Mi Contra Fa

Performer's Revel Report

Fun as always!  Heard many nifty new things, including a song about the Children's Crusade that should come with a content warning for young mothers and/or pregnant women.  We had some attendees who had come from afar, including Sir Axel from the south of Atlantia and Rathlaed duNoir.  (Well, when your hosts are Clam Chowder, I guess there's a certain pull...)

We had I'd say a good half-dozen entrants for the Poeta Spring Challenge, which we followed with the maypole.  Six dancers and nearly as many singers!  It was fun, and much more coherent than the Guppy Gala demo.  Still lacked something of the frission it seems like it ought to have, probably because we were all over 30, mostly married, and a little self-conscious about the whole thing.  I also neglected to psych people up to flirt. I'd still like to see it done with a high school/college crowd.

I did get to speak with Baroness Janina about Ye Olden Daies, and I have my nugget: Storvik's first seneschal and baroness divided those duties between them by coin toss.

Personally, I did all right.  "To Put the Devil Into Hell" was quite well-received, and "None Suffer" started a brief discussion on the nature of the pilgrims (Baron Igor picked up that if they were eating white bread and wine, they weren't especially ascetic...).  I trotted out "By Your Side" for I think the second time in public; a little wobbly at first, but it went fine.  I tried Bertran de Born again; people left the room.  Oh, well - I think I do well by it, but it's just a weird-sounding song.  More gratifyingly, I read the "Saga of Fishflinger" on a lark, during a lull when folks were snacking and talking, and heard a few "Sssh!"s because folks realized they wanted to hear it.  And after the room went on something of a gypsy jag, I hauled out Beggars to God.  Little wobble in the first verse, then my voice caught up with itself and it went very well.

After listening to a large number of minor key narrative folk songs on various popular tropes, though, I admit I'm tempted to try a few Scadian versions of Title of the Song.  Title of the War Song, Title of the Irish Song, Title of the Magical Song...

Test as you fly, fly as you test

That's the mantra in the spacecraft Testing and Integration community.  The idea is that tests which do not simulate flight conditions are, while perhaps not worthless, not really useful for determining flight performance.  Subsystems that work fine in isolation may interact with each other in bad ways, or the transience you thought you could neglect comes back in reality to bite you on the butt.

It's not a bad mantra for performance practice, either.  That's what I discovered at Twelfth Night, when I tried to perform a song/poem/chant that had been fine  sung a capella in the car.  I slapped a simple lyre accompaniment - which would have also been fine on its own - on top, and the mix was a qualified disaster.  The lyre had just been retuned, so the starting note was a bit different than I'd practiced, and I ended up in some in-between key and... it was just unfortunate.

I've been practicing for KASF, again in the car, since that's where and when I have time.  I'd like to perhaps try the lyre, but figure I shouldn't.  More tempting is a drum for "None Suffer" (especially to do sound effects for the dancing pork chop) and possibly for "The Armed Man."  I can sort of get a similar effect by pounding the steering wheel, but it's not the same as handling an instrument.

I want to believe that the drumming I would do would be so simple, I can practice it in the few days before the event and get it down.  Prior lessons learned indicate this will not be true.  This will not be true.  Repeat it, Teleri, until you believe it.

If I start practicing with a drum, in the evenings, for "None Suffer" now, I might have enough time to get it right.

Feasts and Foolishness Report

We had to cut it short on account of toddler meltdown.  But:

Poeta Atlantiae had a last-minute 'challenge' (not competition) for poetry performance, which two gentles accepted.  One recited four brief and funny poems of her own devising, while the other recited one by Sir Walter Raleigh.  Considering the last-minute nature of things, not bad.

I got three performances in.  I did "Wulf and Eadwacer," still sans lyre, for the 'medieval women' challenge.  No one said anything about it to me one way or the other, but I'm pleased with the way the performance has come together.

In the bardic circle and working from paper, I debuted "The Holy Pork Chop Song."  People laughed!  It was funny!  And a few recognized it as a cantiga.  I count this as a solid victory for the Great Translation Project and excellent incentive to keep at it. 

Just before leaving, I gave the "Spring War Song" a go at the bardic circle.  I need more practice with it, but I faked my way through some uneven melismas.  Yseult recognized it as Bertran de Born.  I was very much reading the paper, so I missed a good bit of audience reaction.  I heard a few amused sounds, but overall I'm not sure if it was well-received or just politely received.  (I'm a bit "fussy mother hen" with this piece because I know it's melodically odd and hard to listen to.)

Seen and heard: A new trio (guitar, violin, doumbek) that's only previously been to Pennsic; they were very good!  "The Challenger," a song only three years younger than me by (I think it was) Viscount Sir Edward Zifram ("Fast Eddie"), unexpectedly touching.  Three harps, a flute, and a vocalist collaborating - very lovely!  A boy (single digits in age) performing... I couldn't catch most of the words but the tune was nice and he danced with a rattle to good effect.  My lord performed his tribute poem to our late friend Rhiannon.

Very good event for bardic!

Goal Setting

One thing that the Royal Bardic competition helped to throw into relief for me: I have not been practicing for performance nearly enough.  I somehow have it into my head that I have to produce new work, faster, faster!, and have been leaping from one project to the next with abandon.  This means I have a slew of new translations and a few compositions, and I don't have a single one ready to perform.

This rather defeats the purpose.

So in this new year, I will slow down a bit.  A project isn't done until it's performance-ready, and its documentation is all together. 

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.

Anglo-Saxon Performance, Beta version

More generic documentation, done mostly from memory.  (Hey, I have a good memory.) 

I hope to spiff it up when I have more time.  So... 2014 sometime.

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.

Twelfth Night: Strategy

Tempore Atlantia: The cantigas are dated to the reign of Alfonso X, 1210 - 1284.  So they're at least partly in the current Tempore Atlantia category.  I document my translation decisions on "Non sofre" and in it can go.  It's not a strong entry, but what the heck?

Poeta Atlantia: The documented period form should clearly be Anglo-Saxon alliterative poetry; it will light a fire under my butt to pull together my generic documentation for it.  Time permitting, it should be a new piece, probably the eulogy for Rhiannon that I wanted to write for Chalice.  Time not permitting, it could be something I've already written (unless there's a rule against it?).

The poem for the queen I could do in the same style, to address personal research and performance goals.  To show breadth, though, I could do a virelai.  I can reuse some of the documentation from "Blind King John falls in the fray."

Duke Gyrth Oldcastle: Aheh.  This will probably fall off the back of the line.  If inspiration strikes, I can do something in couplets, but my mental stock of fabliaux themes and stories is low.

Royal Bardic: Do I: do what I usually do, my latest and greatest and least polished, or try with something old and tried and true?  I'm not sure what the guidelines are; I think it's something period, something original, and king's whim.  I could do Non Sofre, one of the pieces I'm pulling together for one of the other events, and, well, whatever the king asks for.

A Croatian Judith

Ensemble Diagolos has video clips of their performance of Judith online.  It is awesome.

I want to point out a couple of things:

• There are three performers.  Just three: two instruments and a vocalist.
• The staging is simple, probably deceptively so.  I'm sure lot of work went into it.
• In the extended instrumental interlude after the feast, watch the way the players interact with their instruments.  The fiddler saws and bangs on his lirica, and the piper blows with breathless abandon.  It's violent - as befits this point in the story, when Judith is sawing off Holofernes's head.
• The subtitles help immensely.
• This was a "musical reconstruction" - no music for this 16th century poem survived.  From the website:

Musically, this project is a reconstruction, using Gregorian, Beneventan and Glagolitic sources of medieval Dalmatia, as well as the study of Glagolitic chant in oral tradition. The text of Judith survives without music but its metrical structure corresponds to a small number of archaic Glagolitic melodies used for storytelling in medieval Dalmatia, often in the context of the highly emotional and dramatic songs related to the Passion or rituals of the Holy Week. The text itself also refers to texts sung in the liturgical offices, so the task of reconstruction was to find, in related musical sources (Dalmatian and southern Italian), melodies corresponding to the suggestions of the original text.

In this research, it was necessary to study the most archaic layers of what is called Glagolitic chant. This liturgical repertoire, sung in the local vernacular tongue (Croatian Church Slavonic) while actually belonging to the Roman rite, was preserved in manuscripts written in the Glagolitic alphabet, used in medieval Croatia. Written sources mention the existence of this chant in Dalmatia as early as the 11th century, within the circles of clergymen who didn’t speak Latin. Yet, the particularity of the Glagolitic repertoire, passed on orally, is its survival up to the present day in a few locations along the Croatian coast, on the Dalmatian islands and in Istria.

Okay, that?  That is performing arts research at a master level.  You can argue the methods if you like - I'm sure there are people who do.  Maybe a "pure" version of the poem would not try to reconstruct the music.  But if you're going to try and reconstruct the music, this is how you do it. (Or it's one scholarly, informed way of doing it.)  You don't just write down whatever comes to mind.

And I think it would be a literally awesome SCA performance, except for the subtitle problem (and possibly length - what's on the website is just clips).  You would, however, have to present it as a sung story, I think, rather than what we expect as a song. Ballads are as close as we get to epic song, for the most part, and this is way past even that in scope. 

Bards and Musicians

I was going back over some of McGee's Performer's Guide and came to the place where he discusses medieval monophony.  I don't have the quote handy, but he calls it "heightened poetry" - the tunes are lovely, no doubt, but they're simple.  They're in service to communicating the message of the text.  Contrast that to a polyphonic piece, where you might not even be able to understand the words. 

I wonder if that (in addition to a soloist/ensemble difference) is the main difference between "bards" and "musicians" in the SCA?

Take your average bardic piece - an old favorite, like "Old Dun Cow" or (heaven help us) "The Scotsman."  Imagine that tune being played on a fiddle.  No words - just melody.  Four or five times in a row.

Did you actually try it?  If you did, were you able to imagine all the verses before you got utterly bored with it?  "Heightened poetry."  Without the text, it's frankly not that interesting.  With the text, it's a good bit of fun.

Bards and their audiences are conditioned to that kind of performance.  A lot of our popular modern music fits that mold, too.  I might except jazz or the blues, but hip-hop, pop, R&B, country and rock?  Take away the words and most (but not all) of the tunes are nice, but not really compelling.

This might be why  1) musicians have a hard time engaging audiences and 2) bards have a hard time engaging the medieval musical repertoire.  The parts of it that fit the bardic idiom are mostly in foreign languages - you might as well be playing the tune on a violin for all the sense the audience can make of it.  And the tune's not compelling enough on its own to maintain their (or your) interest.

Yes, a Great Translation Project is needed...