Musica Subterranea
Incantare
Underground medieval dance music
We're a bunch of dance enthusiasts in the SCA who also enjoy making music. We noticed the great deal of time, effort, and money involved in finding good dance music in the SCA, so we decided to address the problem by producing music for SCA dance that was easy to get and inexpensive to purchase. We have arranged our music specifically to fit our instruments and the dances. Our goal is to make good 'copyright-friendly' music widely available for use in the SCA, thereby reducing dancers' need to rely on bootlegged copies of commercial CDs. Using minimal equipment, we aim to produce music that is both pleasing and useful for SCA dance in a variety of contexts - events, practices, even demos and other public performances.
Our main goal is "Get The Music To The People!" We aim to price the CDs as low as possible to sustain the project without making more profit than is necessary to produce the next disk. At the same time, we try to answer a variety of needs - SCA favorites for new up-and-coming dancers, hard-to-find music for the dedicated dance enthusiast - and everything in between. To that end, we take requests from SCA dancers from all over the known world for tunes and specific arrangements they'd like to have available for the dances they would like to do more often.
Given that we are all volunteers in a not-for-profit organization, we research, arrange, record, tweak, and produce our CDs in our free time. It took about a year and a half to produce the first disk, and it has taken about ten months to produce the second disk. Roy Coutinho of Twelfth Century Fox Recording Studios (the loving and supportive father of two members of the band) spent about a year of trial and research to establish a recording studio that was affordable to the common man and could fit in a suburban basement with his ambitious daughters and their friends. It took years of commitment and long nights and weekends for these disks to come to life, so we thank our patrons, our families, and our lucky stars that this music exists.
To that end, please note our copyright policy. It is our intent to provide music to people, not to make money nor to provide a means for others to make money. Piracy is possible in our world, so we ask any would-be-pirates to consider our years of hard work at no personal profit before you copy our music. We *do* encourage spreading and sharing the joy of dance with others, and we try to keep our prices low so that those who need a copy can afford one themselves. We hope the effort is appreciated.
Please contact us if you wish to use our sheet music or our recordings for a use that may not fit within our stated copyright policy. We wish to serve the SCA dance and music communities to the best of our abilities, and we also wish to avoid providing loopholes in our written policies that allow for unscrupulous use of our work. So, please contact us to create a written agreement for legal use of our products if your intended use might violate our stated policies.
After producing our first two CDs, we discovered a remarkable need in the SCA dance community for custom-made recordings. SCA dancers of all levels requested specific recordings for new versions of old favorites or out of print recordings, corrected versions of slightly incorrect recordings, and brand new music for dances that had no commercially available recordings. Through a series of surveys, personal interviews, and observations, we developed a list of over 80 tunes requested by the SCA dance community. After a long process, we pared the list down to 35 tunes that we are presenting in our third CD. We look forward to recording more of the remaining tunes on the list, and we also hope to support other recording artists in helping to fulfill the requests of the dedicated dancers of the SCA.
The members of Musica Subterranea vary greatly in skills and talents, but we share a sincere passion. Creating the musical experience for ourselves and sharing the recordings with people who can use it provides us all a great deal of joy and excitement. We hope you enjoy the products of our beloved hobby and will pass on the joy as you dance and listen and learn.
Classical: Medieval