Mi Contra Fa

May Pease II

Because it seemed a little lame to repeat the same line when there could be couplets:

May time is here, let us dance and let us sing-o
Flowers in bloom and the birds all on the wing-o

Bagpipe plays loudly a merry melody-o
Lasses and lads in a jolly jubilee-o

Birds in the trees all sing gaily in the sun-o
Take hands with me and together we will run-o

Buds on the boughs mean that spring is coming in-o
Sing all who know that the summer will begin-o

Bring in the May and leave flowers on my door-o
Give me but one, love, and I will give you four-o

Kiss me, my dear, in the morning of the May-o
Leave not my arms, but my dear, please will you stay-o?

Play on the grass in the fresh dew of the morn-o
Springtime is come and the world, it is reborn-o.

May time is here, let us dance and let us sing-o
Flowers in bloom and the birds all on the wing-o

A Lull

It feels a bit odd to be sort of between projects.  I'm contemplating buying some books about chansons de geste, reading over my Anglo-Saxon clothing book, and trying to remember to be Poeta-y. 

Poeta will sponsor a content with a theme of "medieval romances" at Sapphire Joust, by the way.  I need to develop my judging criteria.  And write the announcement for the Acorn.

Possibly, I'm still recovering from the breathless run-up to KASF.  I mean, I could be making project pages for the other completed translations, or starting a new translation, or revisitng the Bertran de Born as a performance piece.  I'm also taking it into my head to do a lyre book. And my son needs new garb.

I should go whale on the "eya" song for a bit.  It's fun, it's seasonal.

April Acorn Poem

For Coronation:

What great deeds are done     by daring man
Battles fought boldly   blood shed by sword
For helpmeet's honor   hero wins the day
Ebonwoulfe and Esa   All now must attend
Of Atlantia regents     Rule they in glory!

Tunes for Five Strings

Years ago, I bought a copy of My Kantele Is My Teacher by Lani Thompson.  The kantele is a traditional Finnish instrument with five strings.  (More modern models can have ten or more.)  I had been looking into potential commonalities between kanteles and lyres, and I fooled around a bit with the tunes included in the book.  I was still mostly plucking the strings at that point, and it sounded nice but not compelling.

Well, I picked it back up for fun last night.  Using the block-and-strum method of playing with a drone on tonic, the tunes seem to take on a deeper life.  They sound really, really good.

The lyrics, alas, are in untranslated Finnish.  Maybe I'll see if I can find some translations on the 'Net, or else use the music as a basis for my own lyrics... although I'd like to know what kind of songs these are before I go writing.  Also, the tunes are all given as "traditional," and that includes everything from the ones collected from rune singers or that use lyrics from the Kalevala, down to the waltzes and the polkas.  So... some more documentation would be nice.

Errata

The translation for the Pork Chop Song had a misalignment between some of the lyrics and the notes; The Armed Man was missing a "the" in its lyrics. Both are fixed.

May Pease

Original May carol lyrics for Pease Bransle.  I take a liberty with the refrain.  It actually goes:

Men: quarter-quarter-half
Women: 4 quarters

The lyrics instead give the women three notes/syllables, like the men.  They can either hold the 3rd quarter for the length of a half note while the instruments play the 4th, or sing both quarter notes to the one syllable.

Verses:
May time is here, let us dance and let us sing-o (2x)

Bagpipe plays loudly a merry melody-o (2x)

Birds in the trees sing gaily in the sun-o (2x)

Buds on the boughs mean that spring is coming in-o (2x)

Bring in the May and leave flowers on my door-o (2x)

Kiss me, my dear, in the morning of the May-o (2x) 
(yeah, I know. May-o, mayo.  But is May-time or May-day any better, esp. with every other line being end-o?)

Play on the grass in the fresh dew of the morn-o (2x)

May time is here, let us dance and let us sing-o (2x)

Chorus (the hopping part):

Men: Come with me!
Women: Go with you?
Men: Come with me and merry be!

Women: I will stay.
Men: You will stay?
Women: I will stay and sing and play

Joan Sanderson, or The Cushion Dance

When I was an undergraduate at Rutgers, we had masked balls twice a year.  And very often we danced "Prinkum Prankum," as our dance mistress called it, which I have never seen danced anywhere else.

Well, it's in Playford, starting in 1686.  The tune does not look like how I remember her singing it, and the actions are not quite the same, but it's clearly where it comes from.  The way we danced it, Man or Woman stood in the center of the ring and called out Joan or John (actually 'insert name here' as I think is indicated by the nonuse of italics in the original) Sanderson.  The cushion was placed; somebody knelt (I don't recall if it was Sanderson, the person calling out, or always the Man) and there was a hand-kiss.  The two exchanged places, leaving Sanderson in the center for the next go-round of the dance.

This is what I read from Playford:

Note: The first strain twice.  The second once.  And the last as oft as is required.

This Dance is begun by a single person (either Man or Woman) who taking a Cushion in their Hand dances about the Room, and at the end of the Tune they stop and sing This Dance it will no further go.  The Musicians answer, I pray you good Sir, why say you so?  Man, Because Joan Sanderson will not come too.  Music. She must come too, and she shall come too, and she must come whether she will or no.  Then he lays down the Cushion before a Woman, on which she kneels, and he Kisses her, singing, Welcome Joan Sanderson, welcome, welcome.  Then she rises, takes up the Cushion and both dance singing, Prinkum-prankum is a fine Dance, and we shall go dance it once again, once again, and once again, and shall we dance it once again?  Then making a stop, the Woman sings as before, This Dance, &c.  Music, I pray you Madam, &c.  Woman. Because John Sanderson &c.  Music. He must. &c.  And so she lays down the Cushion before a Man, who kneeling upon it salutes her, she singing, Welcome John Sanderson, &c.  Then he taking up the Cushion, they take hands and dance around, singing as before; and thus they do til th whole Company are taken into the Ring.  And if there is Company enough, make a little Ring in the middle, and within that Ring set a Chair, and lay the Cushion on it, and the first Man set on it.  Then the Cushion is laid before the first Man, the Woman singing, This Dance, &c. (as before) only instead of -come to, they sing -go fro; and instead of Welcome John Sanderson, &c., they sing Farewell, John Sanderson, Farewell, Farewell; and so they go out one by one as they came in.  Note, the Woman is kissed by all the Men in the Ring at her coming in and going out, and likewise the Man by all the Women.

The words are almost what I recall.  I think we sang, "I pray you, good master/mistress."  We never did the bit with the chair, and we never collected all the dancers in the center of the ring.

Playford gives a little diagram of four couples in a ring but there is no choreography, just "they dance."  We only danced during the "Prinkum-prankum" parts, as the dance stopped at the declaration, "This dance it may no further go."  I think we just doubled left and right; two full sets.  There's not room to do much else.

I bring this up because spring starts on Saturday, which means it's maypole season again.  This sort of kissing game-dance seems very suitable for an adult maypole.

The Rutgers reconstruction has the advantage of not requiring kissing the entire Company, which can get prickly in the SCA with people having widely varying ideas about appropriate casual personal contact.  On the downside, the dance mistress had to watch carefully and end the dance when it started to become clear that favorites were emerging and certain people were being passed over.  I'm leaning towards doing it the Rutgers way, if only because I saw it done without social disaster occuring.  I'm not so sure how the original Playford version would go.

New Directions

So with Year Two beginning, it's reasonable to ask: what's next?

I want to keep the Great Translation Project rolling.  There's the French "Eya" spring song and the Italian "La Badessa" that are the last two from my original "Oooo, gotta do that one!" list.  And I want to start uncovering other web sources for translations or Tudor/Elizabethan English songs that I can link to.

I may step back from Community Performance for this next year, unless I can combine it with Poeta Atlantiae duties.  I'll be having competitions and challenges to run as Poeta, which means I should not also commit to staging a mummer's play or other activity.

In my personal research, I can either spiral deeper into Anglo-Saxon era studies, or branch out to other contemporary art forms.  I feel like I'd rather have a little more breadth before I start going real deep into extant psalters and whatnot.  Norse poetry, performance and culture (skalds and all that) are the most obvious option.  Less obviously, I've a yen to look into other early epics like the French chanson de geste.  That would be the more challenging option, I think - there is a ton of SCA and other research on skaldic and eddaic verse already on the Web.  I might give it a browse and call it good (for now) but make the "hitting the library" part of things more focused on the Continental forms.

Happy Birthday, Mi Contra Fa!

The blog is one year old today! 

My sincerest thanks to all my readers: the few, the proud.  I know a fair fraction of the content here is scattered notes, to do lists, and other research cruft that's not nearly as compelling as LOLcats.  I appreciate that you're either that interested in the research process, or else that good at ignoring the noise to wait for the actual signal, when it comes through.

This has been, without a doubt, the best thing I could have done for my research.  Looking over the "Original Work" page, it's divided about equally between things I did before Mi Contra Fa, and things I did after.  Except that "before Mi Contra Fa" extends from 1994 or so until March 2007, and "after Mi Contra Fa" is just one year.

The desire to update the blog helps keep me motivated to do new work.  The desire to keep the information available and accessible helps me to structure the web pages, take steps to standardize them, and make sure equivalent information is available on each.  Making my work more accessible is also why I've put effort into making PDFs of sheet music, rather than just carrying things around in my head.

Here's to Year Two!

KASF 2009 Event Report

This will go long, so it's behind a cut.  As noted last night, I had a great time and learned a lot, but I wonder if I could have used my time better.