Village Music Project

The Village Music Project (VMP) began in 1998. Its primary aim is to promote the awareness of the rich history of England’s traditional music, social dance music and song through the study of it’s manuscripts and recordings. It does this by tracing – where it came from, where it went to, who it traveled with and where it is now.

Often, musically literate musicians wrote down their tunes, songs, hymns, psalms and band parts in a single book which was easily carried along with their portable instrument. Some of these surviving hand written books date back to the 17th century, e.g. John Playford's Dancing Master, 1st edition, 1651, but most are a bit more recent, coming from the mid and late 18th and early 19th centuries. Some are devoted entirely to church music, some to secular music like the dance tunes of the day, and some are a rich mixture of all musics of their time.

The Village Music Project looks for and records, in ABC format, music found in such manuscripts. To date (2021) this resource comprises several ten of thousands of tunes recorded in dozens of manuscripts.

You can view these tunes on the Village Music Project Website - www.village-music-project.org.uk.

More tunes can be found on Chris Partington's website - www.cpartington.plus.com/Links/ChrisPartingtonsLinksPage.html.

The abcnotation website contains many more references and links to collections of ABC versions of historical tunebooks & manuscripts - abcnotation.com/tunes#historical.