Why does the BIDA open band work well?

January 17th, 2012
bida, contra, music
Open bands have a reputation for being less enjoyable to dance to. I've heard dancers say they avoid open band nights, or that while they understand the role of the open band in fostering musicians they wish they weren't needed. Now that I'm helping organize them with BIDA, however, I'm not seeing this. In fact our attendance is higher, people have a great time, and I don't hear complaints. Afterwards a dancer wrote that they had "never seen that much positive engagement between the band and the dancers."


(on youtube)

I see two explanations: (1) open bands are not actually unpopular and I was just listening to the small number of people who don't like them or (2) BIDA is doing something right. I don't know which it is, but I figured I would describe what BIDA has been doing in case it's (2).

(BIDA has had four open band nights. I've only been involved with the most recent three, so what I have below is about these three.)

In scheduling the open band we first find a band leader. We've had Peter Barnes twice and Debby Knight once, both have been great. They both primarily played piano, but also can play other instruments if someone else wants to take a turn on piano. This is the only paid role; everyone else playing pays admission on a $0-$10 sliding scale.

We have two rows, sorting people by experience. We mic everyone in the front row and most of the people in the back, though there are often some who don't want to be mic'd or who need to take turns with limited mics. It's helpful that we have a large stage. Everyone plays at once. At our most recent dance we had: (front row) caller, piano, 6x fiddle (back row) double bass, whistle, recorder, fiddle, octave mandolin.

Reading through this, nothing sounds very different from other open bands I've been to. Which makes me think it's not actually about how we run the band and instead about the musicians who decide to come. Maybe what's going on is that we're drawing from a different group? I wonder if there's an effect where when an open band has been around longer many of the best musicians move on and you have mostly people who aren't interested in or aren't able to get booked for other dances? If this were happening I would expect that in general open bands that were newer would be better; are they?

Referenced in:

Comment via: google plus, facebook, substack

Recent posts on blogs I like:

Retrospective on life tracking and effectiveness systems

I’ve been doing life tracking for around 10 years, and this post is looking back at some things I learned from the data (since my previous retrospective in 2017). I also review various productivity / effectiveness systems I have tried and which ones have …

via Victoria Krakovna July 4, 2025

Linkpost for June

Effective altruism, policy, social justice, reality's surprising amount of detail, short stories

via Thing of Things July 2, 2025

Elixir's Last Dance

On May 18th, the contra dance band Elixir had their last gig ever. The dance was packed: there were three hundred people. It was the only dance BIDA has ever done where they sold tickets. People flew from across the country just to hear Elixir play one la…

via Lily Wise's Blog Posts June 5, 2025

more     (via openring)