The Fabulous Glen Echo Open Band

It’s so invigorating playing music for people who are dancing and loving it.

Think that sounds like fun? Come play with the “Fabulous Glen Echo Open Band” sometime!

We play folk music for contradance dancers on the second Friday of each month. Glen Echo park’s “Spanish Ballroom” is 15–20min drive northwest of downtown DC, in nearby-MD.

It’s an “open band”. Anyone can join in regardless of experience or exposure to this style music. The front row plays into microphones, and the back rows (where I sit haha) are not mic’d.

Common instruments include violin, flute, several types of horns, clarinet — and then things like banjo, harmonica, accordion, penny whistle. So many more! The audience loves it when we have many different-sounding instruments, variety is super useful here.

The space is not explicitly queer, but it’s super queer-friendly. People generally don’t blink when guys follow, girls lead, or when guys wear skirts (they’re so twirly!!).

Before each dance, the leader writes the names of the three tunes for that set up on a whiteboard. As we go through a dance, we play three tunes. Each tune is repeated ad nauseam until a signal is made (a hand movement).

Contradance tunes tend to be of the structure AABB, where each letter is 8 measures of music. Some vary a bit more than that, like: A’A’’B’B’’.

Sorta! You can get sheet music for most of the tunes, but you won’t necessarily have time to get it out before it’s time to play. Most members play most tunes by ear (more on that below). The tunes are highly repetitive, and if you end up playing a bunch, you’ll eventually pick a lot of it up.

Which ones should you start with? Maybe the top 40 most commonly played ones! Or maybe Casey’s favorite few. Both are in this companion article, Contradance Songs.

You are not expected to know any of these your first few times. And even the most experienced people don’t know all of the tunes played.

Book. You could also get a physical book of the most commonly played contradance tunes. Two popular/common ones are: “The Portland Collection” and “The Fiddlers Fakebook”.

It’s fun to try and play by ear! The tunes are repeated enough that hopefully you’ll be able to pick up some part of it by the end. Here isa rough outline of how I approach learning contradance tunes by ear:

You might want to write some down! I like to assign myself 3–6 as “homework”. These are usually songs that have stood out — maybe they have interesting names, or interesting melodies, or maybe I remember it from the last month. I might practice these before the next time if I’m motivated haha — nobody will mind if I don’t.

Want more details about when and where? Check the Friday Night Dancers, that’s a lot more likely to be up-to-date than this article of mine.

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