Mi Contra Fa

New book: The Rhythm of Beowulf

And by "new" I mean "new to me."  J.C. Pope first published his book in 1942; I have the revised 1966 second edition.  It was on my list of "things to check out from the library" from years ago; it wasn't until I read Christopher Page discussing it in his dissertation that I knew it MUST BE MINE.

Essentially, he takes the Sievers types and junks them, replacing them with a structure that is entirely more suitable for musical performance.

...the Sievers types.  A fellow name of Sievers went through the Old English poetic corpus and tried to understand its structure.  He deduced that each line is made of two half lines, and that each half line corresponds to one of five major rhythmic patterns, e.g., "strong weak, strong weak", "strong, weak weak, strong," "weak strong, weak strong" and "weak, strong strong, weak."  (And the there's his D types, which use three different levels of stress and I still don't fully grok them.)

I'm only a few pages in, but Pope's basic idea seems to be that each half-line is "isochronous," which is a fancy way of saying "is spoken in the same amount of time as every other half-line," which in turn ends up corresponding directly to "can be represented as two bars of 2/4 music."  To make this work out, he has to insert rests into the bar, often at the beginning of a half-line.  Which would be a great place to strum a lyre, as he points out.

Hey, no wonder I like this idea so much.  I was onto a similar track back in 2008, before I even had this blog.  Ha HA I feel all smart now.

Anyway, it seems to be an important book with huge implications for the performance of OE poetry.  Composition, not so sure yet.

The Winchester Troper

The Winchester Troper is an 11th-12th century manuscript containing some of the earliest music in England.  There's a new facsimile edition out.  The $220 price tag is rather steep, but it's also at the UMD Performing Arts Library (in the Reference section, alas, so no checking it out).  The same scholars have put their learning into practice, with a CD of music from the Troper also available.  At $47, the CD ain't cheap, either, but I may just have to pick it up.

Book Review: The Mastery of Music

The Mastery of Music: Ten Pathways to True Artistry by Barry Green, Broadway, 2005.

Well, I liked it.

It helped me realize a few things about my playing: why I prefer improvisation to learning "real" songs, why people usually respond better when I do that.  Because my technique is crap, I can't let go and perform artistically if I'm trying to reproduce someone else's tune.  In improv, there is no right or wrong, so no anxiety, so I can move with the music.

The book is more aimed at someone with a traditional music education, for whom technique is all-important.  It tries to get past technique, to see what other qualities are needed to really soar as a musician - although it acknowledges, repeatedly, that you have to have technique.  Joshua Bell doesn't just have soul, he also plays all the notes right.

So I took home sort of the inverse lesson.  I don't claim to be able to "play in the Zone" at the drop of a hat, but when I improvise, I do play with more joy, more feeling, and I connect better with the audience.  That part, I can do already.  What I'm lacking is the solid technique and skill that comes from regular attentive practice.

(I played at church recently and two people asked how I got that neat note-bending effect.  Um... I accidentally hit the string with my nail? I hadn't been trying to bend any notes, you see.  This sort of thing should be cleaned up.)

Tunes for Five Strings

Years ago, I bought a copy of My Kantele Is My Teacher by Lani Thompson.  The kantele is a traditional Finnish instrument with five strings.  (More modern models can have ten or more.)  I had been looking into potential commonalities between kanteles and lyres, and I fooled around a bit with the tunes included in the book.  I was still mostly plucking the strings at that point, and it sounded nice but not compelling.

Well, I picked it back up for fun last night.  Using the block-and-strum method of playing with a drone on tonic, the tunes seem to take on a deeper life.  They sound really, really good.

The lyrics, alas, are in untranslated Finnish.  Maybe I'll see if I can find some translations on the 'Net, or else use the music as a basis for my own lyrics... although I'd like to know what kind of songs these are before I go writing.  Also, the tunes are all given as "traditional," and that includes everything from the ones collected from rune singers or that use lyrics from the Kalevala, down to the waltzes and the polkas.  So... some more documentation would be nice.

"Saxon Songs" Pseudo-Review

I got my copy of Carl Wood's "Saxon Songs" a while ago.  I've read the text and picked out a few melodies, but I'm calling this a "pseudo-review" because I haven't actually yet played any of the full arrangements.

She comes right out and says in her Introduction that this is not an attempt at historical re-creation.  It's a  modern composition.  This is rather at odds with the ad copy, and I admit I was disappointed.  The other supporting information is the usual; no sources I was surprised to see.  She does give a handy pronunciation guide for Old English.

The music looks very "harpistic," lots of rolled triads or four-note octaves.  It does look to be in either minor keys or else  modes - it's hard to tell at first look, and from the chordal tablature, if it's "really" a minor key or if that's the modern analogue to the mode.  (For instance, the key of D-minor is not the same as D-Dorian, but a D-minor I chord and a D-Dorian I chord are the same. The note in the scales that is different doesn't show up in the chord.) 

The melodies have some accidentals dropped in; I don't like the effect right away, but maybe it grows on you?  My very brief acquaintance with Icelandic folk music showed that it had some accidentals, and maybe that's where this is coming from.  That, or Wood's imagination and art.

It is a good example of through-composed settings for Anglo-Saxon poetry.

On the whole, I'm not unhappy that I bought it, and I hope to be able to try a few of the pieces soon.  However, I'm not as excited about it as I was before learning it was an entirely modern take on things. 

Saxon Songs

Carol Wood has put out a new book called Saxon Songs, which is a compilation of information on Anglo-Saxons, their harps and their poetry.  She's got a PhD in Medieval Literature, apparently, and is also the person behind the Chaucer Songbook, which I have heard praised to the skies but never purchased (my interest in 14th cen music not being all that strong). 

While I am fairly sure I have read all or most of the primary sources for Anglo-Saxon harp information, I am still eager to see what another scholar has made of it.  The book also includes her settings for some of the poems, and again, I'd like to see what conclusions she's drawn and how they compare to what I do.

Book Review: "How to Read an Oral Poem"

So I lied when I said I'd be focusing on the Great Translation Project.  I was also reading this on the side, as background for Anglo-Saxon performance.

Foley, John Miles.  How to Read an Oral Poem.  University of Illinois Press, 2002.

The book also has an associated website.

I'm of two minds on this book.  From an SCA point of view, it's a very readable introduction to studies in oral poetry.  No real surprise - I believe it was developed by Foley as a textbook for an undergraduate class.  It uses a variety of examples, from Homer to slam poetry, to make its points.  Of especial value to the Scadian performer will be the introduction to three major ways of studying oral poetry - performance theory, ethnopoetics, and immanent art (which encompasses the more famous and mechanistic oral-formulaic theory) - as well as applying these techniques to what Foley calls "Voices from the Past," our surviving manuscript copies of poems that were (mainly or in part) oral works.

It is an introduction, though, and anyone looking for a detailed "how to" on bringing Beowulf or Roland to life is going to be disappointed.  It does have a very extensive bibliography, though, so you can find the works that do have these more in-depth treatments.

Also, the book makes good points about the shared vocabulary necessary for oral performance to work.  If I look at you and say, "Once upon a time..." you instantly access a shared "register" of the fairy tale.  You expect a certain pattern in what follows; variation within limits.  Regrettably, we don't have immediate access to the registers the old poets were working in. If I begin to describe a sea-voyage to you, you don't instantly expect the five parts of a sea-voyage that the Old English poets used to construct that scene.  We can try to learn these registers, but as SCA performers, we probably shouldn't expect our audiences to know them.  At least, not until we've been performing in them long enough that they learn they by experience.  But until then, some of the force and power of the traditional forms may be lost.  It's another argument for finding ways to hybridize modern and medieval performance, to present authentic material in an appropriate style but still access the audience's available registers.

I had two main problems with the book.  The first was that the tone was a little too informal sometimes, almost a little too contrived.   Maybe the sense of contrivance came from the set of ten maxims which Foley invented.  They mostly conveyed good and useful points, but why did he have to call them *proverbs* (sic) instead of, oh, maxims or dictums?  Or even "proverbs," with air quotes?  What's with the asterisks?

The second was more of a frame of reference problem.  This book is written for (and possibly by) non-performers, for academics studying oral poetry.  There's a great and healthy emphasis on the need to experience oral performance to really understand it, but this is preaching to the choir for most of us.  There's a sort of wonder that techniques like musical scoring could be used to transcribe a performance that includes music, or that has a sense of musicality.  Some of the major points that the author dwells on are things that are common practice for performers like ourselves.

All in all, it was a good read and a nice introduction.  There are some good lessons to learn in it.  I'm actually glad I read it before the seminal Singer of Tales; I could easily see myself thinking that oral-formulaic theory was the be-all and end-all of oral composition.  (It just fits too well with my engineer's mindset.)  But except for the bibliography, I doubt that I'll be going back to it much.  This could have been a library loan.

Book Review: "Performing Medieval Narrative"

I have still not been able to lay hands on this book (someone keeps checking it out of the UMD library), but I've found a review of it online here.  Typical of these scholarly anthologies, it contains a bunch of essays on some really, really specific topics.  Section 4, written by actual performers, looks to be the most immediately useful to the SCAdian storyteller/narrator.  That is not enough for me to shell out $95 for the book, and I will continue to wait for it to reappear in the library.

The Period Music Songbook

"The PMS was originally produced to encourage social singing of SCA-period music in my local area (Kingdom of Ealdormere)." So says Kirrily Robert/Katherine Rowberd in the introduction to her Period Music Songbook. There's a lot of Ravenscroft and other pieces that you're likely to have heard once or twice - she was aiming for a singable "top 40" collection of period music, mostly in English. I think she's hit her mark. Those Ealdormerians! Always being so excellent in the bardic arts.

Book Review: McGee's "Performer's Guide"

Medieval and Renaissance Music: A Performer's Guide, by Timothy McGee, is absolutely a must-read and re-read book. It is out of print, which is an abominable shame. It is available at several online booksellers, used, for rather high prices; or most university libraries will either have a copy or can get it for you via Interlibrary Loan.

I came to McGee late, and it was like a giant smack upside the head. He lays out, very clearly and cleanly, the assorted performance decisions you need to make when performing early music, and how you might go about making those decisions.

He covers reading fascimilies and modern editions; dealing with problems of tempo and meter (I didn't even know there were problems of tempo and meter); appropriate vocal style for solo and choral singers; instrument selection for instrumental pieces, ensembles, and accompaniment; creating arrangements for soloists, accompanied soloists and ensembles; issues of ornamentation and improvisation. Each section by itself is small and digestible.

Most importantly, this isn't all airy theory. McGee tests his ideas out in performance, and the work is very much a guide for performers, as the title indicates. He offers practical, solid guidelines to work from.

Two caveats. First, this is an older book (1990), so some of the performance practice suggestions may have been refined in the meanwhile.

Second, don't think of this book as either gospel or a straightjacket. It offers practical, solid guidelines, based on what appear to be the "norms" of medieval and Renaissance music. Any particular piece of music may be different from those norms. As Guido d'Arezzo (c. 1050) said in his treatise on music, "Do everything that we have said neither too rarely nor too unremittingly, but with taste." Respect the world the music came from (as we understand it from the scholarship) but also let each individual piece speak to you, and allow yourself to try things beyond these guidelines.

I would say that access to Hoppin's Medieval Music and McGee's "Performer's Guide" are an excellent and necessary start to any SCAdian's music library, whether the SCAdian in question is interested in solo (bardic), polyphony (choral groups), or ensemble (instrumental) performance. If I lost the rest of my library, I could do a lot with just those two.