While we were out for an extended walk today we were chatting about music generally
and the subject of keys came up and I asked
‘Why do we play most of our dance music in these two keys’
Blank looks all round 
There’s probably a very simple answer to it.
You don’t say which part of the world you mean by ‘our dance music’; but the tyranny of D and G in the English tradition is down to the popularity and dominance of the two-row melodeon in … D and G.
If you mean Irish, then there’ll be those who know far more about that than me, but D and G are comfortable keys in first position on the fiddle so that may have an influence.
I suppose you should look at the reaction of some whistleplayers if ,say, a fiddler starts The Drunken Sailor, Tuttle’s, Martin Rochford’s, Caisleann an Oirr, The Mother’s Delight or any of those tunes in the keys fiddleplayers play them in. Or, maybe to a lesser extend, The Boys of Malin. Or a good bunch of Paddy Fahey’s tunes.
I should have said ‘English’ dance music.
Although I feel it applies to Irish music too at least at the sessions I attend.
Yes of course there are plenty in Em, A some in C but there does seem to be this D/G preference.
Just consider the instruments (just talking the major scale key names, implying one or two sharps). there are probably some cart and horse issues here:
D whistle plays in D and G
Anglos are built in D and G
English Morris players play D/G boxes
Fiddles play in first position easily in D and G (as do mandolins and bouzouki…swell depending on the tuning).
Truth to be told these instruments may have developed for a variety of reasons, but the fiddle might have been the thing that determined starting point and the other instruments developed their key centers later so they could play along.
I can’t give you any on line references (haven’t looked) but I strongly suspect it was the urge to play with others that drove the decision making.
You have a similar situation in the British Brass Band where all the instruments are in either Eb or Bb and can all be read from treble clef music using the same fingerings. So, folks could cover parts by just picking up an instrument and playing the music the same way they would on whatever other instrument they usually played.
A quick look through Aird’s Airs ** “adapted to the Fife, Violin, or German Flute” of 1778-1801 suggests a preponderence of tunes printed in one or two sharps. I think that predates the various squeezeboxes.
** a quick look through the ABC on Jack Campin’s site that is http://www.campin.me.uk/
Irish music, as played on the keyless flute in D, whistle in D, and uilleann pipes in D, appear mostly in the key signatures of D Major and G Major (because playing a crossfingered flat 7th, C natural, is commonplace) but the tunes themselves are in a variety of keys.
Going up, commonly heard are
D Major
D Mixolydian
E dorian
G Major
A dorian
A Mixolydian
B minor
C Lydian
Nearly as much variety appears in Highland pipe music, though on that instrument the 7th is always flat:
A Mixolydian
A Major (really an illusion, created when tunes avoid the 7th and the ear perceives the tunes to be Major)
B minor
D Major
E dorian
G Lydian
The Lydian mode, based on the flat 7th of the scale, is infrequent in Irish trad but very common in the older Highland music.
I will say that once, years ago, I was listening to a superb uilleann pipe album by a famous player, along with a friend who is an orchestral composer and arranger, and when we finished the album he said “that whole album is in G” and sure enough it was! Every single tune on the entire album, reels, jigs, airs, hornpipes, all of it, was in the key of G Major.
A curious thing about the uilleann pipes is that while the chanter is nominally in D, the regulators are in G. The lowest, most resounding note, on the regs is G, and the C is a C natural. Only in the key of G can the regs supply full 1>4>5>1 chordal accompaniment. So pipers who revel in lush full regulator playing are naturally drawn to that key. The regs lack the note E and many useful chords are thus unavailable.
** a quick look through the ABC on Jack Campin’s site that is > http://www.campin.me.uk/
While I don’t know how Jack C. put together his collections, I’d be careful drawing any conclusions from ABC collections on the web. Many of them have been ‘rationalised’ into the modern practice of writing tunes in D,G or A. Even where the original tunes may have been written in different keys (three flats is not particularly rare in some of the old, especially Scottish, fiddle collections).
Same caveat would apply to some modern printed collections. Some years ago I bought a collection of James Hill’s compositions, published by the Northumbrian pipers’ society. These tunes were mostly in D or G but as the editor’s notes revealed a large quantity had been transposed into those keys from their original settings, which were much more varied in their choice of key.
It’s worth looking at the original collections for many reasons but if you want to determine the distribution of ‘original’ keys, they’re the most reliable way.
There are many sites where you can download PDF -facsimile- versions of old tune collections for free.
Other sites reproduce the tunes in modern type setting but retain the original keysignatures , the Highland Trust PDF collections download page is a good (and recommended) example. The Macintyre collection is a good example of having plenty of tunes in the ‘flat’ keys.
Sure, but I think in many cases we can trust the scholarship of those involved. I started off here: http://www.village-music-project.org.uk/, where the convention is to note any editorial changes in the ABC header. However, there are a lot of files there and in several cases comparison was made with Aird. Jack Campin on this page http://www.campin.me.uk/Aird/ comments that " they were used by village musicians all over Britain for decades, copied into manuscript books as they fell apart from use." Was it Aird who had scored them in keys suited for the instruments listed ?
Another indication of the keys used in England in the 18th century are the manuscripts left by musicians in the church bands (common lore is that they played for dancing and Saturday night and in church on Sunday - Thomas Hardy, who’s family did both, is an oft quoted source). The noticeable addition to two sharps is one and two flats, often but not always, as Dminor and Gminor. That would give the minor keys in the same vocal range as the common major keys or but also give the home notes on a fiddler’s open strings.
Two things:
-
You can trust Jack Campin’s work to be accurate representation of whatever he is doing, and you can trust him to mention if he is changing keys. He’s a good obsessive musicologist (in the positive sense) and hence useful things.
-
One of the reasons for an influx of flutes into Ireland was the change to the Boehm flute. In the 1830s/1840s orchestral players began to shift to the new Boehm system instruments because of the flexibility in playing in multiple keys. Their old instruments, often stripped of their keys, were D based instruments and found their way into the hands of many traditional music players. The were inexpensive and fit right in…and of course D and G were the best keys further reinforcing the D/G centering of tunes.
Irish music in D and G mostly, Scottish music in A almost exclusively.
One of the reasons being that the Irish alphabet is larger than the Scottish.
Keeping in mind that many of the Scottish “fiddler” composers wouldn’t be recognized as “fiddlers” today, but rather violinists. These were classically trained violinists quite capable of playing in any key, playing in high positions, etc.
It only makes sense to have the things in an NSP collection written in the key in which they’re fingered on an NSP chanter. NSP chanters in F, F#, and G are going to produce their tunes in different keys but it would be ridiculous to have everything written in several sharps because a piper happened to be playing upon an F# chanter.
Strange way to put it, Richard! (Thought you’d mixed it up with Mixolydian having a flat seventh compared to the major scale, then realised you’d said ‘based on’, in which case why not based on the fourth of the [major] scale?)
Almost exclusively? Eh? (A?)
!!! Must be the pipes, with that low G-natural in the key of “A”.
D and G is fine with me.
How many of the instruments used in the 18th and 19th centuries were regarded as transposing instruments for the purpose of notation ? How was music for Bb military wind instruments notated ? Were Northumbrian pipes ever in G or Highland pipes is A or was that convention so as not to notate in flat keys and to be able to more easilly read tunes notated for fiddles and flutes ?
I tried Googling, but didn’t get a clear answer.
David_h: your post makes me wonder about the antiquity of highland pipe notation. It is radically different from standard staff notation. About 4 years ago, I had to play with a highland piper at no notice, reading from highland pipes notation, transposing as I went, and simultaneously translating from highland pipes notation to something that made more sense to me in my own head. I managed it, but boy, was it hard!
My point being that I wouldn’t think standard notation has all that much to do with the highland pipes tradition. Unless I’m mistaken about how old that notation is. My understand is that it goes back at any rate to about the end of the 18c if not before. Please correct me, someone, if I’m wrong.
In the meantime, and back to the OP, isn’t the prevalence of D and G simply that ultimately this music (Irish and English) is based as much on whistle and like instruments as anything else? Call it a D whistle (which corresponds to the classical C flute) and Bob’s yer uncle! 
Yep. Ask Cathal McConnell next time you see him.
I can see that for Irish music but have whistle and flute been particularly common in English music since the squeezy things were invented ? (I find English dance tunes challenging on the flute).
Or are you going back to the influence of folks like Aird with their publications of tunes “adapted for the … German-flute” in that trend. I wonder if the rcrd*r players got in a huff because they didn’t get to use their lowest note 
Where are the bagpipe experts ? I thought with bagpipe scores we just assumed two sharps and ignored the little notes until someone showed us what they were supposed to sound like. If playing in A.
This question is self-answered, at least in orchestral parlance: Bb instruments are notated as Bb instruments. C instruments are notated as C instruments.
I don’t know if military bands in the old days followed orchestral terminology.
Old Highland chanters vary in pitch quite a bit, but as far as I know they were never customarily around 440 cycles. Oftentimes old chanters are around 452 cycles, which is Concert A at Old Philharmonic Pitch, or somewhere between 452 and 466 (Concert Bb, at A=440 reckoning). The trouble is that the original reeds don’t survive so it’s hard to know where old chanters would be pitched with their original reed. The only thing sticking a modern reed in a 200 year old chanter tells you is what a 200 year old chanter sounds like with a modern reed stuck in it.
I don’t know why A was chosen, perhaps because the old chanters were in that neighborhood and that put the tunes into the same keys used by fiddlers. There is an old Appalachian thing of tuning fiddles somewhat sharp, and if old Highland fiddlers did so, they would have been around where the pipes were.