Mi Contra Fa

A Poetic Cycle

A "problem" with "Nam languens" and "Veni, delectissime" is that they're so short.  I say "problem" because it's strictly a problem of perception and staging.  Bardic performances are supposed to go 3-5 minutes.  Long pieces show more skill than short pieces (not really but that's the perception). 

Now, there's nothing stopping me from going off and tackling the Battle of Maldon or Brunaburgh as a lengthy performance.  (Possibly too lengthy...)  But I've put a good bit of work into these shorter, lyric pieces, so I thought - how about combining them into a longer poetic cycle? 

Start with "Veni, delectissime" - two people in love.

Then, any combination of "Wulf and Eadwacer," "The Wife's Lament," and "Nam languens."  "Deor" could fit as well (it has been suggested as a partner to "Wulf and Eadwacer," with Deor and Wulf being the same man) but the first three all have female speakers.  "Deor" would be a sudden shift of point of view... although it could work...

End with "The Husband's Message."

Thematically, it would go:

Sensual love and joy (Veni)
Forcible separation, longing and danger (Wulf)
Meditation on bad times; looking forward to better times (Deor)
More longing, hoping for reunion (Nam languens)
Reunion (Husband's Message)

"Wife's Lament" is a bit of an odd duck with many possible interpretations; the more I think about it, the more I think I'd rather leave it out, at least for now.

The most obvious flaw in this cunning plan is that mixing the Latin and Old English verses into a "cycle" is really dodgy.  Of course, I'm not in the least actually proposing that these poems belonged together originally.  It's just a nice "program" for presentation.

"Veni" and "Wulf" are performance-ready.  I hope to have "Nam languens" done in a reasonable amount of time.  The biggest project would be learning/adapting "The Husband's Message," but I've meant to learn it for years now.  It's a touchingly sweet poem.

Six Notes

So, Singing the Past mentions that many of the tunes used for singing epic poems are melodically pretty flat, have stepwise motion, and span a fifth or a sixth.  Hoppin says almost the exact same thing about the oldest extant Gregorian chants - they commonly span a fifth or a sixth rather than an octave or more.  I suspect that, the more that I look, the more I'll find traditional cultures with poetic/musical traditions that fit this mold.

(Insert standard disclaimer about applying evidence from one culture to another here.)

We get folks on the lyre group who seem to think that playing melody on the six-stringed lyre is "lame" or too limited.  Well, it absolutely is, by our modern standards.  From the late Renaissance on, we've been conditioned to expect depth and texture in music - first, polyponic and then homophonic, as chordal texture started its reign of tenor.  So by any yardstick used in the last 400 years, yes, the lyre is a thin-sounding instrument with few possibilities. 

Of course, it's more than 400 years old.  And, based on my admittedly limited research so far, I'm starting to be of the opinion that the desired sound would have been something primarily melodic and easily encompassed by a sixth or so.

Technically, I think the challenges come in cleanness of fingering and sensitivity to the instrument.  When you have stripped down the sound so far, to a bare melody or melody with drone, you need to really have a clean, pure melody.  It doesn't have to be complicated, particularly for epic recitation.  But it can't be sloppy, with ragged intonation or uneven rhythm.

Rhythm.  I don't know what the answers are*, but by golly, figure out your correct answer for this particular piece and then nail it down to the microsecond. 

*Aside - matters of rhythm and note duration in very early music are extremely contentious.  There are no known right answers.  What I'm saying is, whatever rhythm(s) you decide on for a piece, they need to be executed with full commitment.  I used to worry about playing the right notes.  Now I worry about maintaining rhythm.  A hiccup in rhythm is ten times uglier than a misplayed note.

Artistically... artistically, it's hard.  The audience is conditioned to want more.  You are conditioned to want more.  The aesthetic the instrument belonged to... we don't really know it.  Some days, it seems like re-creations will be interesting exotica at best and dry, clinical efforts at worst.

That's the challenge - to make the art sing again, to make the glad-wood speak to people, even though we may have forgotten how to hear it.

Lyre Book Update

Yes, I am still working on the lyre book.  I have a fair number of songs written out, and am now working on text.  After that, I need some illustrations - either I'll sketch them or take photographs.

What I Do With My Lyre

Again, for those who may be coming in late, the instrument under discussion is the six-stringed Saxon lyre.

Improvise Music
The main thing I do with my lyre is noodle out tunes on it.  Using the playing technique described yesterday, I can sit and make up music.

I use rhythmic or melodic themes or tropes to keep things sounding different, or sometimes I will play in another mode.  I vary tempo and mood between pieces as well.  There is really quite a lot you can do, melodically, on six strings.

Accompanied Singing
So far, I have one performance-ready piece: my sung translation of Wulf and Eadwacer.  I have tried strumming only about one note per measure, and every note.  Both seem to work pretty well.  I still generally play with the Dorian drone on, and just echo the sung melody.

Accompanied Recitation (Current Work)
I have only tried this a few times.  Two early attempts used harp to accompany Anglo-Saxon poems (the Exeter Book riddle for "fire" and For Silvanus Perrin).  In both cases, I used two octaves' worth of fifths (e.g., D-A-d-a), moving almost randomly around the harp - just sure to end on tonic.

Those seemed to go over all right, but the music and poetry didn't seem well-matched.  I'm not sure if they need to be.  I'm not sure if the music should be all over the place, for 'interest,' or if just a home interval (D-A) and an away interval (C-G) would be sufficient.  They feel boring to play, but the listener will be primarily attending to the words, not the music.

I have listened to Benjamin Bagby and Ann and Charlie Heymann do recited early medieval poetry to more complicated music (on lyre in Bagby's case) but I'm not yet sure exactly how.  Bagby says he improvises, but also that the themes are mostly settled after years of practice.

Experiments in private have been dodgy.  It's hard to recite, play and listen to yourself do both at the same time.  I believe I will need to enlist technology.  Audacity allows for the recording of multiple tracks of sound.  I can record myself reciting a poem, and then record different kinds of accompaniment, from a single repeated interval, to "home and away" intervals, to different melodies underlying the text.  Then I can listen to them separately, to hear what they sound like.

My Lyre Playing Basics

I want to do this up as a webpage with photo illustrations someday.  But until then, this is for all the folks who end up at Mi Contra Fa because they Googled for "how to play lyre."  I play the six-stringed Saxon lyre.

There are many ways to play the lyre.  You can pluck the strings like a harp, or strum them like a guitar.  I use the "block and strum" method as my primary approach, with occasional plucking.

Tuning
There are many ways to tune the lyre.  As a historical re-enactor, I prefer the one described by Hucbald, c. 800 CE.  It is the only one we can authenticate.  It is, very simply, "do re mi fa so la."  I tune in the key of F because I am an alto; I do not have a strong opinion on what a "proper do" for the scale is.  It's not like A=440 Hz was defined in the 9th century.

Temperment
I would use a Pythagorean temperment, if I had a tuner or an ear that would let me.  Some day... Right now, I use equal temperment but I would like to change that.

Strap
I tie a tablet-woven band around either arm of my lyre, with enough slack to loop around my left wrist.  This secures my hand near the strings.

Positioning
I am experimenting with different ways to hold the lyre on my leg or lap.  Historically, I set it upright on my left leg with the soundboard facing to my right.  This is not really towards the audience, and I suspect a different pose would be better.  Graeme Lawson has a paper that shows another way to hold the lyre, and I'm trying to practice that.  To start, you can try what feels comfortable.

Basic Playing Style: Drone Plus Notes
For historical performance, I do not like to use modern chords.  They are absolutely modern, becoming popular in the late Renaissance or early Baroque, as new, popular keyboard instruments were causing Pythagorean temperments to be replaced with newer, experimental ones.  The Pythagorean third is dissonant, so building a chord around one just isn't good form. 

(Read more about Pythagorean tempermant and medieval music theory.)

Everything we know about early music suggests that the "most important note" on the lyre would have been "re," followed closely by "la."  "Re" is the base note of the Dorian mode, and "la" is its dominant, a fifth up.  There was no "major scale" in the 9th century, even though today, we might say the lyre is tuned "to the first six notes of the major scale."  It is really tuned to the first five notes of the Dorian mode, with one note below tonic to allow for some nice cadences.

My lyre has six strings and I have five fingers.  What I do is place a finger on every string except "re."

If I want to sound "re," I strum all the strings.

If I want to sound "re" plus another note, I lift up the finger blocking the other note and strum all the strings.  Four fingers damp four strings, and the interval sounds.

Often for "do," and sometimes for "mi," I do not want the dissonance that comes with sounding them together with "re."  In those cases, I shuffle my thumb (on do) or index finger (on mi) from those notes to the "re" string, and strum.

You can also shuffle fingers around to get any single note.  I don't find this as fast as just lifting up fingers, though, and I like the effect of the "re" drone underlying the melody.

Melody?
Yes, I play melodies or parts of melodies.  It's done by oral poets in other parts of the world.  There is nothing wrong with playing what you are singing (if you are singing).

What tunes?
Generally, I improvise tunes in Dorian mode. 

But I want to play tuned pentatonically/using chords/the way I do now.
I am not going to stop you.  I have a very specific goal of historically informed performance, and my current performance practice is a snapshot of where I am right now with my reading and my technique.  You may have different goals, different interpretations of the literature, and different technique.   

Lyre Tunebook

The lyre tunebook is chugging along.  I've scored seven 19th-20th century pieces, like "Twinkle, Twinkle" and "Ode to Joy," that people will already be very familiar with.  That (in theory) helps them know if they're playing the instrument "right."  And I've also scored eight 12th - 16th century tunes (or parts of tunes) to be all medievally.  Maybe "scored" is the wrong word.  It's just melodies at the moment.  I'll be adding some accompaniment separately.

Of course, none of that repertoire is really historically appropriate for the lyre (although the 13th cen. Danish "Dromte mig et drom" is close).  But we don't have any 8th century music, period, is my understanding.  We start getting chant in the 9th cen.

I may include a section on improvising tunes, and what (I think) is historically plausible, and maybe give a couple of scored examples of my own compositions.  I hate doing that, if only because I'm so bad at transcribing what I'm playing into note values.  It takes me forever to get it right.

Lyre Book?

So I've taken it into my head that a book for Saxon lyre would be a good thing to do.

But which one?  There are at least three different books I can think of.

1) Introduction to the Lyre.  That would be the one I wrote the Intro for - not particularly geared at the SCA re-enactor, just sort of a general overview of lyres and lyre-playing.

2) The Scop's Lyre.  This would focus on head learning (early period music and poetry), hands learning (lyre basics, improvisation) and historically-informed performance. 

3) The Glad Wood Sings.  A tunebook.  I hesitate to write a tunebook because of my personal inclination towards improvisation, but newcomers to the lyre list are always looking for songs to play. 

I'm leaning towards e-books in almost all cases, because it would let me embed video or audio media.  Although a print book with a DVD might work... but that's a lot of effort for something I wouldn't really expect to sell commercially.

Lyre Book: Introduction

The Saxon lyre is a simple instrument, but a versatile one.  Most lyre players discover the instrument on their own and develop a playing style through experimentation, leading to a great diversity of techniques.

The goal of this book will not be to exhaustively cover every possible way to play the lyre.  It will attempt to touch on several of the major schools of tuning, sounding and playing the lyre, and then eventually focus on one possible re-creation technique.  Whether or not this is the best technique for you will depend on what you want to do with your lyre.  You may wish to try several of the options presented until you find the one that best suits what you want to with your instrument.

Some lyre players are historical re-enactors, interested in creating a historically plausible Anglo-Saxon, continental Saxon or even Nordic musical experience.  Some lyre players are Asatru, for whom the lyre and its music are an important part of their religious ceremonies, and who want to use it to create or reinforce a particular emotional or spiritual state.  Some lyre players are in neo-medieval rock bands!  They may be interested less in what may have been done in the past, and want to experiment with what they can do now.  And some lyre players enjoy the instrument privately or personally, using it to relax or even to meditate with.

Some people want to sing along with their lyres; some want to recite poetry.  Some just want to play music.  They may want to play solo or in an ensemble.  All of these things will affect how you tune your lyre, how you pluck or strum it, and how you play on it and compose for it.

None of the possibilities are right; none of them are wrong.  They are all different, and it is up to the artist to evaluate them and select the one that is right for the artist.

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.

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.