Mi Contra Fa

Joan Sanderson, or The Cushion Dance

When I was an undergraduate at Rutgers, we had masked balls twice a year.  And very often we danced "Prinkum Prankum," as our dance mistress called it, which I have never seen danced anywhere else.

Well, it's in Playford, starting in 1686.  The tune does not look like how I remember her singing it, and the actions are not quite the same, but it's clearly where it comes from.  The way we danced it, Man or Woman stood in the center of the ring and called out Joan or John (actually 'insert name here' as I think is indicated by the nonuse of italics in the original) Sanderson.  The cushion was placed; somebody knelt (I don't recall if it was Sanderson, the person calling out, or always the Man) and there was a hand-kiss.  The two exchanged places, leaving Sanderson in the center for the next go-round of the dance.

This is what I read from Playford:

Note: The first strain twice.  The second once.  And the last as oft as is required.

This Dance is begun by a single person (either Man or Woman) who taking a Cushion in their Hand dances about the Room, and at the end of the Tune they stop and sing This Dance it will no further go.  The Musicians answer, I pray you good Sir, why say you so?  Man, Because Joan Sanderson will not come too.  Music. She must come too, and she shall come too, and she must come whether she will or no.  Then he lays down the Cushion before a Woman, on which she kneels, and he Kisses her, singing, Welcome Joan Sanderson, welcome, welcome.  Then she rises, takes up the Cushion and both dance singing, Prinkum-prankum is a fine Dance, and we shall go dance it once again, once again, and once again, and shall we dance it once again?  Then making a stop, the Woman sings as before, This Dance, &c.  Music, I pray you Madam, &c.  Woman. Because John Sanderson &c.  Music. He must. &c.  And so she lays down the Cushion before a Man, who kneeling upon it salutes her, she singing, Welcome John Sanderson, &c.  Then he taking up the Cushion, they take hands and dance around, singing as before; and thus they do til th whole Company are taken into the Ring.  And if there is Company enough, make a little Ring in the middle, and within that Ring set a Chair, and lay the Cushion on it, and the first Man set on it.  Then the Cushion is laid before the first Man, the Woman singing, This Dance, &c. (as before) only instead of -come to, they sing -go fro; and instead of Welcome John Sanderson, &c., they sing Farewell, John Sanderson, Farewell, Farewell; and so they go out one by one as they came in.  Note, the Woman is kissed by all the Men in the Ring at her coming in and going out, and likewise the Man by all the Women.

The words are almost what I recall.  I think we sang, "I pray you, good master/mistress."  We never did the bit with the chair, and we never collected all the dancers in the center of the ring.

Playford gives a little diagram of four couples in a ring but there is no choreography, just "they dance."  We only danced during the "Prinkum-prankum" parts, as the dance stopped at the declaration, "This dance it may no further go."  I think we just doubled left and right; two full sets.  There's not room to do much else.

I bring this up because spring starts on Saturday, which means it's maypole season again.  This sort of kissing game-dance seems very suitable for an adult maypole.

The Rutgers reconstruction has the advantage of not requiring kissing the entire Company, which can get prickly in the SCA with people having widely varying ideas about appropriate casual personal contact.  On the downside, the dance mistress had to watch carefully and end the dance when it started to become clear that favorites were emerging and certain people were being passed over.  I'm leaning towards doing it the Rutgers way, if only because I saw it done without social disaster occuring.  I'm not so sure how the original Playford version would go.

Robin-Poeta-Tempore-Bardic: Kingdom Twelfth Night Report

If you had asked me yesterday, I would have told you my Tempore Atlantia entry was 'eh,' my Poeta entry was solid, that I expected to make the second round of the Royal Bardic and hoped to make the third, and that Robin Hood would be fun.  Some of those expectations were met; some were exceeded; and then there was the Royal Bardic.

Robin Hood: ZOMGWTFBBQ

So, after the Maypole and Yule projects, I had the idea that for group-based performance to work in the SCA, it needs to be flexible, adaptable, and somewhat spontaneous.  This goes against the traditional model of fixed, practiced and rehearsed.  But it is showing itself to be true again.

Our 12/28 practice was canceled due to funeral; the one on 1/6 got ice-stormed out.  So here it is, the week of the performance, and we haven't had an all-cast practice.  Life happens.  However, advance publicity has already gone out.  That was my brainstorm - we'd all buckle down if we knew they were expecting us, right?

Aheh.

(I'm not pointing fingers, because I'm not off-book yet, either.  Note to self: Just after a major holiday involving much travel is a bad time to plan a performance debut.)

So.  We will "drop back ten and punt."  The musicians have their parts down, so that's a relief.  The Narrator can conveniently hold a folder with the lyrics and sing the whole thing, so that we no longer have the actors worried about lines.  The actors just have to pantomime in an amusing fashion.

"Just."  And there's a fight scene.  Still, our group has awesome talent and I expect the result to be good fun.  Perfect and polished? No.  But fun.  And flexible and adaptable.

Robin Hood: Documentation

I'm not seeing extensive documentation for this.  We should reference the sources that provided the original poem and some commentary on it - the 'Rymes' book and the Kalamazoo web page I linked to in an earlier post.  The play post-dates the ballad, and seems to descend from it, but I've got no sources that indicate ballads were enacted as sung dramas. 

I can cite "Stations of the Sun" on the Robin Hood cycles being heavily associated with the May Games and transgressive behavior, to support a comedic presentation. 

...yeeeah.  I haven't really done any research into the staging of medieval or Tudor drama, so this is definitely a case of, "Look, this is a period source, which makes this a period performance, right?"  So I'll just cop to the fact that the performance itself is based on air and fairy dust and our own opinions, but that some kind of Robin Hood dramas were staged in the 1500-1600 timeframe.

Robin Hood: Cut down to size

Lady Patricia pointed out that, while "The Hunt is Up" starts on a pickup, not every line in "Robin Hood and the Potter" does.  I think this is readily solved by dropping the pickup for those verses that don't have it.

This does present a problem for the instruments - or it would, if they were echoing the melody.  Glancing over the ballad, it's very typical in that, to make everything fit, the pickup will sometimes be dropped and other notes will sometimes be subdivided.  Plus, "The Hunt is Up" contains a few melismas, and it's not always going to be clear where they ought to go.  My intuition is to give the instruments a simpler accompaniment, more like guitar chords, that won't get hung up on the singer(s) or speaker(s) fiddling with the melodic particulars here and there.

Now, the text needs two adjustments: it could probably stand to be cut down a bit, firstly, and secondly, the parts with speech by John, Robin and the potter should be rewritten so that the narrator and characters aren't intercutting each other.

Robin Hood: Wrong notes

Note to self: When performing a modal analysis of a piece, play the piece in question with accompaniment.

At Ensemble practice last night, we tried out Niles's "The Potter and Robin Hood" and when I went to do chordal accompaniment on the harp, it was unquestionably in C Major, just as Niles had it.  So much for all my fancy analysis!

We also decided that it sounded really Appalachian, especially that up-a-third cadence at the end.  So we flipped back to the Sixteenth Century Broadside Ballad project and started looking at their list of tunes. And don't you know, "The Hunt Is Up" was in there!  The Ensemble prepared that for Baronial Birthday a year... or was it two?... ago.  It's in 8-6-8-6 ballad meter and it dates to the time of Henry VIII.  It works just fine for "Robin Hood and the Potter."

I also proposed that we prepare just the first fytt for Twelfth Night.  It's already the end of October; we haven't cast Robin Hood or the Potter; the instrumentalists are still learning the melody and never mind any harmony or countermelody.  I think we'll be happier if we do a good job on the first third and build up to the rest over time.

Besides, the original play version was only the first fytt, anyway.

Robin Hood: Planning and Etc.

Etc.
Master Ruaidhri did get back to me, with the measured opinion that performability indeed trumps adhering to the original poetic form in this case. 

Ironically, after I have rewritten a few lines that were 8 + "said Robin" or 8 + "said Little John," I may need to go back and rewrite them to their originals.  I'm now thinking of staging, you see, which I should have done from the beginning...

Planning and Staging
I've only got Fytt One translated so far, but I think it's valuable to start thinking about its staging now. (Heck, the play "Robin Hood and the Potter" is pretty much the first fytt, so if it happens that this is all we can get done, we're period!)

(INSTRUMENTS do as they will; NARRATOR alerts the populace to impending performace of tales of Robin Hood.)

(INSTRUMENTS play a prelude as ACTORS gather to places.)

(INSTRUMENTS play melody and accompaniment for first fytt; NARRATOR begins singing the ballad.)

That's all straightforward.  The ACTORS will be doing the dialogue for their parts; I think having them speak it would be best, if only because it gives us a larger pool of potential volunteers.  (Number of people willing to speak in front of crowd > Number of people willing to sing in front of crowd.) 

If the ACTORS are speaking, not singing, INSTRUMENTS will need to switch from playing the melody and accompaniment to some kind of simple accompaniment that allows for irregularities in spoken delivery, but can go right back into the melody when the NARRATOR starts singing again.  Getting the timing on that down may be a bear; NARRATOR and INSTRUMENTS will need to be watching each other to stay together.

Many of the dialogue blocks are entire stanzas, but not all are.  It may require some practice to interleave sung narration with spoken dialogue.

Practice may suggest that even NARRATOR should speak some parts; we'll have to see.

The fight scene should absolutely have music, but probably not the main ballad melody.  Assuming that there will not be time to through-compose music specifically for the fight choreography, I'd steal a very modern page from the video game people and come up with a "song that does not end," simple tune that gets out of the way, good regular rhythm for the warlike drums to beat, that plays over and over until the fight scene is done.  It should be in the same mode as the main melody, of course.

Experiment

Since the "post continuation" section of Typepad is not actually putting an LJ-cut into the posts on the LJ-feed, let me try embedding an LJ-cut in by hand: This'll either show up as an LJ cut or else a blank line followed by this text. Have to see. And there's the end of the supposed cut.

Robin Hood, Robin Hood

All right, here we go: The First Fytt.

I am going to try, again, to hide it behind a cut.  LJ-feed readers, I do apologize if it doesn't work (again).  If I don't get it right this time, I will start putting it on a webpage and providing pointers.

In other news: Also emailed Master Ruaidhri an Cu for his opinion on my translation efforts.  Not that I foisted a draft off on him, but I'm leery of "fixing" medieval poetry.  Are these bugs or features that I'm removing?

Loved by the good!

I emailed Master Ioseph of Locksley about Appalachian ballad style.  Cross fingers and hope for a reply!

I started translating the first fytt of "Robin Hood and the Potter" yesterday.  It's not hard, since it is in English, just archaic English, and the online edition has notes for the extinct or obscure words. 

I made a run through the whole thing (30 stanzas!) and have noticed two issues:

• Ballads are often a little hard on their 8-6-8-6 meter, but this one seems to really take some liberties.
• We're used to the two short lines rhyming.  Most of the time, that was the case with this poem - except when it wasn't, and the long lines rhymed.

I already made the decision to regularize the rhyme scheme.  (I think that we're too familiar with ballad form to accept it turned around; it'll sound 'wrong' to the audience.)  But what about the meter?  There were a lot of lines with 7 syllables, in both the long and the short positions.  There were also a good number of long lines with exactly 8 syllables and good scansion - until the "said Little John" or "said Robin" that's tacked on to the end.  It makes me wonder if the dialogue tags were presented as a sort of aside?

In the interests of preserving my sanity, now and in the future, I think what I'll do is read it over with a ballad tune in my head.  The lines that can be made to work in the usual ways (subdividing unstressed notes, slurring the last bar into a melisma over one word, etc.) I'll leave alone.  The ones that are too broken to sing, I'll fix.

Staging
I was able to talk with Storvik's MOAS over the weekend; she has an interest in medieval drama and we thought this would make a good project for Twelfth Night.  The first fytt is pretty much the entirety of the play-version of "Robin Hood and the Potter."  Go figure - it's mostly a framing device for a cool fight scene.

We'll need two stage fighters (Robin Hood and the potter) and Little John (who doesn't fight); more Merry Men are optional stage dressing.  Little John could also be "played" by the ballad singer/narrator.

I think the other two "major" characters in Fyttes 2 and 3 are the sheriff and his wife; so a cast of three, plus musicians and singer/narrator, could do us.  That's 4-6 people to get to commit now to a January event.  That's... within the realm of the possible...

Feared by the bad

Back to Robin Hood - modal analysis of Niles's "Robin Hood and the Potter":

Details behind the cut, but I think it's Hypodorian A, not C Major as Niles would have it.