Mi Contra Fa

Inertia

Hey, y'all.  Been a while.

I'm working on it, I'm working on it.  Two small kids, one with some special needs, take a bit out of a lady.  I've been cranking out - get this - fan fiction*, because it's fun and relatively easy and doesn't require documentation or dealing with Finale (musical typesetting) or any of that.  Also, the audience is a wee bit larger than for historically-informed Anglo-Saxon performance, and I'll admit the complimentary feedback has been nice.

Actually, it's been interesting, watching the authorial community and its relationship with said feedback.  I could probably write a couple of essays on motivation for writing, peer approval and so on.  Another time, perhaps.

Buuut I managed to crawl out of my hole and attend Noisemaker's Schola in the East, taught a couple of classes and got a pep talk from my friend Mistress Linette - she thinks I should do a few more translations and put out a book.  

I've also acquired a nifty new, high-quality digital microphone, and my husband has more or less said I can have the FlipCam.  The video tutorials I want to do for lyre playing, and the .mp3 files I want to record for the site, are closer to reality.

I also wrote some poetry for the Duke Gyrth Oldcastle Memorial Smackdown, and I should post that directly.

So, the gears are starting to turn again.  The projects currently lined up are more the 'do at home' sort (rather than the 'do on lunchbreak' sort), and there's always a challenge to find time for that, but we'll see.  Precisely because I don't do this for the wild popular acclaim, but because it's deeply interesting to me, I know I'll come back to it - even if I have to take a sabbatical to recharge once in a while.

*Dragon Age: Origins.  It's a video game.  I know, shut up.  I'm having fun with it.

Memes as oral formula

There's this idea among the folks studying oral traditions that some of the "formulas" used - little stock lines or half-lines of poetry the poet could summon up and insert entirely into a piece - carried with them resonances, deep and metaphorical, that made them linguistically rich, rather than empty repetition.

I'm hazarding a guess that in-jokes work in a similar way.  They reinforce an idea of community (those who get the joke) and imply a history when invoked (all the other times the in-joke has come up).  To those outside of the community, the insiders' enthusiasm for the in-joke seems incomprehensible; the outsider hears only some witless words, repeated ad nauseum.

MY HYPOTHESIS: LET ME SHOW YOU IT

You either just entirely understood what I'm talking about, or have no idea why I feel the need to scream stilted English in all caps.

Let me explain the all caps thing, there.  It started, as far as I know, with this lolcat (captioned cat picture).  But that's really the mid-point.  To understand why the picture is (allegedly) funny, you have to know something about Pokemon and the people who play it.  Pokemon is a collectible card game (and handheld video game) (plus cartoon/toy franchise); like baseball cards, you buy packs of cards in the hopes of getting the ones you want.  It's aimed at kids in roughly the 8-12 year old zone.  Have you ever met an 8-12 year old kid with a collection and a lot of knowledge about it?  They want to share.  They want you to know about their hobby, because it's awesome and they love it, and you will love it, too.  YOU WILL LOVE IT TOO.  They just have to tell you about it enough, and you will be so happy to know the joy of [their favorite thing].

I have been that kid, for the record.  It's not uncommon; it's part of child development.  So a good number of people have met a kid who wants to tell them all about [their favorite thing], here exemplified as Pokemon.

Which further draws on stereotypes about geeks and nerds and their inability to read social cues.  Because not only are we talking about an enthusiastic kid here, the enthusiasm is for a bit of geek culture.  And not a few adult geeks retain the desire to tell you all about [their favorite thing], whether or not you care.  You may be this person; you may know this person.  You recognize this person.

So the cat picture moves us to smile.  And then it moves us to imitation.  The "My [thing], let me show you it" phrase becomes popular - the kids today call that "going viral," yes? - and it becomes a point of reference.  At worst, it is witless parroting.  At best, the phrase encapsulates the consuming enthusiasm and delighted, past-all-reason desire to share that enthusiasm, while at the same time acknowledging that perhaps yes, this is on the crazy side.  When I say "My hypothesis: Let me show you it," I am saying, "I have this idea and I'm really excited about it.  I'm going to write a few hundred words on it, which might be way more than it deserves.  I really hope you'll read it and like it, because I think it's a neat idea!  But really, I'm talking about lolcats and oral tradition and I understand that's a little specific for 10:30am on a Monday morning.  Or, really, anytime."

Take home lesson: This is why filks and pop culture references will never die in the SCA.

Why compete?

Yesterday, the lovely and talented Lady Patricia of Trakai dropped by the blog to leave a comment.  And it got me to thinking.

First, for the record, although I am writing an eddic-style poem on early Storvik history, I'm not competing in the competition I'm sponsoring.  It's for display only, and if their Excellencies have the time and inclination, for the amusement of the populace at court.

But past that... why compete?  In general, it's a good bet that there's someone better than you entering the competition, just because we have so many awesomely dedicated and talented artisans in the SCA.  Unless you know yourself to be the go-to person for a particular art or science, there's the distinct possibility that you could be up against the go-to person.

1. Winning really isn't everything.  I give our fighters, heavy and rapier, and our archers a lot of credit here.  Newbies or old pros, they compete in tournaments where, by luck of the draw, they could be up against someone with decades more experience.  But they do it because it's fun.  Hopefully, doing and exhibiting your art is fun, too.

It's absolutely intimidating to take your first sally into an art or craft and show it off to everyone.  But honestly, most people in the SCA don't bite.  We have a few meanies, but you are much more likely to find someone who will congratulate you on what you did right, offer you resources to continue your work, possibly want to start a local interest group with you (!), and will gently point out areas for improvement.  The artisan community is usually full of bright and curious people who are a lot of fun, and competitions are a good introduction to meeting them and having more fun.

2. Competitions can be goals.  Goal-setting, and follow-through, is one of those magical life skills that's supposed to help you solve all your problems.  Well, that's asking a lot of it, but it sure does help sometimes.  And for many people, an externally-set goal, with an external, hard deadline, is more real and compelling than one they set for themselves.  Preparing for a competition can be the kick in the pants that gets you to finally finish a project and finally write up your documentation.

3. Feedback helps growth.  The Flying Butt Monkey Institute of Statistics calculates that 90% of all A&S competitions provide those little feedback sheets to competitors.  The quality of the feedback can vary, but I've never received another point of view that I just tossed aside as worthless.  Even if you don't agree with the assessment, it's good to know how your work is being viewed by others.

4.  If a stitch is embroidered in your house, does anybody else see it?  If you are hoping for recognition in your field - not necessarily awards, but just a general awareness in your local area that you do Craft ABC and might be interested in working groups, or could talk to a newcomer about it, and so on - it helps to actually put examples of Craft ABC with your name on them out on a table so people can see it.  (And it does help with awards.  They can't give you one if they don't know about your skills.)

5.  Win your own personal contest.  Sometimes, you might know if you took second or third place in a competition.  Sometimes, you won't.  Always, you can compare your scoring sheet to your previous one.  Did you address the judges' concerns from last time? Make improvements?  Maybe just entering the contest is a personal win, or you set a goal to provide more than basic documentation and did it.  You can use competitions as motivators to your own goals, not necessarily the obvious goal of winning the blue ribbon.

Why Not to Compete

1.  Less than perfect feedback depresses you.  If you know you don't want to hear about your own shortcomings, if that will send you into a week(s)-long funk... it's not worth it.  Arguably, being able to accept constructive criticism is a good trait but... that's for you to work out on your own.  If right now, today, it would deeply upset you, don't go looking for that.

2.  You're already strongly goal-oriented, and the competition does not further your goals.  You can spend a lot of time chasing competition themes and not make any progress on the work that interests you.  Plan accordingly.

3.  You're not strongly goal-oriented, and the competition does not further your goals. This is harder to diagnose.  If you feel like you've been doing Craft ABC for a few years now, but you're not much better at it and you don't know where you're going with it, sit back and see if chasing competitions has made other, unstated goals take a backseat.  See if you can state those goals that you really feel that you want to pursue, and ignore the competitions that would deny you the chance to work on them.

4.  Your entry is nowhere near complete.  It's one thing to show a work in progress; that can be kind of neat.  It's another to enter some design sketches and a Wikipedia entry and call it "research in progress."  If your project just needs hemmed or sanded or otherwise have a few finishing touches done, I'd say go ahead and enter it.  If it's barely started, it's really not ready yet.

Pentatonic Romance

I admit I have not done an exhaustive search of the uses of the pentatonic scale in world music.  Wikipedia, as always, as something to say, and as usual, some additional references would be nice.

I see a striking absence of of the peoples descended from Germanic tribes.  Iceland is often taken as a living laboratory, given the slow rate of change in their language til at least the 19th century, and it's absent from the list.  From what little traditional Icelandic music I've managed to acquire, it doesn't look pentatonic to me.

So where does this idea that "the pentatonic tuning is the genuine ancient pagan tuning of the lyre" come from?  Upon what shred of evidence does this assertion stand?

Check it: Drømde mig en drøm i nat, oldest extant Viking/Icelandic music.  Diatonic in A Dorian, folks.

Hey, if you like to tune your lyre pentatonicly, you go do that.  I used to.  It sounds awesome.  It's versatile.  It's easy.  It has many things to recommend it to a performer.

Documentable authenticity is not one of those things. 

Own your performance decisions.  You honestly don't need to take cover under hand-waving assertions of authenticity.  You just need to state what's know, how you're varying from what's known and why you did that.  Any other historical performer worth her salt will understand that there's a balance to be struck between what's documentable and what's playable/presentable, and that we all find that balance individually.  She might not agree with you, but she'll understand you.

Poeta Atlantiae

I apparently won Poeta Atlantiae, rather to my surprise.  Despite what several very sincere and lovely people were telling me yesterday, I don't especially think of myself as a poet.

I apparently either need to revise my self-image, or my definition of poet.

Poet, to me, conjures up all that lovely Apollo-and-the-Muses stuff, the inspiration, the vision, the transformation of the pedestrian into the transcendental.  And I don't do Muses.  I have an aversion to the idea of Muses.  It comes with being a control freak.  I want to write when I need to write, Muses be damned.

If I had to pick a word to describe what I do, it's "wordsmith."  It's utilitarian, like smithing.  Somebody needs a poem written; they provide some gemstone of material that's the subject or theme of the poem.  Then, I craft a setting to display that gem, using a poet's tools of rhythm, rhyme, form, and so on.  I will readily admit that there is a degree of artistry that goes into creating that setting, but the major thing - the gemstone - comes from the client.  The rest is figuring out how to show it off to best advantage.

Every once in a while, I might stumble across a stone on my own and want to set it.  That's true, but it's rare.  I don't have the stereotypical pressure of messages and images in my head, trying to get out, that spurs me to write at all hours of the day and night.  I construct messages and images to carry the content other people request.  And they really are gems: stories of love or selfless service or inspirational deeds. 

I'll have to figure out what I want to do with the position, what to make of it.  It would be easy to focus on too many different (and important!) things that the Poeta can do to advance poetry in the kingdom, and not make any headway on any one thing. 

On the suitability of form to theme

For the intermediate or advanced poet and composer, consider this:

Let us say you wish to write a poem on the theme of war; let us further say that for reasons of contest theme or persona preference, you wish it to be in an Elizabethan English form.  A famous Elizabethan English verse form is the sonnet.  You write a war sonnet and away you go.

Not so fast; of all the sonnets Shakespeare wrote, exactly none of them were about war.  They are, by and large, love poems.  There are over 150 of them, and if Shakespeare wanted to use them to write about war, he had ample opportunity.  So how appropriate is it to use them for that purpose?

Well, are there good alternatives? Maybe there aren't.  But we should ask ourselves: What did the Elizabethans do when they wanted a war poem?  What did Shakespeare do?

This story shall the good man teach his son;
And Crispin Crispian shall ne'er go by,
From this day to the ending of the world,
But we in it shall be remembered-
We few, we happy few, we band of brothers;
For he to-day that sheds his blood with me
Shall be my brother; be he ne'er so vile,
This day shall gentle his condition;
And gentlemen in England now-a-bed
Shall think themselves accurs'd they were not here,
And hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speaks
That fought with us upon Saint Crispin's day.

Although, strictly speaking, this is dialogue from a play.  It's blank verse, though - does it count?

Like most things, there's no one right answer.  Do you have a reason for using the sonnet form?  Are you playing on the similarities between love and war? Parodying the sonnet form?  Just fond of it?  Those are all reasons.  "It's the only Elizabethan verse form I know" is not a (good) reason. 

Paradigm Shift: "In the Atlantian Style"

Thoughts brought on by Beethoven's "Consecration of the House" on the radio this morning.

A while back, I started using the phrase "in the Atlantian style" to refer to my original compositions that were based on modern folk music, especially if the work had a war theme.  I meant it as a sort of fig leaf, a way to document the song to common SCA practice, but to also acknowledge that it had no period antecedent.

Also a while back, I was known to rant a bit about our music at church.  The church I am in now plays very different music from the one I grew up in.  I grew up in the Roman Catholic Church in the late 80s and early 90s, with all those Jesuit-written hymns published in 1975 that (to me) seem to be clearly in the style of John Denver.  (I'm guessing that after Vatician II in the 50s, they just didn't know where to go and we crazy Americans decided to go with "popular music.")  My new church plays a lot of music written in the 1930s.  It's very "modern," in the way e.e. cummings was writing consciously "modern" poetry at the time.  It knows the musical rules and consciously breaks them to see what happens.  The result isn't so easy to sing and doesn't resonate as much - with me, at least, but anecdotally, with other members of the congregation as well.

There is a reason popular music - music meant for "the populace" - has a certain sound.  You hear it in hymns, Disney songs, show tunes, Christmas carols, and folk music.  You hear it, in Dorian mode, in ballads.  There are structures and motifs and cadences that appear over and over and resonate with us.  They push our emotional buttons; but then, we're in a place (a house of worship, a theater, a circle by the fire) where we want our emotional buttons pushed.

We don't "do" religion in the SCA, but we have a secular religion we call "The Dream."  It's a different Dream for different people, but it usually has certain features like bravery, courage, honor, grace, courtesy and sacrifice.  And our modernly-composed songs, "in the Atlantian style" (or the Eastern style or the AEthelmarc style or what have you), are no more or less than our hymns to this Dream.  They hit these themes that are important to us, and use the conventions of popular music to push all the right buttons.  It's powerful.  I think you might be able to approach that power with period music, but I doubt you can equal it.  There are patterns and cadences that are so very, very folkie and so very, very effective that just aren't in medieval music - at least, not commonly.

This is not at all to say that I'm going to stop working with period music and start exclusively composing "in the Atlantian style."  It's just finally clicked for me why, when we've grown so much more medieval and Renaissance in our dress, our kit, and our food that our music remains stubbornly modern.  There is a solid emotional reason for it to do so.  Our myth-makers, our singers of tales, will continue to draw on the techniques that they know will best resonate with their (modern) audiences.

The Performance Rant

Friday is (usually) rant day here at Mi Contra Fa!  Just me blowing off steam on whatever bardic soapbox issue comes to mind - it just seems to be appropriate for Friday as a low brain-wattage, wishing-it-were-the-weekend day.  You don't have to footnote rants.

So, as anyone reading this blog has gathered, I like research.  Lots.  Which is good, because it's my job.  Not music research, alas; engineering research.  But it's still research.  And, as someone who thinks that maybe it wouldn't be a bad idea to actually do bardic research, I frequently hear that research is besides the point in bardic, because it's really all about the performance.

I have never, and will never, say that you can isolate bardic from performance, or somehow perfect it in a research environment, or that research and documentation can replace an emotional connection to the audience.

It's really not an OR proposition.  That's my point.  You can have good and bad historically-informed performances.  You can have good and bad ahistorical performances.  The degree of learning behind a piece (we'll call it "authenticity" even though that's fairly misleading in this case) and how good it is, according to the audience, are two different axes.

No, not the things you use to chop wood.  "Ax-eez," the plural of "axis."  They're the scales by which you can measure something - if I draw a picture of my car's speed during my commute home, I'll have an axis for time (the time it takes to get home) and one for the car's speed. 

The notion that "fun" and "authenticity" are different ends of the same axis rather than two different axes (so that you can have fun/authentic, fun/inauthentic, boring/authentic, boring/inauthentic) is old in the SCA, and enshrined in books like the Knowne World Handbook so that it gets passed on to our newcomers.  But the notion is a fallacy.  It is based on the assumption that doing work (the research required for authenticity) is not fun, and that the end product of that research must be boring (because it came from an academic process).

Certainly, for many people, research is boring.  But there is no reason whatsoever that the results of research must be boring.

Can they be?  Oh yes.  Will people try and justify wretched, rambling stories and melodically stiff and uninteresting songs as being virtuous, because they are researched? Of course. 

Will other people inflict material just as awful on the crowd that's taken from modern sources? Yup.  Can period sources and methods yield compelling results? Sure.

Performers want to entertain.  And it is undoubtedly easiest to entertain with the modern and traditional material that the audience is already familiar with and is fond of.   That does not mean it is impossible to do otherwise.  It is harder, though.  Do I think bardic would be improved if more people tried to do the hard thing?  Yes.  Am I judging you because you decline to?  No.  After all, I don't care to be judged because I don't put more work into my garb.  You play in the way that you want to.  Music is Good.

Maybe we can all be a little less defensive if we repeat that often enough.  Yeah, defensive.  A research wonk sighs, "I'd like to see more performance research," and a performance wonk hears, "You're a lazy person if you don't do period material."  So the performance wonk says, "I think the audience's response is more important that the documentation," and the research wonk hears, "You just hide behind your paperwork because you can't really perform."

Neither one actually heard what the other said.  Neither statement is really contentious.  The SCA is ostensibly an educational group; more research is good, right?  And of course the point of doing performance is to engage an audience.  But because there's this idea that you can't have both things at once, it sets up an artificial polarity.  Anyone in one camp must be opposed to the other.  So these pretty bland statements get passed through the polarizing filter and we heard insults coming out the other side.

And in the very end, the audience doesn't want to hear us arguing.

Performance A&S

So, at Tournament of Chivalry, the Royal Bards sponsored a bardic workshop. We each did our pieces and got some feedback, which was excellent. Then we got out our soapboxes to talk about "the state of bardic" and had a lively conversation.

I think it's important to draw distinctions between a literature search, Arts and Sciences, performance, and research. I look at them this way:

A literature search is going to the library and reading a lot about medieval music, poetry and performance. You can document the results of a literature search without ever singing a note.

Doing A&S would be, for a performing artist, creating and rehearsing a performance. This performance might be based on the results of a literature search or it might not be. It might someday get performed in public or it might not. The process of developing a performance - whether or not it's based on a literature search - can also be documented.

A performance is getting up in public and singing/dancing/reciting/storytelling/whatevering. I'm having a hard time thinking of a performance that wouldn't have some kind of A&S process behind it - even an entirely spontaneous improvisation has the knowledge of how to improvise behind it. The performance itself is not usually documented, no more than a dress has its pedigree sewn onto its sleeve.

Research is what happens when you do all of these things in an attempt to learn more about medieval performance. You do a literature search to see what "the authorities" think about medieval performance, you develop your own performance, and then you see how well it is received by your audience. If they hated it, that will affect how you do your next performance.

I think it's also important to distinguish between regular performance and performance for competition. I like to use clothing analogies for this. Everyone in the SCA needs to wear clothes, and they need to be vaguely medievaloid clothes. I'm not a clothes guru myself, so I wear things that are (usually)... okay. Sometimes I even break out the "barbarian" raggy leather tunic, which is so wrong. I do not even think about entering these things into an A&S competition!

For the purposes of making music, entertaining others, or transporting them to the Middle Ages in their minds, all one needs is "SCA appropriate" music. That's fine. But if you want to take that research-y, A&S approach to it, that's not fine.

That said, not all A&S competitions are the same, and that goes double for the performing arts. I can agree or disagree with what a judge thinks is important, but I fully support a host's right to establish whatever rules and standards he or she wants to use for a competition. If I don't like it, I don't have to compete. (I would stipulate that standards should be published well in advance of an event. Preferably, the judging sheets should be made available.)

What do I think is important? I would like to see more scholarship (in competitions). Not everyone who makes great garb enters it into A&S competitions - a great performer who isn't into research possibly shouldn't feel badly about not entering research competitions. But the final product needs to be effective, too - the actual performance counts. Emotional intensity, technical ability, and attempted difficulty (I'd like to be able to give points to someone who tried something hard and fell a little short, as opposed to mastering something simpler) ought to count.

That's for a traditional A&S, for performance. I think themed competitions, or challenges, or whatever you'd like to call them, would be a lot of fun too. There is no reason you can't have competitions that strictly challenge the performer's ability to, well, perform. I'd say it's not A&S (research, really, but the SCA says "A&S" when it means "research" most of the time), but it's a perfectly valid idea for a fun competition at an event.

Improvisation

I'm beginning to believe, more and more, that good improv skills are critical for a modern medieval musician to cultivate.  I don't mean to go out and learn jazz (although that might help), but to play enough medieval music that you get the sound of it, and then can improvise simple, similar-sounding music at a go.

In particular, I've been thinking about it in the context of dancing.  We know darn little about early medieval dance, is my understanding.  But from what we do have, both in contemporary reports and later surviving choreographies, seems to indicate a certain language of music and dance.

Consider that the estampie dance tune form calls for performers to improvise verses.  That's right - the dancers don't know how the music's going to sound.  But they do know that it'll be eight bars, or sixteen, or what have you.

Consider how simple it could be to improvise very basic choreographies for line dances and round dances.  Two slips left, one slip right.  Two slips left, one slip right.  Repeat, repeat.  Put it in a line and extend the pattern to eight or ten steps and that's a pavane, isn't it?  Or a verse-chorus form along the lines of the English country dances.  If everyone knows the building blocks, it would be fairly easy for dancers to invent new patterns.  And if the musicians are well-versed in improvisation, they just need to be told the pattern and can accompany it: 

"We need a verse of eight bars and repeat and a chorus of sixteen bars and repeat."

"Give us a minute to work out the basic structure and we're good to go.  I want soprano recorder doing melody on the chorus and harp doing melody on the verses.  Verses: Drones, I want home-away, home-away in Dorian.  Got that, harp?  Let's use... I don't know, a falling figure from 4-2-1 as a primary theme and cadence.  So we end the verses with 'away,' so chorus: drones, we bring it back home for four bars, then..."

First verse through, harp probably plays exactly (let's say in D Dorian) a pattern of half-quarter-quarter:
G-E-D, G-E-D
A-F-E, A-F-E
G-E-D, G-E-D
A-F-E, A-F-E

Just to, you know, get it down.  Then, as it gets into the fingers and gets boring, the ornamentation and variation can start.  Maybe that last line can go A-F-E, A-B-C up, to lead into the chorus on a rise.  Or instead of the repeat being exact, the away pattern could go down to F-D-C.  And notes start getting divided, grace notes tacked in.  The melody expands and takes off. 

Simultaneously, the dancers are surely acting in parallel, ornamenting the basic steps with elegant sweeps of the feet, or turns of the head and torso, or other such things that I've seen but can't duplicate myself.  Suffice to say, good dancers know how to ornament a dance without disrupting its basic steps.

You could do this. I think it might be fun.