Annotation:German Spa

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 GERMAN SPA. AKA and see "New German Spa." English, American; Country Dance Tune (2/4 time). G Major. Standard tuning. AABB. The melody originated in England, but was soon transported to America. The earliest printings appear on or around the year 1780; it appeared as "The new German spa dance" on page 24 of Longman and Broderip's New Instructions for the German Flute (London), and as "The German spaw minuet" on page 20 of a similarly entitled tutor New Instructions for the Common Flute (Originally published in London, though preserved by the Litchfield, Connecticut, Historical Society). The tune and a dance called the "German Spa" appeared in Twenty Four Country Dances for the Year 1788 (London; Saml. Ann and Peter Thompson), and Van Cleef and Keller (1980) believe it to have been known in New England shortly after its publication. A dance by the same name was copied into a MS by a Pepperell, Massachusetts, lass named Nancy Shepley around 1795, and though the tune was apparently the same, the dance figures differ from those found in Thompson's 1788 London publication. John Griffiths' A Collection of the Newest Cotillions and Country Dances (Northampton, Massachusetts, 1794) gives "German Spa" twice, as a cotillion and a country dance. The tune as printed by Thompson is to be found in several MS sources of the late 18th and early 19th century in both England and America; Van Cleef and Keller note a version for two fifes is contained in Joshua Cushing's 1805 Fifer's Companion (Salem, Massachusetts). There were many German spas, as there were in other countries, including England. Petra Rau of the University of Portsmouth has written on the subject in her paper "Fun and Games? High Capitalism and the German Spa from Thackeray to Ford," and sees the German spa as "not just a 19th century cosmopolitan health resort but a international socio-sexual market place, affording the excitement of conspicuous waste (leisure and gambling) which affirms social status, and providing the opportunity for foreign erotic liaisons that do not threaten respectability at home." She poses that the foreign spas were a Victorian flirting with "the margins and the reverse side" of English and Victorian ideals and mores; "vulgarity, vice, licentiousness, lack of style and restraint, and economic failure." Further, she writes, the German-ness of the spas was linked to the pre-Bismarkian (Georgian?) idea of Germans as cousins of the British, cousins often seen as 'romantic adventurers' or 'learned high-minded intellectuals.'  Source for notated version: Thompson's 1788 Collection (London, England) [Van Cleef & Keller]; Source for notated version: the 1823-26 music mss of papermaker and musician Joshua Gibbons (1778-1871, of Tealby, near Market Rasen, Lincolnshire Wolds) [Sumner].  Printed sources: McGlashan (A Collection of Reels), c. 1786; p. 40. Sumner (Lincolnshire Collections, vol. 1: The Joshua Gibbons Manuscript), 1997; p. 30 (set for three instruments). Van Cleef & Keller (Selected American Country Dances and Their English Sources, from Music in Colonial Massachusetts, vol. 1), 1980; Fig. 30.  Recorded sources: Gourd Music 110, Barry Phillips - "The World Turned Upside Down" (1992).

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