
Scottish Highland dance is a unique cultural art form performed to live accompaniment by a bagpiper. Modularity is part of the art form, as the order and choice of steps in one particular iteration of a dance is up to the dancer and the music for each dance may be up to the discretion of the piper and/or feature a rotating collection of tunes. Because many interpretations of one Highland dance can occur simultaneously and over time when dancers perform at different events, Scottish Highland Dance operates with a dynamic, modular pairing mechanism between conventionalized dance steps and musical genres. For bagpipe music, a generic category implies the tempo, meter, and rhythmic accentuation. As an art form, Highland Dance is structured so that movements show the accentuation of several bagpipe genres. This leads to the same steps being performed with different accentuation depending on the musical genre. Furthermore, dances are made up of multiple tunes to different genres, leading to marked changes in movements throughout the dance. This poster presents an account of genre in bagpipe music and examples of dance movements that change depending on the musical selection, as well as examples of a change in musical genre and dance movement accentuation within the context of a full dance. By analyzing how the accentuation patterns of the music are demonstrated in the movements of the dance, this poster proposes a way to analyze music and dance relationships that accounts for the modularity found in Scottish Highland Dance.