Tantsumuusika ja tantsud Kuusalu rannas

This paper consist an analysis of the music and dances of Kuusalu coastal area culture during the first half of the 20th century. Kuusalu parish is known as one of the richest in the North-Estonian folk culture. About two hundred instrumental tracks and notations,mostly dance music, and hundreds of dance manuscripts have been collected from this region. The collected material is located mainly in the Museum of Estonian Literary in the department of the Estonian Folklore Archives, Estonian Theatre and Music Museum in the department of the Music. Content and quality of the dancerecordings are essentially very different. They vary from full transcripts to more general descriptions if the dance is known or not. Recorded music and written materials from the archives are from the period of 1905–1938. My goal is to find out where, how much and what were the dances and instrumental pieces in Kuusalu parish. The data are presented by the villages. As a result, I got a versatile overview about the variation of the dances. It turned out that some villages had clearly different dance repertoires. In the villages where there were good musicians, there was also active dance culture.Comparison of both instrumental and dance music is essential to understand their development. This can be used as a tool to evaluate spreading and development of different folk music pieces.