Mi Contra Fa

Robin Hood: Wrong notes

Note to self: When performing a modal analysis of a piece, play the piece in question with accompaniment.

At Ensemble practice last night, we tried out Niles's "The Potter and Robin Hood" and when I went to do chordal accompaniment on the harp, it was unquestionably in C Major, just as Niles had it.  So much for all my fancy analysis!

We also decided that it sounded really Appalachian, especially that up-a-third cadence at the end.  So we flipped back to the Sixteenth Century Broadside Ballad project and started looking at their list of tunes. And don't you know, "The Hunt Is Up" was in there!  The Ensemble prepared that for Baronial Birthday a year... or was it two?... ago.  It's in 8-6-8-6 ballad meter and it dates to the time of Henry VIII.  It works just fine for "Robin Hood and the Potter."

I also proposed that we prepare just the first fytt for Twelfth Night.  It's already the end of October; we haven't cast Robin Hood or the Potter; the instrumentalists are still learning the melody and never mind any harmony or countermelody.  I think we'll be happier if we do a good job on the first third and build up to the rest over time.

Besides, the original play version was only the first fytt, anyway.

A Wedding Toast

If each other you've offended

Talk and kiss til all be mended

So that when you slumber here

Just sweet visions do appear

Tender, soft and loving themes

Only pleasant, happy dreams

Gentles, do not reprehend

If you pardon, you will mend

And as I am an honest Puck

I wish you well-deserved luck

And all good things I can with tongue

Give breath, like life and love so long

And full reply to Cupid's call.

So good night unto you all,

Raise up your glass, if we be friends

And wishes best to them we send.

(If it sounds familiar, that's because it's totally a rip-off of the ending of A Midsummer Night's Dream - check Puck's final words at the Bottom of the page.)

Baronial Birthday Song

To the tune of "America the Beautiful"

Oh aching back and greying hair
Atop our weary heads
Oh fading sight and busy day
That makes us long for beds
Oh barony, our barony,
Another year's gone by
So happy birthday, Storvik sing,
Our voices raised on high

Robin Hood: Planning and Etc.

Etc.
Master Ruaidhri did get back to me, with the measured opinion that performability indeed trumps adhering to the original poetic form in this case. 

Ironically, after I have rewritten a few lines that were 8 + "said Robin" or 8 + "said Little John," I may need to go back and rewrite them to their originals.  I'm now thinking of staging, you see, which I should have done from the beginning...

Planning and Staging
I've only got Fytt One translated so far, but I think it's valuable to start thinking about its staging now. (Heck, the play "Robin Hood and the Potter" is pretty much the first fytt, so if it happens that this is all we can get done, we're period!)

(INSTRUMENTS do as they will; NARRATOR alerts the populace to impending performace of tales of Robin Hood.)

(INSTRUMENTS play a prelude as ACTORS gather to places.)

(INSTRUMENTS play melody and accompaniment for first fytt; NARRATOR begins singing the ballad.)

That's all straightforward.  The ACTORS will be doing the dialogue for their parts; I think having them speak it would be best, if only because it gives us a larger pool of potential volunteers.  (Number of people willing to speak in front of crowd > Number of people willing to sing in front of crowd.) 

If the ACTORS are speaking, not singing, INSTRUMENTS will need to switch from playing the melody and accompaniment to some kind of simple accompaniment that allows for irregularities in spoken delivery, but can go right back into the melody when the NARRATOR starts singing again.  Getting the timing on that down may be a bear; NARRATOR and INSTRUMENTS will need to be watching each other to stay together.

Many of the dialogue blocks are entire stanzas, but not all are.  It may require some practice to interleave sung narration with spoken dialogue.

Practice may suggest that even NARRATOR should speak some parts; we'll have to see.

The fight scene should absolutely have music, but probably not the main ballad melody.  Assuming that there will not be time to through-compose music specifically for the fight choreography, I'd steal a very modern page from the video game people and come up with a "song that does not end," simple tune that gets out of the way, good regular rhythm for the warlike drums to beat, that plays over and over until the fight scene is done.  It should be in the same mode as the main melody, of course.

Experiment

Since the "post continuation" section of Typepad is not actually putting an LJ-cut into the posts on the LJ-feed, let me try embedding an LJ-cut in by hand: This'll either show up as an LJ cut or else a blank line followed by this text. Have to see. And there's the end of the supposed cut.

Robin Hood, Robin Hood

All right, here we go: The First Fytt.

I am going to try, again, to hide it behind a cut.  LJ-feed readers, I do apologize if it doesn't work (again).  If I don't get it right this time, I will start putting it on a webpage and providing pointers.

In other news: Also emailed Master Ruaidhri an Cu for his opinion on my translation efforts.  Not that I foisted a draft off on him, but I'm leery of "fixing" medieval poetry.  Are these bugs or features that I'm removing?

Loved by the good!

I emailed Master Ioseph of Locksley about Appalachian ballad style.  Cross fingers and hope for a reply!

I started translating the first fytt of "Robin Hood and the Potter" yesterday.  It's not hard, since it is in English, just archaic English, and the online edition has notes for the extinct or obscure words. 

I made a run through the whole thing (30 stanzas!) and have noticed two issues:

• Ballads are often a little hard on their 8-6-8-6 meter, but this one seems to really take some liberties.
• We're used to the two short lines rhyming.  Most of the time, that was the case with this poem - except when it wasn't, and the long lines rhymed.

I already made the decision to regularize the rhyme scheme.  (I think that we're too familiar with ballad form to accept it turned around; it'll sound 'wrong' to the audience.)  But what about the meter?  There were a lot of lines with 7 syllables, in both the long and the short positions.  There were also a good number of long lines with exactly 8 syllables and good scansion - until the "said Little John" or "said Robin" that's tacked on to the end.  It makes me wonder if the dialogue tags were presented as a sort of aside?

In the interests of preserving my sanity, now and in the future, I think what I'll do is read it over with a ballad tune in my head.  The lines that can be made to work in the usual ways (subdividing unstressed notes, slurring the last bar into a melisma over one word, etc.) I'll leave alone.  The ones that are too broken to sing, I'll fix.

Staging
I was able to talk with Storvik's MOAS over the weekend; she has an interest in medieval drama and we thought this would make a good project for Twelfth Night.  The first fytt is pretty much the entirety of the play-version of "Robin Hood and the Potter."  Go figure - it's mostly a framing device for a cool fight scene.

We'll need two stage fighters (Robin Hood and the potter) and Little John (who doesn't fight); more Merry Men are optional stage dressing.  Little John could also be "played" by the ballad singer/narrator.

I think the other two "major" characters in Fyttes 2 and 3 are the sheriff and his wife; so a cast of three, plus musicians and singer/narrator, could do us.  That's 4-6 people to get to commit now to a January event.  That's... within the realm of the possible...

Feared by the bad

Back to Robin Hood - modal analysis of Niles's "Robin Hood and the Potter":

Details behind the cut, but I think it's Hypodorian A, not C Major as Niles would have it.

Classes on deck:

Just some jottings in the old research log here:

A beginner's class on music notation and theory: Requested by Storvik MOAS Beatrix von Leipzig

Introduction to Saxon Lyre class: Possible replacement for A-S Performance class, there are interested parties

Still want to do How to Write a Medieval Song cheatsheet. 

University: Research Class

I did the Bardic Research class again at University, using feedback from my singular student at Highland River Melees.  I cut back on the goal-setting and literature search portions and included an extended example of how to work through preparing a period piece for performance.  The class self-identified as bards or musicians, so I didn't try to fit in too much on poetry and storytelling (although I dropped in one or two references or examples, to show how this stuff can apply to other forms).

Boy howdy, I talk fast when I present.  I covered material that, in practice, took 25-30 minutes in 20 minutes flat.  That apparently made me come off as nervous; maybe I was, although I felt comfortable.  Perhaps excited would be a better word.  At any rate - something to pay attention to in the future.

I forgot to hit the "form appropriate to material" gong, but oh well.  I mentioned style and genre in passing; I just didn't call them out for emphasis.  And if people start using lyric forms for narratives, know what? I can live with that.  Lyric forms are typically shorter and better suited to SCA-style performance.  Not that I'd have a problem with an abridged chanson de geste, but it would have to be abridged.  Any epic narrative form would be.  So you're tweaking no matter what.

Feedback was good.  The material was presented clearly and the ideas got across; better, the ideas were seen as good and useful. 

My only wish is that I'd been in the science classroom with the scientific method poster splashed across the back wall.  It's exactly the same thing as my "research process" poster.

With his band of men

Mudcat Cafe and the Digital Tradition Database turned up Child 121 but no tune.  Combined with the Child midi file page I found yesterday, I suspect that #121 (Robin Hood and the Potter) is one of the ones that just doesn't have a tune.

I could confirm this with a trip to the UMD library, which has four volumes of "The Traditional Tunes of the Child Ballads."  I should, as a matter of due diligence, but I'm fairly confident there will be nothing there. 

Continued poking around on Google turns up either nothing, or more references to the John Jacob Niles book.  I glanced at the lyrics last night; it wasn't a very careful read, but a quick counting-off on my fingers made me think the "ballad" was not in 8-6-8-6 ballad form.  More like 6-6-6-6.

Looking at the text of the Potter ballad... it's not exactly 8-6-8-6 either.  I mean, I think it's trying to be, but there are some irregularities.  (In a folk ballad?  Gasp!)  But it tends to err on the side of extra syllables, at least in the first few stanzas.

I think the next thing to do is to play the Niles tune and see if it can be stretched to fit the early lyrics.  If not, then I'll have a listen to the other traditional Robin Hood ballad tunes and pick a nice one.

Other things that can move forward: playing the Robin Hood tune from the 16th century ballad website, seeing if it works; beginning to translate the ballad from Middle to Modern English.

Original composition will wait, I think, until the other two-thirds of the melodies are selected.  That way it can be composed to work with them instead of just being laid beside them.