Mi Contra Fa

Google Penace: Lyre notes of nobody

Someone uses the search term "lyre notes of nobody" from google.com.ph to get here.  A lot.  I'm not quite sure what they are looking for.

Here's the melody line and lyrics for "Hey, Ho, Nobody at Home" by Ravenscroft.  I know a different tune for the fifth bar, and of course almost all of us know the revised Victorian lyrics.  It was originally "Fill the pot, Eadie," not "Yet I will be merry."  The absolutely! scandalous! reference to drinking had to go, and was replaced with the more generic "merry."

The melody, alas, spans an octave, so you won't fit it on a hexachord-tuned six-string lyre.  It's not pentatonic, so you won't fit it on a pentatonically tuned lyre, either.  You could, however, take that low E in Bar 2 and transpose it up an octave.  Tune the lyre from G to E (or transpose the music down to wherever your lyre is tuned) and you're good to go.

Google Penance: Acorn Poem

Many people looking for an "acorn poem" end up here, because I list the little poems I've written for Atlantia's newsletter as "Acorn Poems."  (The newsletter being "The Acorn," of course.)  This is an attempt at an Anglo-Saxon-style riddle.

A hard round thing    high above earth
I fall in the fall    found on the ground
Pleasing to pigs    precious hog-meal
I wear a hat    high on my head
Brown is that cap    covering brow
Come spring, I shed    simple headgear
Taller I stand    try to touch sky
Many years pass    til proudly I rear
High above earth    hard round thing falls

Google Penance: Mi Contra Fa

"Google penance" is a term Carl Pyrdum of Got Medieval? uses to denote when he has written a post inspired by a Google search that brought a reader fruitlessly to his website.

For example, I get a fair number of hits from people looking for "Anglo Saxon riddle kids."  I actually have an article on Anglo-Saxon riddles for children posted, so that's a good hit.  But I also get people searching for "mi contra fa." 

Now, if they're looking for this blog, that's a good hit.  But if they're looking for information on the tritone, they are out of luck.  I have a whole site named "Mi Contra Fa" and I never once explain what it means.

For this oversight, I do Google penance.

It's pretty simple in this case, since there's a Wikipedia article that summarizes most of the relevant information and debunks the "devil in music" thing at the same time.  "Mi contra fa," or "the note mi played against the note fa" is the tritone, an augmented fourth or diminished fifth, the interval between (for example) F and B.  It's dissonant - really dissonant - and it was considered good musical practice in the Middle Ages to avoid it.  However, we don't have a single scrap of evidence to support the idea that people really believed that playing it summoned the devil or was an act of evil.  It just sounded nasty.

Now, someone out there is going through their "Do, a Deer" and wondering how in the world mi and fa can be an augmented fourth apart.  Do, re, mi, fa... that's a major or minor second, right?  They are right next to each other!  In what world does B follow F in a musical scale?

In the world of hexachords, and even then, not directly.  Medieval musical theory wasn't based on octaves and major and minor scales.  It was based on hexachords - six notes long, rather than the octave's eight - and modes.  But yet, the octave was recognized as the perfect interval.  How did you compose music if your 'octave,' this hexachord thing, didn't contain the octave?

You switched hexachords.  There are three of them, see, each one patterned "tone-tone-semitone-tone-tone."  That got you, in a world of mostly diatonic instruments:

CDEFGA
FGA(Bflat)CD
GABCDE

Now, when you sing "Do, a Deer," you don't necessarily know what key you're in, right?  You do know that the tonic, the base note that structures the piece, is going to be "Do."  That's its name, no matter what note you're actually singing.

The same is true for each of the three hexachords.  If I'm in the natural hexachord (the one starting on C), C is do.  if I'm in the soft hexachord (the one starting on F), F is do.

Note that in the natural hexachord, F is fa.  And in the hard hexachord (the one starting on G), B is mi.

Mi contra fa - augh, the tritone!  There it is!  And that's why in the soft hexachord, the only one that would naturally contain an F and a B, the B is flattened (or softened, and hence the name of the hexachord).