Mi Contra Fa

Roland: Tunes

Remember this page of Norwegian folks songs?  #10 on that page is our song.  Click through to find two different tunes given.  The first tune is the one used by Trio Medieval and Glitterind.  The second tune is the first one given in that Danish 1908 book of Faroese tunes; there are four tunes total given.

They are similar but not the same. Most notably, in the second and fourth lines, the more modern contour proceeds through scale degrees 5-3-4-1-3-2-7-1.  The dance tune proceeds 5-3-4-3-1-3. (EDIT: Scale degrees are for Dorian mode.  Add 1 to all the numbers to get the scale degree for the major scale.)

The "2-7-1" cadence is a major folkie thing, IMO.  The Faroese dance does give an alternate tone on degree 2 for the very final cadence; it gives 3-5-1, with a smaller note on 2 written under the 5.  Harmony on a fourth?  A variant? I'm not sure.  And some of the other tunes at least do use scale degree 1, although not that I noticed in that particular telling pattern.

I'm not surprised that I had a hard time telling that the tunes were in fact different at first look.  But now I know why the video of the Faroese dancers didn't quite sound like the other performances.

I'll have to give a more careful listen to some of the Faroese tunes.  It's sort of a philosophical question - all the tunes under consideration are only documentable to the 20th century, but the Glitterind tune with that cadence sounds even more 20th cen to my ears.  But it also sounds good.

Tablature for comparing the two tunes under the cut.

Folk Music and Art Music

So I was listening to Sequentia's "Shining Light" recording the other day.  It's 12th and 13th century Aquitanian chant music.  And the second track, Verbum patris humanatur, o o, just reached out and slapped me.  First, if a song's got an "o o" or an "eya" in it, it's usually pretty joyful and fun, and this song has both.  But the other thing, the thing that made this song seem so much more singable and accessible than anything else in the recording, was the syllabic setting.  Most of the syllables took one note. 

I need to look into this a bit more, but my vague understanding is that this is typical of world folk music.  Early chant also follows this model, if I recall correctly.  [citation needed but I'm pretty sure it's in Hoppin.]

Art music, on the other hand, is a more conscious use of musical tools to achieve some artistic effect. My growing suspicion is that the long melismas in chant are more art music than folk music.  It's probably no accident that their elaboration and eventual polyphonic settings rise with the rise of better musical notation (an important marker for art music).

So, depending on context, I should possibly be not looking to highly melismatic chant pieces for melodic inspiration.  Or perhaps use the melody but in a more syllabic fashion.

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).

At long, long last!

I am finally, finally buying a Korg OT-120, an electric tuner that supports Pythagorean temperament!  And, between the Amazon.com discount price and $50 of credit card "rewards" coupons, I'm getting it for under $25!

I think it's taken me so long because I had the Korg OT-120 pegged in my head as "expensive outlay."  Over $100!  I could buy several books or CDs for that!  But it's also really well past time I got it.  My ear isn't good enough to do "circle of fifths" unassisted tuning; I can barely hear the resonance on the wire harp and don't hear it at all on my other instruments.  Even on wire, I seem to hear it quite a few cents on either side of true tone, so I just don't trust myself to get it right that way.

Gut strings will likely be the next major investment; we'll see how long it takes for me to get around to that.

Early period music theory in a (humorous) nutshell

Hat tip to Giddysinger.