Mi Contra Fa

What I Do With My Lyre

Again, for those who may be coming in late, the instrument under discussion is the six-stringed Saxon lyre.

Improvise Music
The main thing I do with my lyre is noodle out tunes on it.  Using the playing technique described yesterday, I can sit and make up music.

I use rhythmic or melodic themes or tropes to keep things sounding different, or sometimes I will play in another mode.  I vary tempo and mood between pieces as well.  There is really quite a lot you can do, melodically, on six strings.

Accompanied Singing
So far, I have one performance-ready piece: my sung translation of Wulf and Eadwacer.  I have tried strumming only about one note per measure, and every note.  Both seem to work pretty well.  I still generally play with the Dorian drone on, and just echo the sung melody.

Accompanied Recitation (Current Work)
I have only tried this a few times.  Two early attempts used harp to accompany Anglo-Saxon poems (the Exeter Book riddle for "fire" and For Silvanus Perrin).  In both cases, I used two octaves' worth of fifths (e.g., D-A-d-a), moving almost randomly around the harp - just sure to end on tonic.

Those seemed to go over all right, but the music and poetry didn't seem well-matched.  I'm not sure if they need to be.  I'm not sure if the music should be all over the place, for 'interest,' or if just a home interval (D-A) and an away interval (C-G) would be sufficient.  They feel boring to play, but the listener will be primarily attending to the words, not the music.

I have listened to Benjamin Bagby and Ann and Charlie Heymann do recited early medieval poetry to more complicated music (on lyre in Bagby's case) but I'm not yet sure exactly how.  Bagby says he improvises, but also that the themes are mostly settled after years of practice.

Experiments in private have been dodgy.  It's hard to recite, play and listen to yourself do both at the same time.  I believe I will need to enlist technology.  Audacity allows for the recording of multiple tracks of sound.  I can record myself reciting a poem, and then record different kinds of accompaniment, from a single repeated interval, to "home and away" intervals, to different melodies underlying the text.  Then I can listen to them separately, to hear what they sound like.

My Lyre Playing Basics

I want to do this up as a webpage with photo illustrations someday.  But until then, this is for all the folks who end up at Mi Contra Fa because they Googled for "how to play lyre."  I play the six-stringed Saxon lyre.

There are many ways to play the lyre.  You can pluck the strings like a harp, or strum them like a guitar.  I use the "block and strum" method as my primary approach, with occasional plucking.

Tuning
There are many ways to tune the lyre.  As a historical re-enactor, I prefer the one described by Hucbald, c. 800 CE.  It is the only one we can authenticate.  It is, very simply, "do re mi fa so la."  I tune in the key of F because I am an alto; I do not have a strong opinion on what a "proper do" for the scale is.  It's not like A=440 Hz was defined in the 9th century.

Temperment
I would use a Pythagorean temperment, if I had a tuner or an ear that would let me.  Some day... Right now, I use equal temperment but I would like to change that.

Strap
I tie a tablet-woven band around either arm of my lyre, with enough slack to loop around my left wrist.  This secures my hand near the strings.

Positioning
I am experimenting with different ways to hold the lyre on my leg or lap.  Historically, I set it upright on my left leg with the soundboard facing to my right.  This is not really towards the audience, and I suspect a different pose would be better.  Graeme Lawson has a paper that shows another way to hold the lyre, and I'm trying to practice that.  To start, you can try what feels comfortable.

Basic Playing Style: Drone Plus Notes
For historical performance, I do not like to use modern chords.  They are absolutely modern, becoming popular in the late Renaissance or early Baroque, as new, popular keyboard instruments were causing Pythagorean temperments to be replaced with newer, experimental ones.  The Pythagorean third is dissonant, so building a chord around one just isn't good form. 

(Read more about Pythagorean tempermant and medieval music theory.)

Everything we know about early music suggests that the "most important note" on the lyre would have been "re," followed closely by "la."  "Re" is the base note of the Dorian mode, and "la" is its dominant, a fifth up.  There was no "major scale" in the 9th century, even though today, we might say the lyre is tuned "to the first six notes of the major scale."  It is really tuned to the first five notes of the Dorian mode, with one note below tonic to allow for some nice cadences.

My lyre has six strings and I have five fingers.  What I do is place a finger on every string except "re."

If I want to sound "re," I strum all the strings.

If I want to sound "re" plus another note, I lift up the finger blocking the other note and strum all the strings.  Four fingers damp four strings, and the interval sounds.

Often for "do," and sometimes for "mi," I do not want the dissonance that comes with sounding them together with "re."  In those cases, I shuffle my thumb (on do) or index finger (on mi) from those notes to the "re" string, and strum.

You can also shuffle fingers around to get any single note.  I don't find this as fast as just lifting up fingers, though, and I like the effect of the "re" drone underlying the melody.

Melody?
Yes, I play melodies or parts of melodies.  It's done by oral poets in other parts of the world.  There is nothing wrong with playing what you are singing (if you are singing).

What tunes?
Generally, I improvise tunes in Dorian mode. 

But I want to play tuned pentatonically/using chords/the way I do now.
I am not going to stop you.  I have a very specific goal of historically informed performance, and my current performance practice is a snapshot of where I am right now with my reading and my technique.  You may have different goals, different interpretations of the literature, and different technique.   

Art and Accessability

I hope my last post didn't make it sound like I thought Art has to be inaccessible, or that accessible things can't be Art.  That's not what I meant.

The performance I feel drawn to create is likely to be somewhat inaccessible.  I think I can count it as a valid artistic expression, though.

A different performance or expression of artistry that happens to also be accessible is also still an artistic expression.  This is, in fact, a principle behind the Great Translation Project - that making inaccessible art more accessible is worthwhile and does not inherently diminish the art of the original.

And to be fair, I do plan on making concessions to accessibility.  I am not interested right now in performing in Old English.  I want my audience to be able to easily access the meaning of my words, although this is a departure from utterly strict authenticity. 

Like usual, it all comes back to one's own personal goals.  If I wanted to continue working on the Great Translation Project for this next little while, I would be making accessibility a high-priority goal and not at all feeling like I was compromising because of it.  The point of that project is accessibility.  But right now I want to work on a project whose point is the re-creation of a different and distinctive performance style, even if that style is a bit inaccessible.  And if I make changes only to make it more like what people expect from bardic performance, I would feel like I was compromising.

Art and Performance

I argue that "fun" and "authenticity" are not two poles of one axis, but rather independent, perpendicular axes.  So there can exist performances which are fun and authentic, fun and inauthentic, unfun and authentic, and unfun and inauthentic.

The "sweet spot" for SCA performance seems to be well up the "fun" axis and about centered on it.  That's "SCA appropriate" - maybe inauthentic, but too much; maybe authentic, but not too much.  It's close enough to modern to be accessible but also not "glaringly" modern.  Ideally, it is somehow evocative of the Middle Ages "as they should have been" as well.

For examples, consider the collected works of (say) Mistress Rosalind Jehanne.  "The Song of Roland" falls on the "authenic" side of the fun axis (but not too far - it is not, after all, a reconstruction of the chanson).  "At the Battle of Maldon" ambitiously captures the alliteration of the original, but also imposes meter and rhyme on it.  This fits it much more firmly into our modern performance idiom.  It makes it more accessible - that's the second time I've used that word, and I think it's important.  It's hard for something to be fun if you don't "get it."  Mistress Rosalind's work is marvelously accessible and brings some actual medieval stories and themes to people who might otherwise assume it would be boring.

As I'm  brainstorming ideas for a performance project, I find myself torn on this idea of accessibility.  Part of me wants to lump it and strictly pursue Art (and you should probably imagine that word all in pretentious fancy Gothic letters).  That's the part of me that's fascinated by the Anglo-Saxons and wants to try and bring their words and performance to life in the most accurate way I know how.

Then there's the bard part of me who wants a happy audience.  While I do  believe there would be people who would appreciate a very authentic re-creation, it is not going to hit that "fun" spot for most folks, because it won't be accessible. It'll be weird.  Good-weird, hopefully, but weird all the same.

So I found myself pondering parallel performances: the "real" one and the "modernized" one.  Say, the onion riddle in direct poetic translation vs. the onion riddle rewritten in three rhyming quatrains of iambic tetrameter and set to repeating music.

I don't think I really want to do that.  I think I feel like I need to, to satisfy this imaginary audience.  Maybe the brave thing is to try the weird performance and see how it flies. 

Post-Somerset Ponderings

I attended this year's Somerset Folk Harp Festival.  (Aside: I have thrown my hat into the ring to teach next year.  I am a nobody, and usually they get professional Somebodies to teach the tracks, but... I know my material.  Given the low information content of two of the workshops I attended...)

Anyhow.  Somerset is usually a kick in the pants to get me thinking about my music and my music goals.  This year is no exception.  As I look back on Mi Contra Fa 2009 so far, I'm seeing... a lot of poetry.  This is not unexpected, since I've been Poeta Atlantiae.  And I am very pleased with some of the output.  Some of it touches on my overall SCA performance goals, mostly the praise poems.  Granted, few of them were performed for the recipients.  But at least it was more practice in Old English verse.

The Great Translation Project is fun and worthy.  It is also, at the last, for other people, to introduce them to music that I'm already a fan of. 

I want to keep learning medieval music.  Given how little information there is for pre-Conquest performance, this is at least somewhat related to my personal goals.  If I can't get actual Anglo-Saxon music, I should be learning what I can about later music.  At least get acquainted with some other pieces to expand my gut feeling on what's authentic.

I'm thinking it would be interesting to put some focus on Anglo-Saxon performance, instead of bouncing around to whatever the theme of this month's A&S challenge is.  I've spent part of my "night off" tonight messing around with harp, lyre and my Seven Virtues poem and... well, it ain't ready for prime time or anything, but it's good practice.  I should do more things like that, with extant pieces (excerpts from Beowulf and Judith!) and my own stuff.

Book Review: The Mastery of Music

The Mastery of Music: Ten Pathways to True Artistry by Barry Green, Broadway, 2005.

Well, I liked it.

It helped me realize a few things about my playing: why I prefer improvisation to learning "real" songs, why people usually respond better when I do that.  Because my technique is crap, I can't let go and perform artistically if I'm trying to reproduce someone else's tune.  In improv, there is no right or wrong, so no anxiety, so I can move with the music.

The book is more aimed at someone with a traditional music education, for whom technique is all-important.  It tries to get past technique, to see what other qualities are needed to really soar as a musician - although it acknowledges, repeatedly, that you have to have technique.  Joshua Bell doesn't just have soul, he also plays all the notes right.

So I took home sort of the inverse lesson.  I don't claim to be able to "play in the Zone" at the drop of a hat, but when I improvise, I do play with more joy, more feeling, and I connect better with the audience.  That part, I can do already.  What I'm lacking is the solid technique and skill that comes from regular attentive practice.

(I played at church recently and two people asked how I got that neat note-bending effect.  Um... I accidentally hit the string with my nail? I hadn't been trying to bend any notes, you see.  This sort of thing should be cleaned up.)