A Trip to Aberdeen ~ ECD
A Trip to Aberdeen ~ ECD is an English Country Dance. It was published by David Rutherford in 1759 in Rutherford's compleat Collection of 200 of the most celebrated Country Dances both Old and New, Vol. 2. It was interpreted by George Williams in 2022. It is a proper Triple Minor dance. The minor set lasts 32 bars.
Rutherford writes:
First Man cast off and turn the 3d. Wo: First Woman cast off and turn the 3d. Man Hands round 6 that back again foot it corners and turn Lead out sides and turn
The big problem I have with interpreting this dance is what to make of the strain markers ( , , and . Given the variety of the markers I would expect the tune to have three strains, each to be played twice. But Rutherford prints a rather standard jig with an A and B strain both repeated. Is one of the strains to be repeated four times? AAAABB? but if so why not use , and for the third and fourth markers? I suppose AABBAA could be intended but that doesn't seem likely to me either.
AAABBB really doesn't match the markers.
The RSCDS interpretation suggests that first four marks should each represent half a strain, and in other dances Rutherford seems to take a relaxed approach to what the marks mean. And it does seem likely this is a normal 32 bar jig given how the music is printed.
The animation plays at 120 counts per minute normally, but the first time through the set the dance will often be slowed down so people can learn the moves more readily. Men are drawn as rectangles, women as ellipses. Each couple is drawn in its own color, however the border of each dancer indicates what role they currently play so the border color may change each time through the minor set.
The dances of George Williams (including interpretations like this one) are licenced under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike: CC BY-NC-SA license.
An online description of the dance may be found here.
| A1 | 1-4 | M1 cast down and two hand turn turn W3 |
| 5-8 | W1 cast down and two hand turn turn M3 | |
| A2 | 1-4 | Circle six left... |
| 5-8 | ...and back by the right | |
| B1 | 1-4 | 1s set to 1st corners and two hand turn them |
| 5-8 | 1s set to 2nd corners and two hand turn them | |
| B2 | 1-8 | 1s lead out to the sides and two hand turn back to place |
If you find what you believe to be a mistake in this animation, please leave a comment on youtube explaining what you believe to be wrong. If I agree with you I shall do my best to fix it.
If you wish to link to this animation please see my comments on the perils of youtube. You may freely link to this page, of course, and that should have no problems, but use one of my redirects when linking to the youtube video itself:
https://www.upadouble.info/redirect.php?id=ATripToAberdeen
The dance itself is out of copyright, and is in the public domain. The interpretation is copyright © 2022 by George Williams. And is released under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. My visualization of this dance is copyright © 2022 by George W. Williams V and is released under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
This website is copyright © 2021-2025 by George W. Williams V
My work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. Most of the dances have more restrictive licensing, see my notes on copyright, the individual dance pages should mention when some rights are waived.