How Old Is the Hornpipe, Really?

 

The hornpipe has a problem with its own history.

It is frequently described as one of the oldest surviving European dances, and sometimes, more boldly, as the oldest European dance still performed today. It is an appealing claim. The word itself is old. The instrument from which it apparently takes its name is considerably older. Hornpipes appear in early musical sources, became associated with sailors, survived in English, Scottish and Irish traditional music, crossed the Atlantic, and remain part of living dance and musical traditions.

But none of those things, individually or together, proves that the hornpipe is Europe's oldest surviving dance.

Once I began looking closely at the evidence, I discovered that the history is both more complicated and more interesting than the familiar claim suggests.

First, what do we mean by “hornpipe”?

That question turns out to matter enormously.

The word can refer to a musical instrument, a piece of music, a rhythmic or metrical type, a dance, or several rather different kinds of dance performed in different periods and places. A reference to a hornpipe in an early source therefore cannot automatically be treated as evidence for the dance we would recognize as a hornpipe today.

The instrument is ancient. Hornpipes were essentially reed pipes fitted with an animal-horn bell, and instruments belonging to that broad family have a history stretching far back before the Renaissance.

But an ancient instrument does not make the dance ancient.

Likewise, the existence of a tune called a hornpipe does not necessarily tell us how anyone danced to it. Music and dance histories overlap, but they are not identical.

For purposes of establishing the age of the dance, we need something more demanding: evidence that people were actually using the word hornpipe for a dance, evidence of what that dance consisted of, and some defensible connection between those early forms and later practice.

The sixteenth-century evidence

The trail becomes much firmer in sixteenth-century England.

There are references from the middle and later sixteenth century that appear to use hornpipe as the name of a dance rather than merely an instrument or piece of music. A date around 1555 is plausible for an early dance reference, while references from the 1580s provide much firmer ground.

That makes the hornpipe unquestionably old.

It does not, however, make it the oldest named European dance still known today.

The problem is that other dance names are documented earlier. Sword dancing, for example, is recorded in medieval Europe centuries before the earliest secure hornpipe evidence. Morris dancing appears in English records during the fifteenth century. Other European dance traditions present still more complicated claims of continuity extending into the medieval period or earlier.

The Greek syrtos is especially intriguing because claims have been made for the name appearing in an inscription from antiquity. That potentially gives it an extraordinary history, although the precise inscription and the relationship between the ancient terminology and the modern dance require much more careful examination before using it as a trump card.

The broader point remains: the sixteenth-century evidence does not establish the hornpipe as Europe's earliest surviving dance.

What did the early hornpipe look like?

Here we run into another historical trap.

Knowing the name of a dance is not the same thing as knowing the dance.

The earliest references to hornpipes do not give us a complete choreography. We cannot take a modern English step hornpipe, an Irish competitive hornpipe or a theatrical sailor's hornpipe and project its steps backward into Elizabethan England.

By the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, however, the picture becomes clearer. Hornpipes occur in theatrical and ballroom contexts, and surviving dance notation finally begins to show us actual movement.

Among the earliest substantially notated hornpipe choreographies are dances associated with the English dancing master Mr. Isaac from about 1706–1707.

That is important evidence, but it also exposes another weakness in the “oldest surviving dance” claim. Thoinot Arbeau's Orchésographie, published in 1589, describes and notates dances such as branles in considerable detail, more than a century before those early eighteenth-century hornpipe choreographies.

If “oldest surviving dance” means the oldest dance for which choreography survives, the hornpipe loses again.

And the rhythm changed

Modern musicians tend to recognize the hornpipe immediately from its characteristic rhythm. In Irish and related traditional music, we often think of a hornpipe in duple meter, commonly written in 4/4, with the familiar uneven or “dotted” rhythmic feeling.

That should not be projected backward either.

Earlier hornpipes were frequently associated with triple meters such as 3/2, 6/4 and 9/4. During the eighteenth century the repertory changed substantially, with duple-meter hornpipes becoming increasingly important and eventually dominant.

There are also connections between seventeenth-century Scottish forms, including the double hornpipe and Scottish Measure, and later developments in the hornpipe family.

So even musically, “the hornpipe” is not one unchanged object that has travelled intact for five hundred years. It is better understood as a family of related practices that evolved.

That evolution is not evidence against its historical importance. Quite the opposite. It is evidence of a successful tradition adapting to different musicians, dancers, audiences and social settings.

What about the sailors?

This may be the most persistent image of the hornpipe: sailor, arms folded, feet dancing rapidly, perhaps with a bit of rope-hauling, climbing or looking out to sea worked into the choreography.

The maritime association is genuine, but it is not the origin of the hornpipe.

Evidence connecting the hornpipe particularly strongly with sailors becomes prominent during the eighteenth century, from roughly the 1740s onward. The sailor's hornpipe subsequently became a theatrical favorite and eventually one of the most recognizable representations of British maritime life.

By then, however, the word hornpipe had already been in circulation for generations.

The sailor's hornpipe is therefore better understood as one branch in the dance's history rather than the original hornpipe.

There was never just one hornpipe

This may be the most useful conclusion of all.

Over several centuries, hornpipes appear in court and ballroom dancing, theatrical performance, English step dancing, Scottish traditions, Irish traditional music and dance, maritime performance, and eventually North American musical and dance traditions.

Some were in triple meter. Others were in duple meter.

Some were social dances. Others became displays of individual virtuosity.

Some were associated with professional dancers on the stage. Others belonged to local and traditional communities.

The name survived remarkably well, but the things attached to the name changed.

This makes it extremely difficult to prove uninterrupted continuity from a sixteenth-century hornpipe to a hornpipe danced in a pub, competition, folk festival or session today. There is continuity, but it is a branching, evolving continuity rather than a preserved Renaissance choreography.

So is the hornpipe Europe's oldest surviving dance?

On the evidence I have been able to find, no.

Or, more precisely, there is no good historical basis for making that claim.

If we mean the **oldest surviving dance