Mi Contra Fa

Maypole: Documentation

Yes, it is still ongoing. Documentation is, for me, one of the hardest parts of a project. The fun part is done, and I want to move on to the next thing! But I'm stuck rewriting stuff I've already done into a form that can be understood by a random passerby. Not so much fun, but necessary if the project is going to be of any use to anyone but me.

Class: Highland River Melees

Highland River Melees (June 13-15) is having a bardic competition (on the theme of the 100 Years War and the Black Prince) and performance classes. I've volunteered to teach a class on researching and documenting music. I'm still trying to figure out its structure, but I foresee:

1) The research process, in brief (goal-setting, information gathering, creation, performance, feedback)

2) Special issues for researching music (or other performance)
2a) For performing existing period work
2b) For composition of original work

3) Structuring documentation (summary/abstract/introduction, background, methods, result, conclusions, future work)

Given that I know next to nothing about 14th century bardic, other than there was Chaucer in it, I may do a piece for the competition and use it as an example for the class!

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.

Music Event: Madrigals, Morris, and Maypole

The DC Revels will be presenting traditional English spring festivities at the National Arboretum's Garden Fair and Plant Sale this Saturday from 10am - 1pm. Um, or 11am, according to the Friends of the National Arboretum webpage. It appears to be free and open to the public, and dear Lord there are a lot of plants for sale.

Music Event: Shakespeare's Birthday

Music, theatre, pageantry and stage-fighting at The Folger Theatre this Sunday, noon - 4pm. With cake! Free event.

Maypole: Documentation

Documentation continues apace.

On Research: Authenticity vs. Documentation

This is an aside from the original "On Research" series. As a result of the bardic workshop on Saturday, I've been thinking about research and documentation issues. I think - but am not sure - that the beast we call "documentation" in the SCA is really "due diligence, authenticity, and documentation." Let me explain.

Documentation is the written report of your A&S effort. That's it. I can document any choice of garb in my closet, or any song in my repertoire - even the inauthentic ones. Here's a brief example of documentation for Bad Tudor Garb:

The chemise is the drawstring type commonly seen at SCA events. The skirt has an elastic waistband, which isn't period, but it is hidden by the bodice. The leather for the bodice was bought at an SCA event and sewn into a bodice by an SCA artist in a popular, commonly-seen style. Hats were commonly worn in period.

I could go on. This is "documentation from experience" - "I saw something in the SCA and copied it." This is documentation written by someone who doesn't know how bad the Bad Tudor Garb is. Since I do know, I could add:

The chemise should properly be of linen, but it is cotton. Similarly, the skirt and bodice should be of wool and sewn to each other, but the skirt is cotton and the bodice leather, and they are separate. The skirt and chemise should be pleated, not gathered. The hat is from the MD Ren Faire and may be more Cavalier than Tudor; moreover, it's probably a man's hat.

I'm wearing it anyway because 1) it looks good on me and 2) it's no worse than what 75% of the populace is wearing.

See? Documentation. No references, a clear lack of any kind of literature search - no authenticity. And no indication of any desire to learn from this and do things differently in the future - no research. But damned if this isn't documentation. It's even pretty good documentation, by some standards. It's honest, for one thing. It doesn't pretend that, somehow, a cotton drawstring chemise is really okay (from an authenticity standpoint). It lets the reader know pretty clearly that authenticity is not the goal of this outfit - it's about looking good, fitting in, and having fun. It charts the evidence used to justify the outfit (common practice), some of the methods used to create it (bodice was custom-made), some of the deviations from more authentic clothing (although no references are given), and the wearer's justification for those deviations.

Would I give this outfit a good A&S score? Hell no! It's a Ren Fest costume!

And in general, my hunch is that the "documentation" score in an A&S competition would be low for it, even if I expanded my documentation to a fifteen-page exploration of this outfit and how it came to be. "Documentation" is not the same as "documented authenticity," but I think the words are used interchangeably.

Maypole: Documentation

Today's work can be seen in progress.

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.

Maypole: Maypole

The maypole, version 1.0, is complete. 

The Pole
My options, at the local hardware megastore, were: a steel closet rod (about 1.5" diameter, 8' long), a wooden closet rod (about 1.25" diameter, 8' long), PVC pipe (1" or 4" diameter, as long as I could possibly want), or oak hand railing (about 2" diameter, flat spot on one side, 8' long).  The PVC looked much uglier than I expected, and curved.  The dowel was pathetically skinny-looking.  The steel rod was... steel, and on the slim side.  So I went with the oak railing.  It isn't fully round, but it's close.  And it's real wood, and attractive enough that I don't have to paint it.  Cost: $24.

The hand railing had stepped ends for obscure home installation purposes; I used my "two free cuts" at the megastore to have them squared off.

The Topper
There's no particular evidence for a carved top-piece, but there needs to be something to tie ribbons, streamers, flags, etc., to.  I could have just pounded a nail in, I suppose, but I found an acorn-shaped wooden ornament that's supposed to go on the end of a curtain rod.  None of the wood-toned ones matched the oak pole, so I went with a white one.  Cost: $16 for a pair of toppers (not sold separately, since they're matched pairs for either end of a curtain rod).

I drilled a pilot hole (and broke my cheap 1/8" bit in doing so; oak is hard!) and screwed the topper into one end of the pole.

The Ribbons
I had several spools of narrow, cheap ribbon left over from a bridal shower.  You know the stuff that's in everyone's drawstring chemise, and goes for $0.75/spool regular or 2/$1 on sale?  I had lavender and white on-hand, so I used those.  Each spool was enough to wind a spiral down the pole and then back up it.  I used another spool of white to make a big floppy "bow" - a handful of 12"(ish) loops of ribbon that I secured to the topper as "streamers."  If I find myself in a craft store, I'll get a spool of green instead of the lavender - I think green's attested in the sources, but I didn't get the impression that it could be only green, just that green was a documented example.  I have a feeling whatever was bright and available would be used.

The Flowers and Greenery
There are no flowers on it yet - I want to use fresh, not fake.  In theory, flowers will be tucked under the ribbons spiraling down the pole.

The Stand
As of today, the "stand" holding the pole upright will have to be a human volunteer.  Some sort of portable hole would be better, if/when I can find/make one that will accept a 2" shaft.

I will have to get a picture of it to post, when it is well-decorated with flowers.  But it looks pretty good, even just with ribbons!