The GLEN COLLECTION of Scottish Dance Music

This directory contains ABC transcriptions of the tunes from the Glen Collection of Scottish Dance Music, published in 1895 by John Glen in Edinburgh. The transcriptions were done by John Chambers in late 2011. If you have a copy of this collection, and spot any errors here, please report them.

Many of the tunes here have been published as the standard tunes for various Scottish Country Dances, often with small variations and different accompaniments (if any). You can also find versions of many of these tunes in various other historic collections.

The files here have names of the form PPN_TITLE.abc, where PP is the page number, N is the tune number on the page, and the title is mostly upper-case with '_' between the words. The capitalization is actually the same as the title in the manuscript, which capitalizes most names, but uses lower case for titles (Mr, Mrs, etc.) and some abbreviations. Punctuation (mostly periods) is ignored. The capitalization of the titles, author names, etc., are preserved. The few lower-case letters in the original are mostly raised, with dots underneath, and mostly occur in abbreviations.

The above naming convention produces a sort order with the tunes in the same order as in the original collection. The Glen2.abc file contains all the tunes, in the original order.

The tunes here mostly consiste of a melody line and a bass staff with a simple piano accompaniment. Both staffs are transcribed, though most people will want to discard the bass staff or convert it to accompaniment chord symbols. A few minor typos are corrected, but there are very few of these. The most common is omitting a repeat sign at the end of a tune when the phrase has an repeat sign at the beginning. Initial open-repeats are introduced for full measures (but not when there's a pickup note), since there are known problems with ABC software having problems with initial full measures without an initial repeat sign. This also supports the common practice of indexes ignoring notes before the first bar line.

The number of bars per staff hasn't generally been preserved. This is in line with many other ABC transcription projects, which have generally standarized on 4 bars per ABC line. This is partly to avoid the damage done by much email to long lines, and also encourages formatting with phrases starting on a new staff. This isn't generally significant musical information, of course, but is often done these days to improve readability. The accompaniment "voice" usually has only two bars per ABC line, and most software will use the staff breaks in the first voice to format all the voices.