Mi Contra Fa

Maypole: Maltese Cuckoo

So here's a thought: How about some kind of internal rhyme?

The tune for "Schiarazula Marazula/Maltese Bransle" ends most of its lines with a musical "STRESS-unstress."  Rather than try to do end rhyme - which would (assuming I use some of the original language like "ewe") put the rhyme on the unstressed beat - I could do an internal rhyme, so that the "oo" sound falls on the musical stress.

The first verse, ending in "cuckoo," nicely puts "oo" sounds in both syllables.  (At least, it does the way I pronounce it, "COO-coo," as in "Cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs."  If you pronounce it "CUH-coo," not so much.) My handy online rhyming dictionary isn't finding anything that rhymes with "cuckoo" or "boo-boo," so I'm not going to torture myself into trying to come up with more two-syllable words with "oo-oo" sounds.

In the second verse, "anew" has a nice "oo" sound on its stress; so there needs to be an unstressed word following it.  "Spring the woods anew..."  Anew what?  A new nothing, is the problem.  It's an adverb, modifying "spring," which is what the woods are doing.  I could cheat a little and change it from "anew" to "a new": "Show the woods their new leaf," "Spring forth the trees their new leaf/leaves."  (The second has an extra syllable but the first note subdivides readily.)  Eh, they don't really "spring forth" leaves, although they might "send forth." 

Seeds all sprout and meadows bloom
Send forth the trees their new leaves

I like "leaves" better than "buds," even though "buds" gets you bonus alliteration with "bloom."  "Leaves" assonates with "trees," maybe that's it.

Verse three has ewes in it; "ewe sheep" comes instantly to mind.  Now to just reorder the animals in that verse:

Goat and bullock merry frolic
Lamb bleats after ewe sheep

I'm willing to allow "merry frolic" rather than "merrily frolic" on poetic license, I think.  Too bad we lose the cow, but it's no longer pronounced "coo" expect perhaps in Scotland.

Verse four reinvokes the cuckoo, which suggests itself for the rhyme again.

Sing all birds and never stop,
Loudly sings the cuckoo

I could do a new last line ("especially the cuckoo," for instance) but I like echoing the first verse this way.

 

Maltese Cuckoo, Second Draft

Summer is a-coming in now,
Loudly sings the cuckoo
(repeat)

Chorus:
Sing cuckoo nu,
Sing cuckoo nu,
Everyone
Sing cuckoo nu
(repeat)

Seeds all sprout and meadows bloom, send
Forth the trees their new leaves
(repeat)

Goat and bullock merry frolic
Lamb bleats after ewe sheep
(repeat)

Sing all birds, your joy unceasing,
Loudly sings the cuckoo
(repeat)

...The first line of verses 1 and 4 needed unstressed syllables, too, so I added some in.  I am not very pleased with "summer is a-coming in now," not at all, and I'll be rethinking that.  Verse four has moved even farther away from the source material and the language sounds vaguely hymn-like, but it scans well and conveys the right meaning.

Early Music for April

In the Washington, DC area:

Chanticleer: "My Spirit Sang All Day," celebrating 30 years of their ensemble in Fairfax, VA, April 4, 8pm.

Chantry: "The Full Monte: Music of Renaissance Master Philippe de Monte," contrapuntal music of the 16th century Hapsburg court, April 18, 8pm and April 20, 6pm, at locations in downtown DC.

The Folger Consort: "Highland Ayres," music to accompany the Folger's production of Macbeth, April 18-20 at the Folger Theater.

Collegium Musicum: "On the Road to Spain – Music of the Pilgrims to Sant'Iago de Compostela," Saturday, April 19, 8pm, Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center, College Park, MD - FREE

UM School of Music: Annual Harp Studio Recital, Thursday, April 24, 8pm, in College Park, MD - FREE. Mostly/all modern concert harps, but hey... harps.

Non Sofre (Martin Best Ensemble)

If you intrigued by the idea of a sacred song about miraculous steak, the Martin Best Ensemble has a recording of "Non Sofre" for download at Amazon for 0.99:

Non Sofre Santa Maria: The Lost Steak

I have the featured Cantigas CD, with this as track two; it's a nice and lively recording, with the words sung (it's often recorded as an instrumental piece).

Learning from Cooks

I joined the SCA in 1994, in the East Kingdom.  If I recall correctly, this was at the beginning of a push towards more period feasts.

It was bloody awful.

I mean no disrespect to the hard-working cooks who labored to serve us that... stuff.  They had newly researched recipes and I suppose they must have thought they were tasty.  In their enthusiasm, they laded down the tables with odd flavors and textures, with barely a friendly chunk of bread to ease the hunger of the less culinarily adventurous.  I distinctly recall the kindness of a stranger at one of my first feasts, where of all the foods I tried, the only thing I could stomach was a single soft-boiled egg and some ham.  He shared his orange with me.

In the intervening years, either the cooks have reformed their menu planning or my palate has grown more tolerant - but I think it's both.  I sincerely doubt we will ever see an eel-based dish at a feast table, for instance.  Even if one could find a good eel supply, that's just too far outside most people's comfort zone.  It would go largely uneaten and the cooks know this.  On the other hand, those wily cooks have been slowly feeding us more and more period food - and we like it!  Maybe they serve the sauces on the side, so the timid can try them bit by bit.  Usually, every remove has something that seems more or less "normal" to a modern.  Oh, and they always try to accommodate the growing number of vegetarians among us.

How?  I think, in their super-secret Cooks' Guild HQ, they realized that there's a lot of medieval and Renaissance recipes out there.  Some of them appeal to modern American tastes; some challenge them a little; some seem to fit best on Fear Factor.  No matter how authentic the baked eel is, an equally authentic chicken dish will go over better.  And each remove gives several opportunities for serving dishes which are easy pleasers and a few which will challenge and inform the tastebuds of the populace.

I look at the cooks because they've achieved what I hear is impossible in the bardic arena: served up period tastes to a modern crowd, and to great acclaim.  Bards perform traditional music "because that's what the audience wants to hear, and our job is to entertain." 

After some of those early feasts, I suspect I would have gladly told the cooks, "No, please, forget the period food. It's nasty.  Cook me some beef stew, please, because in my imagination that's what medieval people ate anyway."  But now, I'm glad that we're having more tasty and period food.   There were, in my local area anyway, some missteps early on.  That's research and learning; it happens.  And then we got past that and now have all manner of  sauced meats, lentil and rice dishes, seasoned vegetables and that awesome pistachio cream they make here in Storvik.

I have a CD of  a historically-informed performance of troubadour chansons d'amour.  And you know what?  Even I find them boring after the first three minutes of a seven-minute song, in a language I don't speak.  The music's nice, but languid.  That's a baked eel performance, right there.  The populace won't eat it.

But something like "Non Sofre"?  It's a 13th century Cantiga de Santa Maria about a miraculous pork chop, with a jaunty tune and a decent helping of silliness.  All it needs to be is not-in-Spanish, which I admit is a problem, but hardly an insurmountable one.  (In fact, I hope to surmount it once the maypole project is done.)  There is music out there which is both period and fun to listen to.  It doesn't have to be an either/or proposition.

Maypole: Official Month of Maying

Working on the rewrite.  I like the change I made to the first verse in the last post and will keep that:

Now we celebrate the spring
When merry lads are playing
Each lad with his bonny lass
A-dancing on the grass

Eh... all right, you do have to extend "grass" into "gra-ass," which isn't wonderful.  Is "green grass" any better? ...Trouble is, the musical accent falls on first of the two syllables (either "GRA-ass" or "GREEN grass") while the poetic form only needs one accented syllable, and it must rhyme with the prior line. Ideally, the musical accent would coincide with the rhyme ("GRASS").

On the balance, I think I prefer not to torture poor "grass" into two syllables. "Green grass" it is. Second verse:

The Spring, in blooming flowered dress,
Doth laugh at Winter's sadness
To the country bagpipe's sound
The nymphs tread out their ground

I've had "verdant" suggested for the first line, which would work, but this is a pastoral song, aping what Sir Thomas Morley thought shepherds and their "nymphs" might say and do in the springtime. I like the simpler language. Bagpipes were considered a rustic instrument (I have a reference for that, just not this moment), so I feel pretty good about "country bagpipes." But oh - there's "grou-ound," like "gra-ass." Hrm - "round ground"? (No, not really: too much like Ground Round. But they could be dancing a circle, a 'round ground'...) "Fair ground" sounds too much like "fairground."

Problem is, "to tread the ground" is an expression all by itself and doesn't seem to take kindly to my efforts to shoehorn an adjective in there. I'm loathe to put it anywhere else, where it would disturb the stresses on "nymphs" and "out" (which are the same in this version and in Morley). A larger rewrite, perhaps having them "dance all around" or somesuch might work, but it's not working right this moment. My brain really wants to have that last musical stress (second to last note) bear the rhymed syllable, and then stretch it.

The third verse, my problem child. The idea for the first couplet is "Why are we sitting here on our butts/When we could be singing and dancing?" My second draft is an almost entire rewrite:

If we linger here we might
Refuse youth's sweet delight

But on third look, "linger here" really isn't the same as "sit we musing." They could be "lingering here" on the dancing ground with the girls, which would certainly not be refusing youth's sweet delights. But I do like the re-ordering on the second line, so that there's a one-syllable word to rhyme with the necessary one-syllable word in the first line. "If we sit and muse we might"? Then are they really "refusing" or just missing out on? "Neglect"? "O'erlook"?

If we sit and muse we might
O'erlook youth's sweet delight
Say what, dainty nymph and speak
Shall we play barley break?

Oy, "brea-eak." I don't even know what "barley break" is, although if it literally is breaking young barley, perhaps crushing it by laying on it, I have a guess that it's a euphemism. Or it could be a popular country dance. Or I could embrace the power of AND.

That's all for this morning. "Grou-ound" and "brea-eak" aren't insurmountable problems, I think, although I'd like to return to them and iron everything smooth.

Book Review: Hoppin's "Medieval Music"

I confess that I have not read Richard Hoppin's book, Medieval Music, or its accompanying Anthology , cover-to-cover.  I recommend it wholeheartedly, anyway.

When I took it into my head to write a lai or chanson d'amour, I looked in my books of the troubadors and trovéres for details on the verse and musical forms.  Nothing.  I checked the almighty Internet. Not much, and nothing I'd trust.  I looked in the liner notes to the CDs I had of the appropriate music.  Nope.

Finally, I remembered that I had Hoppin, and there it was, a whole chapter for the troubadors and another for their northern cousins.  With plenty of musical examples in the accompanying Anthology, to boot.  He discussed the texts, the music, and the relationship between them.  He discussed the different genres and verse forms and possible modes of performance.

And he does this for just about all of Western music from plainchant up until the start of the Renaissance (early 15th century).  There are ten chapters on church music. Now, you may not be interested in church music per se, but those ten chapters include discussions on reading neumes, modal theory, and organum, all topics of interest to an SCA bardic researcher.  Secular monophony, polyphony, ars nova: it's all in there.  (The Table of Contents can be viewed at Amazon, if you want the whole enchilada.)

It is a textbook and it is 30 years old.  This is  not the most cutting-edge recent scholarship.  However, while our understanding of medieval music has been refined and improved in the last 30 years, I don't know of much that's been entirely overthrown.  This book is still an excellent basic resource.  It provides the documentation you need for so much of that stuff that "everyone knows" about medieval music, and for a good bit of stuff that not everyone knows.  Any chapter, or some sub-headings, could easily be turned into an hour-long class at an event.  If I lost my entire music library and had to rebuild it, this would be one of the first books I would want to replace.

On Research

I first wrote "On Research" as a more informal series of LiveJournal posts, in response to the quote below.  I'm now re-writing it as a series for the baronial newsletter and republishing it here (and eventually archiving the entire re-write on a webpage).

Most of us in the A&S community struggle to get past the novice/intermediate level; not knowing how to proceed, who to talk to for advice, what the latest research says, what about our work could use improvement or how to make those changes. We lack a clearly marked path upon which to journey towards excellence, and we lack support along the way.

- from the “Arts and Sciences 50 Challenge” web page

If you’ve been to the ivory towers of academia, the quote above shouldn’t come as a surprise.  The author is describing the research process, and it’s something that’s rarely taught at all, nearly never taught well, but still indispensable to those interested in doing research.  Undergraduates seldom do original research.  Graduate students are guided by their advisors, more or less well, along a learning curve.  They learn by doing – which means that, often, their early work is embarrassingly rough.  Researching is a skill in and of itself; if your A&S project is your destination, research is knowing how to drive the car that will get you there. And like all skills, it takes time to learn and to practice.

There are four things I’d like you to keep in mind as we go, month by month, through the research process.  The first is what I just said above, but I’ll repeat it: researching is a skill which takes time to learn.  The mundane graduate school experience is as much about learning to do research as it is completing a research project, and it takes several years to complete.  You shouldn’t beat yourself up if you aren’t doing Laurel-level research for your first A&S project, and you shouldn’t not do A&S because you don’t have the time to“do it right.”  You do it as best you can, learn what you can, and keep moving forward. 

The next is that you don’t have to perform all research to the same depth.  One of the first things we’ll cover is goal-setting, and it’s okay to not be as interested in some areas as others.  If, overall, I tend towards assuming that you want to do Laurel-level research in a field, that’s just my assumption.  You are not a bad person or a bad researcher for only wanting and needing a casual acquaintance with a topic.

Third, that research is more than a literature search.  That’s what a lot of people think of as research: going to the library, getting books out, and reading them.  And that is a part of research.  But really, research is the whole process of original learning: asking a question, deciding on an approach to answering it, doing the literature search and background reading, talking to experts and other researchers, doing a project, learning from the results and applying them to advancing the state of your knowledge.

And lastly, I’m going to harp on the cardinal virtue of the researcher: honesty.  You need to be honest as a researcher.  Experts will know when you are making things up.  Novices will take you at your word, which does them a disservice.  And you can’t grow, personally, if you don’t admit that you still have work to do – and there will always still be work to do!

Even the most expert Laurel will look back at a project and think, “Gosh, if I had only known what I know now when I started this, I would have done it all differently.”  That’s good!  That’s the point!  That’s how research works.  You are supposed to know more at the end of a project than you knew when you started.  If you don’t, you might be creating Arts and Sciences projects (which is good and fine), but you aren’t doing research.

So please don’t try and backwards-justify your projects.  Do your research first.  If you didn’t do any “official research,” then honestly document whatever you did do – observing and imitating common practice in the SCA counts!  And if you’ve learned since then that maybe your counted cross-stitch wolf pattern wasn’t the most period thing to embroider, that’s okay.  Remember, learning is the point. 

Welcome to Mi Contra Fa!

I'm Teleri, and this is my new blog for early music research in the SCA.  (It's also a repository for my class notes, essays, how-to articles and original works - links are over on the right.) It's mostly for my research, as opposed to being an open forum.  However, the comments are enabled, so if you have feedback, commentary, references, or anything else you'd like to share, you're welcome to do so.  And if there is interest, I am not averse to having the occasional question for debate and discussion.

In fact, today being Day One and all, it seems like a good time to ask people to say hello and chime in.  So, welcome!  What's your name?  What interests bring you here today?

Maypole: Problems with "The Official Month of Maying"

What did you do to that poor, innocent madrigal?

All right, I admit being self-conscious about hijacking Morley's text.  I really do love "Now Is the Month of Maying" exactly as it is, so twisting the words a little and setting them to another tune feels a little off.  But (for the reasons discussed previously, we can't dance to the madrigal.  We need to dance to the dance tune.

I have the same concerns I did for adapting "Sumer Is Ycumen In" - namely, that people unfamiliar with the original will think that this is the original.  On the other hand, it seems right to somehow involve these famous spring songs in an SCA maypole dance.  Also, it is a great time-saver, and I do need this by May 9.

What's up with the inverted word order?  'Now comes joyfully the spring'?

I am first a performer, second a musician and composer, and lastly a poet.  Sorry.

The first line of each verse was the most challenging to rewrite.  They had to end on a stressed syllable, which in English usually means a single syllable.  And they had to rhyme with a two-syllable word in the next time.  In the original, both lines have a "stress-unstress" pattern that lets Morely rhyme "maying" and "playing," "gladness" and "sadness," and "musing" and "refusing."  The two-syllable rhymes feel more subtle and well-composed than my groping for single syllables to rhyme with "-ing" and "-ness."

There is still room for improvement.  The first couplet could be

Now come celebrate the spring
When merry lads are playing

or another similar rewrite that isn't as tortured as my first draft.  The second verse isn't bad.  The third verse... well, what I had for the third verse was worse; "Why to winter should we cling?" is Morgan's (my husband and fellow bard's) contribution.  That will require some more thought, or else a rewrite of the entire couplet.

Maypole: Problems with "Maltese Cuckoo"

There is no rhyme.
The more I look at the original, the more I see how important the interplay of the rhymed words are.  It's not obvious in the first couplet, but becomes more pronounced the further into the song you get.  There's a lot of "oo" sounds in there.

Solution to problem: I'm not sure.  I'm very, very loathe to leave behind the almost instantly-recognizable, unrhymed first couplet.  Possibly all verses should be of the form xA, where A rhymes with "cuckoo." 

Wait, this doesn't scan to "Schiarazula Marazula."  There are syllables missing.

Well... it does if you drop some of the pickups and condense some of the repeated, identical notes into longer notes.

I don't feel too badly about dropping some of the pickups (such as the twiddle that, by rights, should come before "Everyone" in the chorus).  Frankly, instrumentalists playing the song at high speed do it all the time.  It does rob the dancers of an auditory cue; on the other hand, it's hard to sing sixteenth notes clearly,  especially if you're not a singer, you're a random member of the SCA who's been pulled into this dancing/singing demo-thing.  The change in words can now serve as the dancers' cue; paring down the sung melody a little won't hurt.  (And an accompanying musician can put it back in, if it's really missed.)

I feel worse about the stretching that happens at "anew" and "now."  That's a lot less defensible, especially since I made it work in verses 1 and 3, and since I wasn't rhyming.  Well, "anew" rhymes with "cuckoo;" that might justify leaving it alone, if finding a synonym that ends in "oo" but has the right number of syllables and the right stress pattern proves too impossible.  Verse 4 really needs work.

This is a thirteenth century English canon set to sixteenth century Italian music!

Yes, it is very anachronistic that way.  However, the cuckoo as the messenger of spring definitely survived into the sixteenth century in England, so it's not as bad as all that.

The overriding goal of my community performance work is to make it as easy as possible for Johannes Q. Scadian to join in.  The Maltese Bransle is a common and easy bransle; at least where I'm from, it's frequently taught to beginners and at demos.  I picked it for those reasons.

Is it really a good idea to use the words of a real song to a different melody? It might confuse people, or misinform them (if they've never heard it before and think that this is the "real" version).

I admit that's a possibility.  I actually had started a different version of this with an original refrain, but when I found that the gist of Sumer could be shoehorned into the music, I was eager to take the opportunity to showcase what's possibly the classic medieval English spring song.  It's hard to argue that the text isn't period when it so clearly based on something that is.

Should I have adapted the text of something like Spenser's sonnet XIX, or Shakespeare's "Spring", (more 16th century cuckoos there) from Love's Labors Lost?  "Spring" is a little too salty for this maypole; originally conceived of as a teen and/or adult event, I've been asked to stage it at a kids' demo.  Cuckoldry is Right Out as a song theme.  The Spenser might work, though, and would then at least be from the same century as the music.