Mi Contra Fa

"Veni, delictissime" Performance Development

Dun Carraig is having a Beowulf-themed birthday event in about a month, and I've been asked to perform. Which means it's time to actually get some of these dusty pieces performance-ready!

I really do find Sequentia's tune (on their "Lost Songs of a Rhineland Harper" CD) for "Veni, delictissime" better than what I came up with, so I will shamelessly co-opt it.  The piece is so short, I'm thinking that I'll do the Latin and the translation.  I mean, it's three short verses and I can whip through them in 30-45 seconds.  Doubling the performance time is hardly a burden.

I think the tune has mutated in my head.  I should listen to the CD to refresh.

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.

Roland: Revision

"Olivant" in the original was not "Oliver" but rather "oliphant," the elephant ivory horn.  I was wondering why Oliver was blowing Roland's horn!

The original has "blaumen" (blue men?) for the Moors.  Okay, the religious war theme is tricky enough already without going there.  I just call them Moors for the most part.  I use 'heathen' a few times, hopefully understood as a descriptor and not a pejorative?

I saw in the Faroese songbook that their version has masculine rhyme, too.  So nyah!

Tidied up the scansion in verse 3, corrected a few typos.

-----------------

"Six of my earls will stay at home to guard the rings of gold
The other six in heathen lands are swinging their iron cold"

CHORUS
Ride they out from Frankish lands on horses finely saddled
Blow the horn Oilphant at Ronsavollen      (or Roncevaux, dealer's choice)

Raised they up their silken sails high upon the masts
Sailed they to the heathen lands before two weeks had passed

Oaken oars and anchors strong then touched the clean white sand
Next was Roland, king's own friend, the first upon the land

Slaughtered they at Roncevaux for two days and for three
On Roland's sword the Moors did die; a scythe they could not flee

The sun in the sky was blotted out as Moors their spears did throw
A frightened fellow Frankish man asked Roland his horn to blow

He set the horn to his bloody mouth, the blast heard o'er the fray
Over mountains went the sound; it was heard three days away

Charlemagne the mighty king cries with grief and woe:
"What has passed with my own dear friend that he sounded such a blow?"

Charlemagne the mighty king came to the heathen land
Dead lay Roland, king's own friend, his sword still in his hand

Buried at home were the mighty earls and many a tear was shed
Their ship was full of gems and gold and the heathens were left for dead

Roland: More help from Sweden

J.S. from Sweden confirms that the Trio Medieval/Glitterind tune for "Rolandskvadet" is a popular, common tune to sing in Norway.  He provided fifty Norweigan variants on the lyrics, as well as a link to this page.  Of the contents of that, he says:

[I]n the 1840s, Norwegian folk song collector Magnus Brostrup Landstad found 27 stanzas of the Roland song in a handwritten songbook of Laurantz Groven from ca 1800, but there were pages missing in that book, so that the first "complete reconstruction" of the Norwegian version was published in 1890 by Moltke Moe who "reconstructed" it by filling the gaps with his own poetry and changing the order of stanzas to make it more congruent with the Karlamagnús saga. Moe's lyrics are those which are most often sung in Norway today.

The same website says that there exists only one tune from Norway to this ballad which was collected by Hans Seeberg and Olea Crøger in the 1840s from a singer in Seljord in the Telemark region. However, it is seldom used; the Norwegians mostly sing the ballad to a Faroese dance melody which was introduced in 1934 by Klara Semb in her songdance circles. Since the Faroese ballads usually have much longer refrains than the Norwegian ones, the Norwegian lyrics were not long enough to fill out the melody, and so Hulda Garborg translated the Faroese refrain to Norwegian.

Which Faroese song?  J.S. points to this Danish collection of tunes, published in 1908.  Songs 54a-d on pages 124-125 are all variants of the Faroese "The Battle of Roncevaux," and their refrain is exactly the one used in the popular Norwegian version of the song.  And here's a YouTube of the Faroese dancing that dance. 

It's... doesn't sound quite the same, except the cadence on the refrain, but when I look at the transcribed sheet music, I definitely see the very strong similarities.

Trying to find that 1840s tune, I turned up some field notes preserved in... a national library?  I don't see this ballad on those leaves, but the library assigns it the title "Ludvig Mathias Lindeman: [Folkemelodier II]. 'Melodier fra Thelemarkeni."  Seeberg and Crøger are recognized as 'Creators' but Lindeman is the 'collector.'

Lindeman! We've seen him around here before.  "Melodies from Telemark."  Another page of music, with the Ramund that confounded me  before.  Searching for Lindeman's book brings me back to the same collection I examined before, and could not find any Roland in.  Either the referenced website is in error, and there is no tune for Roland in Lindeman's collection, or I'm just not recognizing it.  (Or there's another collection, possibly entitled "Melodies from Telemark," that's not available digitally.)

Anyway!  I think that runs the song's provenance pretty much into the ground.  So what do I do with it?

I'd be lying if I tried to pass it off as "Anglo-Saxon."  It's Continental, in subject matter and in poetic form. 

The tune is as neo-medieval as anything I'd come up with myself.  It's got a narrow melodic range (a fifth) in D-Dorian, and has a simple contour with lots of flat spots.  Guido d'Arezzo would approve of the construction, I think.  And the tune is catchy.  The subject matter is period.

I think it'll make a good performance, albeit an "SCA appropriate" rather than a period one.  But despite its range fitting exactly onto my lyre, I think it should be done a capella or else with harp.  I'll think that over, because of how tempting it is to do epic material with an instrument that probably accompanied epics, but the rhyming form is just plain later than the instrument. 

Mailbag: From Sweden!

I am always thrilled when people email me about the blog.  I am doubly thrilled, this time, as J.S. from Sweden wrote with some information relevant to the Roland project, and an offer to assist with understanding the Scandanavian sources.

He confirmed that the "medieval ballads" are just about what the Child ballads are for English-speakers: collected in the 19th and 20th centuries, but with subject matter that could be much older: "They are called 'medieval' because they usually have aristocratic protagonists in what looks like a medieval setting, plus that it is assumed that Scandinavians started to sing them when the ballad genre reached Scandinavia from the continent some time around the 12th century."  There are articles on the possible evolution of that ballad genre, and I will probably try to get my claws into them.

There were some ballads written down in the 16th century (I linked to some of the 19th century English translations of them a bit back), but again as in the English case, the tunes were all collected by folklorists in the late 1800s and early 1900s. 

So we're definitely in the "SCA-appropriate, period subject matter, not actually period" realm.  Still a worthwhile project, I think, though.

J.S. also cleared up some matters of translation:  "'Kaempevise' is, by the way, correctly translated as 'heroic ballad'. [Google translated it as 'Giant Display.']  (The usual ambiguity of translations: 'kaempe' can be both giant or hero, and 'vise' can be everything from ballad to nursery rhyme and lots of other words too...). 'Justin Bieber viser kæmpe Jesus-tatovering' means "Justin Bieber shows a big Jesus tattoo."

And now you know! 

Well, at least I had fun.

So, yeah, the blog's named what it is for a reason.

I spent a good 90 minutes at the University of Maryland's Performing Arts Library last night, with two different copies of Klara Semb's "Norse Folkdance."  One was the 1951 translation, which ended up being more of a 40-page pamphlet containing only some background material on the kinds of dances, and then about four tunes and dances.  The other was the 1925 edition of her book, in Norwegian.

I combed through it, looking at all the music for a tune that matched "Rolandskvaet."  Nope, nada, zilch.  There were two tunes labeled "faeryosk" (Faroese) and I dutifully copied them down to compare at home, but no love. 

Yes, well.  I was looking at the 1925 edition of volume one of her book.  There are four volumes, apparently, all with the same primary title and then subtitles to distinguish them.  This was not clear to me until after I got home.  The tune for Roland is supposed to be in the second volume.

The second volume is in the Library of Congress.  I've gone to the LoC before for concerts; it would be an entire evening to get into the city, register as a reader, view the book and get out, but I could do it.  Alternately, it's an afternoon to get my UMD Alumni card its library bar code, then submit an ILL request to have the book sent there.  Either option is really pushing at the limits of my curiosity vs time spent curve, re: the tune source, but my inability to overlook such things may mean I'll track it down eventually.  In the meantime, I'll go with the Trio Medieval tune that I like and compare it to my current lyrics.

Also, I picked up a bunch of PVC pipe, drill bits and files.  The nice man at the Home Depot even cut the ten-foot lengths into one-foot pieces for me!  We'll see where that goes with the bone flute project.  (Speaking of... I got a few more toots out of my pen version, and got a change in tone from the fingerhole I'd made.  But I can't reliably pick it up and make sound on it.  Finding the right combination of pen/mouth angle and embouchere is hard.)

Roland: Rough Draft

Found another translation to work from/with.  Helpful, since the other had a few holes. ("Okay, that word seems to be that word... but where' that entire half-line?")

The original appears to have (sigh) feminine rhyme.  I didn't even try.  The ending notes are the same, so it's very, very easy to just make them one, longer syllable.

It's only the nine verses performed by Glittertind, that their fans have translated, not the entire 31-verse poem. (Any Norwegian speakers out there?)

Rather than work on it with the score in front of me, the smart way, I ran with the tune as I have it in my head.  Is it how the tune actually goes?  Did I lose half the eighth notes along the way?  I will have to review this and see.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------

Six of my earls will stay at home to guard the rings of gold
The other six in heathen lands are swinging their iron cold 

CHORUS
Ride they out from Frankish lands on horses finely saddled
Blow the horn, Oliver, at Ronsavollen                              (or Roncevaux, dealer's choice)

Raised they up their silken sails high upon the masts
Sailed they to the heathen lands before two weeks had passed

Oaken oars and anchors strongs touched the clean white sand
Then was Roland, king's own friend, first upon the land

Slaughtered they at Roncevaux for two days and for three
On Roland's sword the Moors did die; a scythe they could not flee

The sun in the sky was blotted out as Moors they spears did throw
A frightened fellow Frankish man asked Roland his horn to blow

He set the horn to his bloody mouth, the blast heard o'er the fray
Over mountains went the sounds; it was heard three days away

Charlemagne the mighty king cries with grief and woe:
"What has passed with my own dear friend that he sounded such a blow?"

Charlemagne the mighty king came to the heathen land
Dead lay Roland, king's own friend, his sword still in his hand

Buried at home were the mighty earls and many a tear was shed
Their ship was full of gems and gold and the heathens were left for dead

Roland: Wait, which tune?

Translated page here has two tunes (culled from elsewhere on the Internet, I'm pretty sure I've seen them in other places by now).  Obviously related tunes with a few melodic variations, and a pretty big metrical difference!  (4/4 time vs. 3/8 time.)

What I really want is Semb's book.  In the meanwhile, "Traditional Music in the Faroe Islands" gives a lot of examples in 3/8, 6/8, and even 9/8 time, which inclines me that way.  (Since the tune is Faroese.  According to that book there, Danish ballads are popular in the islands.  Maybe the tune Semb uses was a tune for a Faroese version of the Roland ballad? That would be nice.

I'm not so great at relating ear-things to note-things, but I think Trio Medieval's rendition is the first one.  Definitely the musical figure with "Ronsarvol" matches that one... yeah, the opening line has the two eighth notes.  So does Glittertind's.  So that's the tune I like.

Hrm. 

Welllll... seeing as how neither tune is period, and they're clearly related, I don't think it's a great sin to use the tune I like better.  I suspect the 3/8 version might be older, but I've got no reason to think it preserves any sort of authentic characteristic of medieval song, either.  Although maybe I should read the book on Faroese traditional music.

Wait, wait, wait... one's in Phrygian mode and one's in Dorian?  Huh, that's... odd.  And interesting. 

Roland: Wait, I take it back

I'm losing track which book of Norse folksongs is which, but!  Here is an 1853 book which the Internet Archive credits to Landstad but Google appears to be a credit as an omnibus edition of Landstad, Lindemann and Croger. 

Here in that book is the start of "Roland og Magnus koingin."  Here (with lazy Anglified letters) is the first verse:

Sex mine sveinar heime vera
goyme ded gullid balde
dei adres sex pa heid heidningslando
royne dei jonni kalde!

Here are the Glittertind lyrics from yonder translation:

Seks mine jarlar heime vera, gøyme det gullet balde,
Andre seks på heidningalando då svinga dei jørni kalde!
- Rida dei ut av Franklandet med dyre dros i sadel,
Bles i luren Olivant på Ronsalavollen.

If you remove the refrain (the last two lines):

Seks mine jarlar heime vera,
gøyme det gullet balde,
Andre seks på heidningalando
då svinga dei jørni kalde!

They aren't exactly the same, but yeah, I'll buy that they actually are the same song. Maybe different dialects?  Or one of these is a Danish edition or something?  "Six" is obviously "sex" in one, and "seks" in the other.

Now, I would have sworn yesterday that I saw a "Roland and Magnus" that was much, much different, so let me go scare up the Lindemann book I found. ...right, you can download the whole thing here.  He gives a whole bunch of lyrics up front, then gives all the tunes.  The index tells me "Raamund" is songs 43 and 90.  At Song 43, it says "(Sammelign hermed No. 90, Landstad Pag. 189.)"  Imma guess "See below Number 90, Landstad page 189." 

So, on to No. 90.  "(Se No. 43.)"  Well.  That leaves us with Landstand 189, which, if I go up to "Norske folkeviser" (the first link in this post) and go to page 189... yup.  A song about Ramund.  Who is apparently not Roland.  So Lindemann just doesn't cover Roland at all.

So where's the tune I thought was a variant?  (This is why I say to keep a daily log.  I had this up in front of me yesterday, and I'm already confused about what I saw where.)  Ah, there's the link in yesterday's post and... no, that's pretty much the tune.  What was I thinking?

So we've nailed the verses down as a variant of something collected by Landstad in 1853; the refrain/burden with Oliver blowing the horn isn't there at that time. 

The tune is credited to Klara Semb (as a Faroese dance tune that she collected); there's a copy of her book at the Library of Congress, which might be accessible to me if I want to double-check that.  I wonder if the extra words were written at that time?  Clearly there was more tune than words, so perhaps the refrain was added?  That's circa 1921.

And my remaining question is, How old is the ballad form in Norway?  This site says (in translation) that "it is assumed that there must have been made ballads as early as the late 1200s while Erik Magnusson was king."  That's quite an assumption, and one that bears checking out.

(Ugh, ick.  I keep getting search results from Stormfront.org...)

See, this is what Wikipedia is good for - telling me where to look.  First, there's native Norweigan skaldic verse.  Then, the kings start importing Icelandic skalds.  Still all alliterative verse going on here.  What about the High and Later Middle Ages?  They're a part of Four Hundred Years of Darkness, apparently.  So I should go and see what the Danes were up to, poetically.

(northvegr.org, bookmarked for future reference...)

There is... not a lot out there on medieval Danish poetry.

100 Danish Poems: From the Medieval to the Present Day may be my best bet.  I'm hoping it has notes talking about the history of the poetry.  At least it's facing-page translations.  At UMD McKeldin Library, due back May 8.

Poems, from the Danish.  A folk-song/poem collection, 1815.  Not what I need.

Romantic Ballads, translated from the Danish.  1913.  Partly translations of a contemporary Danish poet, partly translations of the Kiape/Kaempe Viser, which (if I can believe the Internet) is a Danish collection of songs first appearing in 1591.  (Scholarly essay mentioning this here; apparently one Robert Jamieson included several of the Kaempe Viser ballads in a collection of popular ballads in 1806.)  Anyhow, the Borrow "Romantic Ballads" has this to say on Danish versification:

The old Danish poets were, for the most part, extremely rude in their versification. Their stanzas of four or two lines have not the full rhyme of vowel and consonant, but merely what the Spaniards call the "assonante," or vowel rhyme, and attention seldom seems to have been paid to the number of _feet_ on which the lines moved along. But, however defective their poetry may be in point of harmony of numbers, it describes, in vivid and barbaric language, scenes of barbaric grandeur, which in these days are never witnessed; and, which, though the modern muse may imagine, she generally fails in attempting to pourtray, from the violent desire to be smooth and tuneful, forgetting that smoothness and tunefulness are nearly synonymous with tameness and unmeaningness.

Yay just-barely-post-Victorians.

(On the other hand, his "Sir John"?  That may be worth getting a tune for and performing!)

(Jamieson's Popular Ballads and Songs, to see what he does/says about the Danish poems.)

Translated Danish wiki page for Kaempevise.  "Giant Display."  Excellent.  Gives the 16th cen as a start date, with correlates with the 1591 publication date, as well as the rise of balladry in England.

"Justin Bieber viser kæmpe Jesus-tatovering"  I don't know what that means, but I think it deserves to be shared.

Hm, Borrow mentions that Anders Sorensen Vedel was the editor of the 1591 Kaempe.  His wiki page doesn't give that name for the collection of 100 ballads, but rather Hundredvisebog.  And hey, look: here it is on Google Books.  But gaaah, no ebook.  WorldCat says it's up at Harvard; I could ILL it if I want, I suppose.  Getting a bit far afield...  (Hey, WorldCat knows I'm at work.  Does that mean I can't access it from home? Maybe it's subscription-only?)

That's enough for today.  My informed best guess is that Scandanavian balladry is going to be documentable to 1591 Hundredvisebog.  Maybe there are some scraps or fragments or transitional styles earlier, but I would probably need to be speaking Danish and in Denmark's libraries to track the evidence down.

http://lyricstranslate.com

More on Roland

So hey, like a year ago I was thinking about translating the Norweigan version of the Song of Roland.  I did a little more poking around today, after discovering one of the links I'd found last year died.

(Oh... did I miss the blog's birthday?  I think I did.  Happy Birthday, Blog!)

One sheet music vendor identified the tune as being from the Faroe Islands.  Huh?  I thought it was Norweigan.  I thought the answer was here, in an awful Google translation of a Norweigan page.  It looks like the lyrics were collected sometime in the 1800s and a folklorist (specializing in dance) put the words to Faroese music in 1921.  (That page cites a 1985 edition of her work, but it was published in 1921 according to this automatically translated website.) 

Except if you look at the music, or even the lyrics, that's a different song.  It's about Roland, but it's a different song about Roland. Drawing board, I return to it.

There is this Norweigan book, but at first look, I think it's the Old French chanson translated into Norweigan. Sort of like our Penguin edition.

A list of Norweigan folk song collectors seems like a reasonable place to start looking for their Cecil Sharp or Child.  I can confirm that MB Landstad's Norske folkeviser does not contain the Roland I want, just the "Roland and Magnus" ballad.  For that matter, none of these three books appear to.

Hm... Leden recorded Inuit music.  Lindeman and Sandvik might be promising; not enough details on Olea Crøger to really say, so I should see what books are in her name.

Why?  I dunno.  I am perfectly content to say this is a folk song, not a medieval ballad.  I just want to nail down when it was first recorded.