Color is based upon five English folk dances: Stanes Morris, Stingo, Daphne, Argeers, and The Slip. The musical treatment is improvisatory, playful, mischievous, and generally compact in structure, with a strong emphasis on style and tone color.

Quite a few melodies were looked over before settling on the ones for this suite. The entire English Dancing Master (1651) of John Playford, and most of van Eyck’s Der Fluyten Lust-hof (1646) were consulted for the tunes, which are all English country...