Embracing Amateurs to Get Experts

I've been reading a lot of older writing, trying to understand how and why contra dance ended up with a strong and near-exclusive live music tradition when many other dance forms switched over to recorded music. One of the more interesting ones I came across is a series of three letters (1985, 1988, 1992) from Enid Cocke, President of the Lloyd Shaw Foundation , tracing the evolution in her attitude towards this question. Lloyd Shaw was the superintendent of the Cheyenne Mountain School in Colorado Springs, who documented traditional Western square dancing in his book Cowboy Dances and kicked off what became Modern Western Square Dancing. This is a branch of the tradition that has gone in a very different direction from traditional contras and squares: instead of a simple form danced to live music with 10-25 regionally varying calls that welcomes people who've never danced before, MWSD has 100-400+ (depending on level) highly standardized and formalized calls, with classes, and is nearly always danced to recorded music. I have several friends that love it, especially at the high levels where they say it's a lot like collaborative physical puzzle solving. Shaw died in 1958, however, after the introduction and spread of recorded music but before most of these other changes. I do suspect he wouldn't have been a fan: he'd say "keep it simple, keep it folk." His wife, Dorothy Shaw, continued organizing dances, and in 1964 she and others founded the Lloyd Shaw Foundation to contin…