
Another way of looking at this is as an approximation for "given instruments A and B, what are the candidates for C, and how popular are they?" Or possibly "given A and B, how much do each of the candidates for C add?"
Update 2014-04-02: At Mac's suggestion I've added a chart:
[1] For example, while the Free
Raisins play some as Fiddle/Trumpet/Piano or
Fiddle/Accordion/Mandolin, we're primarily Fiddle/Mandolin/Piano.
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