Mi Contra Fa

Slippery like sand

I've had the Winchester Troper "Kyrie" on repeat in the car for a few days now and I still can't say I've got the thing memorized.  There are so many notes, so much stepwise motion, so few syllables to help remember what comes next - I am not at all surprised that this style of music required the invention of a system of notation.  Nor does the form of the earliest notation surprise me - I find myself thinking that just a wavy line to help me remember if the next step is up or down or on a new syllable would be perfect.

I'm also making no progress in directly adapting the tune to the Nam languens poem.  The antiphonal verses are so different than the "Kyrie" itself - it works for that song, as structured, but it really doesn't work for a cohesive single poem.  And the music of just the "Kyrie" proper is just too short to stretch over eight lines.

So I really need to tuck the "Kyrie" into the back of my head as inspiration and just compose new music.

Gnomic Verses with Harp

A tech-enabled experiment!

Poem: A selection of the gnomic verses from the Exeter Book as found in "The Earliest English Poems," trans. Michael Alexander, Penguin Books 1991.

Music: A progression of open fifths: DAda (x4), CGcg (x4), repeat for one minute ending on DAda

Recording software: Audacity

Microphone: Initially, the mic on the webcam was picking up too much noise so I tried the directed mic-on-a-stick I have (a $10 cheapie).  Noise problem solved, audio quality fairly wretched.  On a different computer, I did once get a good recording off of this thing...

Recording Notes: Place mic near harp soundboard to record music.  Place mic near mouth to record words.

Mixing: I recorded the music and spoken word components separately, in different Audacity files.  Then I copy-pasted the spoken word track into the music project and "Saved As" a third project.  I had to balance the two tracks a bit, turning down the harp and turning up the words.

Technical Difficulties: Make sure Windows Vista Defender is NOT running before doing ANYTHING.

Result: Can be heard here (MP3, ~ 1 Mb). 

Conclusion: It's not exactly a show-stopper, but there's nothing wrong with the very simple progression as an underlay.  I stress again that they were recorded separately, with no attempt to align the words with the shifts in the music.  The recording itself is fairly crap, but it does let me hear roughly what I sound like without me having to play, recite and listen all at the same time.

Future Work: Try it with lyre. Also, memorize the selection of text.

What I Do With My Lyre

Again, for those who may be coming in late, the instrument under discussion is the six-stringed Saxon lyre.

Improvise Music
The main thing I do with my lyre is noodle out tunes on it.  Using the playing technique described yesterday, I can sit and make up music.

I use rhythmic or melodic themes or tropes to keep things sounding different, or sometimes I will play in another mode.  I vary tempo and mood between pieces as well.  There is really quite a lot you can do, melodically, on six strings.

Accompanied Singing
So far, I have one performance-ready piece: my sung translation of Wulf and Eadwacer.  I have tried strumming only about one note per measure, and every note.  Both seem to work pretty well.  I still generally play with the Dorian drone on, and just echo the sung melody.

Accompanied Recitation (Current Work)
I have only tried this a few times.  Two early attempts used harp to accompany Anglo-Saxon poems (the Exeter Book riddle for "fire" and For Silvanus Perrin).  In both cases, I used two octaves' worth of fifths (e.g., D-A-d-a), moving almost randomly around the harp - just sure to end on tonic.

Those seemed to go over all right, but the music and poetry didn't seem well-matched.  I'm not sure if they need to be.  I'm not sure if the music should be all over the place, for 'interest,' or if just a home interval (D-A) and an away interval (C-G) would be sufficient.  They feel boring to play, but the listener will be primarily attending to the words, not the music.

I have listened to Benjamin Bagby and Ann and Charlie Heymann do recited early medieval poetry to more complicated music (on lyre in Bagby's case) but I'm not yet sure exactly how.  Bagby says he improvises, but also that the themes are mostly settled after years of practice.

Experiments in private have been dodgy.  It's hard to recite, play and listen to yourself do both at the same time.  I believe I will need to enlist technology.  Audacity allows for the recording of multiple tracks of sound.  I can record myself reciting a poem, and then record different kinds of accompaniment, from a single repeated interval, to "home and away" intervals, to different melodies underlying the text.  Then I can listen to them separately, to hear what they sound like.

Patterns

Here's a short video, developed for math and science curriculum at schools, where a modern movie soundtrack composer explains how he uses patterns to write music.

A lot of medieval and Renaissance music uses repeated patterns, melodic and/or rhythmic, too.  The main trick is, they are often different patterns than the one a modern composer would use. 

This is why, to compose modern medieval music, you need to listen to and learn about actual medieval music - to understand what patterns work, and which don't.

War Song: More arranging

The first verse is arranged, more or less.  (I expect we'll hammer it out a little more in practice.)  Notable changes:

• I felt free to rearrange the melismas to suit the English (rather than the French) words
• When in the original, in two places, there was a pattern like E - E, where the first E was outside the melisma and the second E was the first note in it, and in the arrangement both were in the melisma, I dropped one.
• I had a one-syllable word ending a line with a weird F-E melisma, and the next line started with an E - it just didn't sound right.  I removed the E at the end of the line and held the F for longer.

As a troubador piece, it probably shouldn't have much in the way of rhythmic accompaniment.  However, considering the audience, I'm thinking sing the first verse mostly without drum, but then add one when the song's true martial intent becomes clear.  I think it'll give it an edge and some energy. 

I wonder if a recorder solo in the middle, using the verse melody but in duple (marching) meter would be a good thing or a bad thing...

War Song: Arranging

I started yesterday to try and reconcile the translation of the Bertran de Born war song with its music.

I wrote down on paper the notes of each line, noting the melismas (mostly to ignore them later).  The tones were given as stemless noteheads in the book I was using, to reflect their original neumic nature. 

Then I underlayed the English text for the first verse and started a matchup.  I had to regroup most of the melismas - probably a cardinal sin - to work with the text.  I think I dropped one repeated note.

Next, I picked out the melody on my psaltery, paying careful attention to which notes I wanted to hold and which I didn't.  Stresses often (but not always) were getting about twice the duration of unstresses, especially if we were in an iambic situation.  (Breve - semibreve, it seems to me, was one of the common rhythmic modes, so that's about right.)

Then I tried to migrate that to Finale Composer, with some mixed success.  Finale requires a meter, and I do wonder at times if I'm following the same one (3/4, owing the preponderance of repeated half - quarter patterns; maybe it should be 6/8?) throughout.  There are times (at this first glance) when it feels like I just want to lose a beat here or there, perhaps with a measure of 2/4, but I also seriously doubt that I'm naturally composing in that fashion.  Probably I have some written note durations off from what's in my head.

I'm not very good at translating head or ear music to paper, rhythmically speaking.  I can get the notes just fine, but I'm often not sure if that pickup is a quarter note on "Three" or an eighth note on "three-AND."

After the note values are good and I'm convinced the first verse is singable, we'll see about shoehorning the other verses in.  If I recall, the poet-translator was mostly good about maintaining stress schemes between stanzas, but a few balloon from eight syllables to ten or twelve.  If the stresses are about the same, though, we can do the folkie thing and subdivide some notes to fit in the extra syllables.

Performing Medieval Narrative

This website has been around for a while, but I always lose track of it and then come back to it. Performing Medieval Narrative Today is a searchable collection of people performing medieval texts, generally with music but not always. The performers range in skill, ability, and degree of historically-informed performance. (There's an "Aucassin and Nicolette" that's sporting some ballet moves, for instance.)

Some of the clips show really great performers; Benjamin Bagby comes to mind. He knows how to work an audience like a bard. Eberhard Kummer's performance of the "Nibelungenlied" sounds great (and the dancing is very nifty) but he's looking too much at his instrument to connect to the audience in the way that SCA bards usually seek to do. Ron Cook's harp-and-storytelling is in one of the probable historical performance modes (instrument and voice, just not at the same time) and I don't find it as compelling.

Your Mileage May Vary. What I really like about this site is that you can poke around on it until you find a performance that you really like, or don't like, or almost like. Then you can copy it, avoid that style, or adapt and tweak it to suit you.

There is also a book, published in 2005 and actually in-print! It is $90 and I haven't read it, so I won't recommend it just yet, but it's at the library and I intend to go take a look at it when I get the opportunity. If for no other reason, Bagby talks about his unique methodology for "reconstructing" music that we have no record of - it should be interesting.