Mi Contra Fa

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.

GTP: Shining Spring V

Alternate first verse?

It is the shining time of spring, eya!
With flowers bright and birds on wing, eya!
And jealous husbands trouble bring, eya!
So now our queen would like to sing
To say and to tell that she is full of love

Hm....  I will think about it, but this one is 1) prettier and 2) foreshadows what 'action' the song has rather nicely.

GTP: Shining Spring IV

Shining spring is never late, eya!
Bringing joy to low and great, eya!
And jealous husbands irritate, eya!
Now our queen would like to state
To sing and to say that she is full of love

Go away, go away, jealous ones!
Leave us be, let us be
We shall all dance, together in the sun!

She has proclaimed it everywhere, eya!
On land and sea and in the air, eya!
That every youth and maiden fair, eya!
All should dance without a care
All should come with joy, should come and dance with us

Go away, go away, jealous ones!...

The King is coming with his lance, eya!
He says that he will stop our dance, eya!
He doesn't want to take the chance, eya!
That his Queen will find romance
That someone will steal his April Queen away

Go away, go away, jealous ones!...

Well, she doesn't like his plan, eya!
She doesn't want an older man, eya!
You know she wants a man who can, eya!
A man who knows so much more than
Only how to couch his lance and then to thrust

Go away, go away, jealous ones!...

If you saw our lady dance, eya!
Gracefully she does advance, eya!
With just but a single glance, eya!
You would know there is no chance
That there is a peer to our fair queen of joy

Go away, go away, jealous ones!...

_____________________________

"Go away" is just more fun to sing that "To the road."  "Hit the road" is too modern.

I ditched the end-rhymes for the last lines.  This version is just more singable.  Now to just practice it a bit to make sure that it flows...

GTP: Shining Spring III

As it turns out, Vladislav's page has mp3 and midi files, so I just listened to his version of the song.  It is indeed different from the two recorded versions I've heard.  (In addition to the Skye Consort, I first heard the song on this CD, by the Folger Consort, whose research is not to be sneezed at.)

Hrm... Skye Consort, on their YouTube page says:

A song in old French. There are lots of versions of this one and there is dispute about the transposition of the chorus but we weren't trying to be historically accurate, just playing a good tune....

So that might explain some of the variants.  I think the trouble is mostly the chorus, and especially the last line.  Poking around at Amazon, I found the Martin Best Ensemble's version which sounds like it has an awful lot of notes for that last "ballar entre nos, entre nos."

...oh wait, maybe they really do mean "transposition," not "transcription."  Here's another version and the chorus is definitely transposed. 

Go away, go away, jealous ones / To the road, to the road, jealous ones
Leave us be, let us be
We shall all dance, together in the sun

(There. Now at least 'sun' and 'ones' approximately rhyme.)

Speaking of rhymes... I'm waffling on changing the last lines of each verse.  As it stands now, they're meant to approximately rhyme with each other.  Which results in:

To sing and to tell that she is amorous

Not bad, and close to the original, but "that she is full of love" sounds more natural.

That someone will steal, his April Queen possess

This is my least favorite line in the whole translation, because of the sucky grammar.  "Steal" doesn't have an object, and so the idea of repetition doesn't quite work.  I can either do the folk song thing and subdivide something to squeeze in an object:

That someone will steal her, his April Queen possess

Now the second half of the line repeats the first half.  Or forget the rhyme:

That someone will steal his April Queen away

And then, oh yeah:

That there is no peer to our fair Queen Joyeuse

It's not her name, and she's not the queen of Joyeuse, France.  I'm given to understand the word means "joyful" in French; I learned it as the name of Lancelot's castle, Joyeuse Gard.  And it vaguely rhymes with "us" as "joyful queen" or "queen of joy" does not.

I am tending to think that the audience is not going to pick up on semi-approximate rhymes separated by an entire verse-refrain structure in a way that's anywhere near as important as having the words make sense to them.  But-but-but the proper form...

GTP: Shining Spring II

Chorus:
Go away, go away, jealous ones / To the road, to the road, jealous ones
Leave us be, let us be
We shall all dance, all dance most joyfully

Last verse:
If you saw our lady dance, eya!
Gracefully she does advance, eya!
With just but a single glance, eya!
You would know there is no chance
That there is no peer to our fair Queen Joyeuse

Some further resources:
Skye Consort performance of original
Sheet music (link down the bottom, page 2)

Now, I'm bad at sight-reading, but listening to the Skye Consort and looking at Vladislav the Purple's score, they don't seem to match.  Maybe it's because they sing faster than I can follow.

What I need to do:
1) Play the sheet music to see if it tallies with the tune in my head

2) Listen to the early music CD I have with this on it, and see if that tallies with the tune in my head (I may have learned it wrongly; I have a hard time getting this one, for some reason. Maybe the melismas.)

3) Make sure my translation can be sung.  It works to the tune in my head, and the verses at least can be fit under the notes in the score (although not the way they sound in my head)

4) Go back and make corrections as needed.

GTP: Less work for me!

Douce dame jolie is one of those super-mega medieval hits.  It gets recorded a lot.  And now it's in English!

Master Efenwealt Wystle has it on his latest release, Songs from the Sock Drawer.  The liner notes say that the transliteration is by Anne Lister, who may be this folk singer.  The song is available for download (just 99 cents!) at Master Efenwealt's MySpace page.  (Scroll down til you see the black box in the right column.)

I don't see the transliteration available on the Internet anywhere, and I'm not going to transcribe it from the CD.  It's worth your 99 cents to learn a singable version.  But if you want to hear the tune, we can go to YouTube and find:

A very slow and lyric version with spiffy harping.

This unaccompanied one picks up the pace.

Hey, an English version.  I haven't listened to the Lister/Wystle version enough to know if this is the same translation or not!

GTP: Shining Spring

Finally, work on A l'entrada de tens clar!

Verses so far:
Shining spring is never late, eya!
Bringing joy to low and great, eya!
And jealous husbands irritate, eya!
Now our queen would like to state
To sing and to tell that she is amorous

She has proclaimed it everywhere, eya!
On land and sea and in the air, eya!
That every youth and maiden fair, eya!
All should dance without a care
All should come with joy, should come and dance with us

The King is coming with his lance, eya!
He says that he will stop our dance, eya!
He doesn't want to take the chance, eya!
That his Queen will find romance
That someone will steal, his April Queen possess

Well, she doesn't like his plan, eya!
She doesn't want an older man, eya!
You know she wants a man who can, eya!
A man who knows much more than
Only how to couch his lance and then to thrust

(Last verse TBD)

Part of refrain:
Go away, go away, jealous ones
Leave us be, let us be
--------------- (I need to study the melody)

I saw an interesting translation online that, instead of "go away" was "hit the road."  I assumed "via" was some French version of the Spanish "ir," "to go," which gets conjugated into forms like "voy, vas, va."  But it does look an awful lot like Latin "Via," road, too!  It could literally be "To the road, to the road, jealous ones!"

May Pease

Original May carol lyrics for Pease Bransle.  I take a liberty with the refrain.  It actually goes:

Men: quarter-quarter-half
Women: 4 quarters

The lyrics instead give the women three notes/syllables, like the men.  They can either hold the 3rd quarter for the length of a half note while the instruments play the 4th, or sing both quarter notes to the one syllable.

Verses:
May time is here, let us dance and let us sing-o (2x)

Bagpipe plays loudly a merry melody-o (2x)

Birds in the trees sing gaily in the sun-o (2x)

Buds on the boughs mean that spring is coming in-o (2x)

Bring in the May and leave flowers on my door-o (2x)

Kiss me, my dear, in the morning of the May-o (2x) 
(yeah, I know. May-o, mayo.  But is May-time or May-day any better, esp. with every other line being end-o?)

Play on the grass in the fresh dew of the morn-o (2x)

May time is here, let us dance and let us sing-o (2x)

Chorus (the hopping part):

Men: Come with me!
Women: Go with you?
Men: Come with me and merry be!

Women: I will stay.
Men: You will stay?
Women: I will stay and sing and play

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.

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.