Mi Contra Fa

Bertran de Born Podcast

From the grey mists of time, Bertran de Born's "Be'm plai lo gais de pascor" emerges!  You've seen the documentation and possible struggled with the poorly-notated sheet music (PDF)!  Now hear the song!

Gah, I never realized how bad I am at aligning words and notes until I went back and tried to sing this from the page.

More good news - my computer records again!  Granted, I'm using a gaming headset to sing into, which results in some static if I'm too loud (which I frequently am).  But!  Now I can record audio more often.  Upgrading mic can be a future project.

Back to Bertrand de Born

At Kingdom Twelfth Night, I presented my setting of Bertrand de Born as "singable English."  Alas, it is, but not very singable.  There are some weird stresses and phrases.

Verse 1 is fine.

Verse 2 is... almost fine.  "And O! how my spirits adore" is currently set so that the stress is on "And", not "O!," which is where I keep wanting to put it.  Eh... it almost doesn't matter.  Shifting things so that the stress is on "O!" gets you spiRITS instead of SPIrits later, but it's not violently wrong-sounding.  I should pick a way and go with it.

Verse 3's ending is bad.  "For a soldier is soon forsaken / Unless he's given many blows and taken."  Eh?  Taken?  You'd want to avoid that, right?  So...

"For a solider will be food for the crows / Unless he's given many blows"

Verse 4 is okay, and a good place to stop.  I like how Verse 5 opens, but the rest of it... I can leave it.

War Song: Feedback and Performance

So, first we amputated most of the last two verses, and swapped out one pair of lines in verse 4 for its compatriot in verse 3.  There were problems with the scansion that I couldn't iron out and, rather than continue to fight with it, we decided to just shorten the song.  Three verses of that wandering melody would probably be more than enough, right?

At Novice Tourney, I brought sheet music along and gave it to two members of Clan Cambion, Mistress Fevronia and a lady called "Sue" (I suspect that's her mundane name).  We worked through it and Baron Igor offered his considered opinion on the period tune: "It sucks!"  He suggested composing an original tune for the words, which he did like.

And I am forced to admit that I'm not a fan of troubador music in general.  It does wander and lacks a strong tonal center.  But we had committed to this!  And we pressed on.  Lady Patricia arrived later and we sang it through, not entirely together.  With enough practice, I'm sure we would have nailed it, but our interpretations of the melismas didn't always match.  So we tried it as a dramatic reading.

That really worked, and that was what we went with.  Lady Patricia played the first two lines of music as a prelude.  I read the first verse, Lady Patricia the second, and we alternated lines for the last one, reading our finale: "Better than prisoner: be dead!" together.  The king seemed to like it.

There is a lot of medieval music out there that I think people would like, if they gave it a chance.  The troubador corpus is not that music.  Having been up close and personal with this song for a while, I think I can see some of the beauty that's there, but it's really not accessible to our ears.  You have to work at liking it.

The works of the troubadors were key in defining medieval concepts like chivalry and courtly love.  They deserve more exposure.  But would it, philosophically, be wrong to write new tunes for them? Perhaps in the style of the trouveres, the northern neighbors of the troubadors?  If, as Timothy McGee suggests, medieval monophony is "heightened poetry" and the music is primarily in service to the words, and if we are primarily concerned with presenting the words to a wider audience, can we reinvent the music?  Or would it be more intellectually honest to give a spoken-word performance, perhaps with authentic musical accompaniment?

And what about those troubador poems without music accompanying them?

I could argue either side, I think, and I'm not sure right now what I think the better answer is.

War Song: Progress

It's been a slow week.  I need to tweak the text underlay a bit, to make it more singable, but it seems to work overall.  The tempo needs to be "up" in a big way, to keep the thing from dragging.  It's written in Dorian D, but I'd much prefer it in Dorian G (why yes, I am an alto).  But our recorder player has been practicing in Dorian D, so unless I buy an alto recorder for her to use, we'll be doing it there.  I can sing it there, but some of the notes are a stretch, especially at volume.

There are places where I'd like to exchange existing "half note - quarter note" patterns for a punchier "quarter note - quarter rest - quarter note."  Problem is, I don't necessarily want to do it for all the verses.  I can try singing it that way with the recorder playing the "normal" pattern and we'll see how it goes.  (There are already slight mismatches in the places where I have to subdivide a note to squash in more syllables.)

I also wonder how a vielle-esque drone on D would work, rather than the unison we have now.  That would be closer to the troubador HIP stuff I've heard.  On the other hand, there are still a few bars where I really don't mind a melody instrument keeping me on-key.

In the future, I expect this will actually make a nice solo piece.  It offers a lot of opportunity for dramatizing the battle in good bardic style, and places to use tricks with meter and tempo to maintain interest.

War Song: Background

The Poems of the Troubador Bertran de Born. ed. William D. Paden, Jr., Tilde Sankovitch and Patricia H. Stablein.  University of California Press: Los Angeles, 1986.

Dates: born c. 1150, died c. 1215 (19)
Eldest son, inherited father's lands 1178.  Wrote first surviving, datable poem, a sirventes ( satire) in 1181 in which he boasted of being a poet of war (19)

"The art of Bertran de Born springs from an obsession with conflict and a drive to master conflict by an act of will." (33)

"For Bertran war functions as a source and emblem of moral value. [...] For Bertran it is the ideal of war which upholds the secular virtues of the age, demanding that a knight be courageous, generous, courtly and slightly mad; a prince must display the same qualities in order to direct society to its proper goal. [...] The precise violence of war produces a well-formed death, a monument to the moral achievement of victor and vanquished alike." (34)

But this is an ideal, not the real... "even there [the imagery] is characteristically removed from full realization by being expressed as a possibility, in the conditional tense, or as a hope, in the future tense.  The martial panorama in poem 30 springs from the poet's imagination - Be'm plai lo gais temps de pascor, "The gay time of spring pleases me well"; whether he describes factual events which please him, or the pleasure which he takes in the thoughts of events he has imagined, one cannot say." (35)

"Bertran's pervasive allusions to the chansons de geste [author has given examples of battle imagery previously] not only enrich the diction and heroic sense of his work, but also, as an index of literary self-consciousness, situate his art within the mythic space of epic."  (40) 

But "Unlike the epic poet who sings blindly of the glorious past, Bertran speaks as a satirist who engages in continuous self-conscious scrutiny of the present.  Because of the structuring role of the speaker's voice, which distinguishes his discourse from that of the epic, it was inevitable that Bertran de Born should employ lyric form." (43)

"It was apparently Bertran, in the absence of earlier known cases who first practiced the kind of structural imitation which was to become one of the notable characteristics of the troubador lyric as an art-form. [...] The verbal elements of such structural imitation were three: the abstract rhyme scheme, the number of syllables in each line, and the particular rhyme sounds.  These three imply a fourth dimension of the song, the melody; by adopting the three verbal elements of his model's structure the poet assured that his words would fit the model's music.  However, while we can easily compare any surviving poems with respect to rhyme scheme, syllable count, and rhymes, melodic transcriptions have survived for only about 10 percent of the extant troubador compositions, so that it is rarely possible for us to verify in detail that structural imitation extended to the melody." (45)

"Bertran's key innovations were two: it was he who first used the same rhyme sounds as he found in his model, thus developing the principle of imitation to the full; and it was he who freed imitation for thematic constraint by restricting it to the purely formal dimension.  The latter innovation was a crucial preliminary step towards the development of such fixed forms as the sonnet." (45-46)

This song (a sirventes) appears to follow a canso (it was usually the case that the sirvente would be modeled on a canso, not the other way around) but we can't date the canso in question. (47)

"Bertran was instrumental in the creation of several minor but hardy genres.  The enueg, or enumeration of annoyances, with its complement the plazer, or enumeration of pleasures, was invented by the Monk of Montaudon, but the Monk was probably inspired by Bertran's antithesis of annoyance and delight, developed in such poems as 6, 13, 24 through 28, 30 and 40. [B'em plai is 30.]  [...]  Bertran's plazer de guerra, poem 30, must have contributed particularly to the creation of the Monk's more general plazer." (66)

Poem dates to 1184-1188 (325)

"The attribution of this song to Bertran cannot be regarded as certain, since the MSS are far from unanimous.  Yet we judge him the most probably author of the whole poem, as have all earlier editors, and accordingly we consider him the probably author of the stanzas on love (6, 7, 8), which are included in only a few MSS and earlier editions. [Wilhelm does not translate these.]

The inclusion of these stanzas changes the poem from an ode to war into a celebration of elan in war and in love, themes that intertwine throughout Bertran's work. Both are implicit in the first stanza, which transforms the sentimental delicacy of the conventional spring setting into martial vigor." (334)

"Perhaps imitated from Guiraut de Borneill" (335)

"Melody: Preserved with two other poems in the same metrical form: with the supposed original and source of our transcription in Guiraut de Borneill 242,51 No pose sofrir, MS R 82; and in a slightly different version, with Peire Cardenal 335,7 Ar mi posc, MS R 72." (335)

MS R is "Paris, Bibliotheque Nationale, fr. 15211"

Music is given on pages 495-498 as staffless noteheads. No barlines are given, nor meter.  Notes are tied to show melismas.

War Song: Lyrics tweaks

A few changes from the JJ Wilhelm translation, mostly for meter/scansion (and a few unintentional typos):

First verse:
From "Makes leaves and flowers grow" to "Makes leaves and flowers bloom" (transcription error)
"woods" to "wood"

Second verse:
From "people with property" to "people of property" (unintentional transcription error)

Third verse:
From "Who's the first man" to "Who's first man"
"And when the battle's fierce" to "And when the battle's getting fierce"

Fourth verse:
"And horses running free" to "And their horses running free"
"Will hack at arms and heads" to "will hack at arms and legs and heads"
"Better than taken prisoner: be dead' to "Better than prisoner: be dead"

Fifth verse:
From "Not eating or drinking or sleep" to "Not eating, drinking or sleep"
"hear the cry: Charge!" to "hear the cry of Charge!"

Envoi: Deleted

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.

War Song: Early Steps

Lady Patricia of Trakai has a real find: a copy of Lyrics of the Middle Ages (ed. J.J. Wilhelm, Garland Reference Library of the Humanities vol. 1268, Garland Publishing, Inc: New York, 1990).  She got it for $3 at a used book store when online copies of this out of print edition go for $40-$50!

On page 90 is a poem (I think it's a lai by the rhyme scheme, if the translator preserved it) called Be·m plai lo gais temps de pascor, or "A pleasure song with war as its theme" (as given in the footnote).  It's attributed to the troubador Bertran de Born.  We saw this and decided that it was perfect for Storvik's Novice Tournament:

And I like it when the scouts
Make people with property flee
And I like it when I see the rout
Of a swarm of opposing armies

Does it get more Atlantian than that?

I'm not sure from the footnote, but it appears that there is music for this piece (actually, it's been recorded on two CDs, so yeah).  The music apparently appears in another book, cited by this book; that book is in the UMD library.  I don't know if the original music will at all fit with the English translation, but it's worth a shot to find out.

I'm hoping this other source (The Medieval Pastourelle, ed. William Paden, vol. 1 and 2, I think the same Garland series but need full citation) has some more information on the original; I don't know if I have the timeframe for a major effort, but I'd at least like an Internet search for some background on the composer, his times, and works; I'd definitely like to know if this is a lai or what.

Then it's back to a decision similar to the one I had to make for the virelai: if the rhymed English translation doesn't fit the music well, what then?  Try a new translation?  Stretch the music? Write new music for the new words?  No answer's perfect and I'm not sure which is best.  In an ideal world - probably a new translation.