Mi Contra Fa

Chalice: Never mind

I'm either attending a friend's wedding or watching the baby while Morgan goes.  I think I'll still write the eulogy but it's sliding down the To Do list without a firm deadline to motivate it.

AS Performance Class

Class outline:

I. Five-minute review of A-S alliterative poetry
    A. Structure
    B. Themes

II. A-S performers
    A. Caedmon and his harp circle of farm workers
    B. The gleoman: entertainer, wanderer (link 1)
    C. The scop: keeper of tradition, guardian of community values, mouthpiece of the lord (link 1)

III. A-S performance
    A. Vocal modalities
        1. Spoken word
        2. Chanted word
        3. Sung word
        4. Challenges of setting music to words

    B. Instrumental choices
        1. Lyre (link 1)
            a. Tunings
            b. Sounding methods
        2. Harp (link 1 for dates of artifacts only)
        3. Winds
        4. Percussion

    C. Performance modalities
        1. Literary basis, memorization
        2. Oral basis, improvisation

IV. Playtime - provide texts and instruments to students for experimentation

Patterns

Here's a short video, developed for math and science curriculum at schools, where a modern movie soundtrack composer explains how he uses patterns to write music.

A lot of medieval and Renaissance music uses repeated patterns, melodic and/or rhythmic, too.  The main trick is, they are often different patterns than the one a modern composer would use. 

This is why, to compose modern medieval music, you need to listen to and learn about actual medieval music - to understand what patterns work, and which don't.

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.