Mi Contra Fa

Languens: Tune

I'm much enamored of a "Kyrie" from the Winchester Troper.  It's organum, but just the tenor line works as a simple and melancholy melody.  It won't readily port over directly, though.  It's A-B-A-C-A' structured, I think (Kyrie eleison, antiphon 1, Christe eleison, antiphon 2, Kyrie eleison).  I figure I'm either going to adapt the A or longer A' tune and repeat it four times (bleah) or through-compose a short tune 'based on' or 'inspired by' the Kyrie.  (By which I mean, "Stealing several of the coolest phrases, including the awesome cadences, and filling in the gaps with appropriate stepwise motion.")

Folk Music and Art Music

So I was listening to Sequentia's "Shining Light" recording the other day.  It's 12th and 13th century Aquitanian chant music.  And the second track, Verbum patris humanatur, o o, just reached out and slapped me.  First, if a song's got an "o o" or an "eya" in it, it's usually pretty joyful and fun, and this song has both.  But the other thing, the thing that made this song seem so much more singable and accessible than anything else in the recording, was the syllabic setting.  Most of the syllables took one note. 

I need to look into this a bit more, but my vague understanding is that this is typical of world folk music.  Early chant also follows this model, if I recall correctly.  [citation needed but I'm pretty sure it's in Hoppin.]

Art music, on the other hand, is a more conscious use of musical tools to achieve some artistic effect. My growing suspicion is that the long melismas in chant are more art music than folk music.  It's probably no accident that their elaboration and eventual polyphonic settings rise with the rise of better musical notation (an important marker for art music).

So, depending on context, I should possibly be not looking to highly melismatic chant pieces for melodic inspiration.  Or perhaps use the melody but in a more syllabic fashion.

Languens: Take Three

My love for you, a constant ache
I rose from bed at (s) daybreak
With small bare-footed steps I go
(u) Through the cold and through the snow
On empty sea I turned my gaze
While searching by the sun's first rays
For white sails filled with winter wind
Or your ship's bow come home again

Songwriter's Dirty Tricks

The place marked with a (u) is a missing unstressed syllable.  The hack poet's answer is to slap an unnecessary single syllable filler in there. "All," "so," and "yet" are popular for the purpose.  ("All" would be the most sensible choice here.)

The hack songwriter's answer is to ignore it.  These lines are iambic, meaning the first syllable is unstressed.  Well, the first beat of a measure* is always stressed.  So when you write music for iambic lines, the first note will actually be the last beat (or half-beat) of the previous measure.  Then the first stressed note of the measure falls on the second, stressed syllable of the line.

So when you are missing that initial unstress, you just hold the tone for the last word of the previous line a beat (or half-beat) longer than usual.  This is one of the ways "close enough for folk music" works.

I think the poem is superior without a hacked-in "all."  It's arguably even more superior to fix it so that it's eight syllables but I like the current symmetry and repetition.

Now, the (s) denotes a missing stressed syllable and that cannot be ignored.  "Daybreak" needs a single syllable adjective to describe it.  Note that the hack answer is to rewrite it as "all at daybreak."  "At just daybreak" is pretty hacky, but at least "just" connotes that our speaker is up and out of bed immediately as soon as the first light of dawn is visible.  It adds to the line, albeit clumsily.

I keep wanting to put a possessive in there (light's daybreak, dawn's daybreak, day's daybreak) but they're either don't make sense or are redundant.

Dim? Grey?  ...I think I might like grey.  It goes with the wintery scene.

My love for you, a constant ache
I rose from bed at grey daybreak
With small bare-footed steps I go
Through the cold and through the snow
On empty sea I turned my gaze
While searching by the sun's first rays
For white sails filled with winter wind
Or your ship's bow come home again

I'll let that sit and see how it reads in a bit.

*Of course, measure and meter are totally anachronistic to this time and place, but I haven't yet got the trick of composing nonmetrical music.

A Poetic Cycle

A "problem" with "Nam languens" and "Veni, delectissime" is that they're so short.  I say "problem" because it's strictly a problem of perception and staging.  Bardic performances are supposed to go 3-5 minutes.  Long pieces show more skill than short pieces (not really but that's the perception). 

Now, there's nothing stopping me from going off and tackling the Battle of Maldon or Brunaburgh as a lengthy performance.  (Possibly too lengthy...)  But I've put a good bit of work into these shorter, lyric pieces, so I thought - how about combining them into a longer poetic cycle? 

Start with "Veni, delectissime" - two people in love.

Then, any combination of "Wulf and Eadwacer," "The Wife's Lament," and "Nam languens."  "Deor" could fit as well (it has been suggested as a partner to "Wulf and Eadwacer," with Deor and Wulf being the same man) but the first three all have female speakers.  "Deor" would be a sudden shift of point of view... although it could work...

End with "The Husband's Message."

Thematically, it would go:

Sensual love and joy (Veni)
Forcible separation, longing and danger (Wulf)
Meditation on bad times; looking forward to better times (Deor)
More longing, hoping for reunion (Nam languens)
Reunion (Husband's Message)

"Wife's Lament" is a bit of an odd duck with many possible interpretations; the more I think about it, the more I think I'd rather leave it out, at least for now.

The most obvious flaw in this cunning plan is that mixing the Latin and Old English verses into a "cycle" is really dodgy.  Of course, I'm not in the least actually proposing that these poems belonged together originally.  It's just a nice "program" for presentation.

"Veni" and "Wulf" are performance-ready.  I hope to have "Nam languens" done in a reasonable amount of time.  The biggest project would be learning/adapting "The Husband's Message," but I've meant to learn it for years now.  It's a touchingly sweet poem.

War Poet

It's not just Old English scops and Continental jongleurs writing poetry about war.  Meet Suzanne Steele, Canadian poet, embedded artist with Princess Pat's Light Infantry.  Her blog, War Poet, contains prose reflections and poetry.

From the news article:

She remembers sitting in a jeep one night on exercise in Alberta as an NCO questioned just what she was doing there.

Already picking up the thick skin and profane diction of the soldiers, she fired back a question about what was the most famous war art in Canadian history.

"The sergeant-major started guessing various statues or paintings, and there was a major in the front seat of the G-wagon and I could see his shoulders start to shake from laughing as he listened -- he knew what I was going to say," Steele recalled.

"I told him it's something that every child in Canada knows at least a line of -- In Flanders Fields,which is a poem."

_______________________________

In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
   That mark our place; and in the sky
   The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.

We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
   Loved, and were loved, and now we lie
         In Flanders fields.

Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
   The torch; be yours to hold it high.
   If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
         In Flanders fields.

"Languishing" Second Draft

• Returned to past tense
• Used best line I had to cut from before, but had to use approximate rhyme
• Some lines start with an unstress, some with a stress.  "Good enough for folk music"?
• First four lines end "stress-unstress," last four end on "stress."
• Is it legit to rhyme "sea" with "see"?
• Line 3 forces a stress on "With" which is sub-optimal
• Line 4: "flurries."  Really?  Do I really think that's a good idea?  I really prefer the "go/snow" rhyme... can I handle the changing tenses?  Should I leave it all present tense, or is that too "fifteen year old writing sad poetry"?
• Line 8: I added "your" to try and take the stress off of "Or" but... I'm not sure if it naturally reads "YOUR SHIP'S bow" or "YOUR ship's BOW."  If it's the former, I should just drop the "your."  Or... something. Once you get the stresses right, it flows, but it seems like you could say it a few ways.

My love for you, a constant aching
I rose from bed as dawn was breaking
With bare-footed steps I hurried
Through the cold and snowy flurries
Until I gazed on empty sea
Hoping yet that I would see
White sails filled with winter wind
Or your ship's bow come home again

Time to also start thinking about music, lest I find an awesome tune and realize I have to totally change everything to work with it...

"Languishing" First Draft

My love for you, a constant ache
I feel, arising at daybreak
With bare-footed steps I go
Through the cold and through the snow
I gaze upon an empty sea
Hoping so that I would see
Some wind-tight proudly lifted sails
Or ship's bow before the gale

• Not thrilled with the enjambment in lines 1-2.  Also, "daybreak" really mucks with the meter.  Needs a rewrite.
• Rather a few irregular lines, although nothing that (I think) music won't smooth out
• Tense changed from past to present to make rhymes.  Good idea, bad idea?
• Last couplet was a bear; not sure I like the present one. 
• Best line I couldn't use: "White sails filled with winter wind"
• One use of redundant "so."  Maybe "Hoping yet that I would see."  Mm. Yes, better.

Memes as oral formula

There's this idea among the folks studying oral traditions that some of the "formulas" used - little stock lines or half-lines of poetry the poet could summon up and insert entirely into a piece - carried with them resonances, deep and metaphorical, that made them linguistically rich, rather than empty repetition.

I'm hazarding a guess that in-jokes work in a similar way.  They reinforce an idea of community (those who get the joke) and imply a history when invoked (all the other times the in-joke has come up).  To those outside of the community, the insiders' enthusiasm for the in-joke seems incomprehensible; the outsider hears only some witless words, repeated ad nauseum.

MY HYPOTHESIS: LET ME SHOW YOU IT

You either just entirely understood what I'm talking about, or have no idea why I feel the need to scream stilted English in all caps.

Let me explain the all caps thing, there.  It started, as far as I know, with this lolcat (captioned cat picture).  But that's really the mid-point.  To understand why the picture is (allegedly) funny, you have to know something about Pokemon and the people who play it.  Pokemon is a collectible card game (and handheld video game) (plus cartoon/toy franchise); like baseball cards, you buy packs of cards in the hopes of getting the ones you want.  It's aimed at kids in roughly the 8-12 year old zone.  Have you ever met an 8-12 year old kid with a collection and a lot of knowledge about it?  They want to share.  They want you to know about their hobby, because it's awesome and they love it, and you will love it, too.  YOU WILL LOVE IT TOO.  They just have to tell you about it enough, and you will be so happy to know the joy of [their favorite thing].

I have been that kid, for the record.  It's not uncommon; it's part of child development.  So a good number of people have met a kid who wants to tell them all about [their favorite thing], here exemplified as Pokemon.

Which further draws on stereotypes about geeks and nerds and their inability to read social cues.  Because not only are we talking about an enthusiastic kid here, the enthusiasm is for a bit of geek culture.  And not a few adult geeks retain the desire to tell you all about [their favorite thing], whether or not you care.  You may be this person; you may know this person.  You recognize this person.

So the cat picture moves us to smile.  And then it moves us to imitation.  The "My [thing], let me show you it" phrase becomes popular - the kids today call that "going viral," yes? - and it becomes a point of reference.  At worst, it is witless parroting.  At best, the phrase encapsulates the consuming enthusiasm and delighted, past-all-reason desire to share that enthusiasm, while at the same time acknowledging that perhaps yes, this is on the crazy side.  When I say "My hypothesis: Let me show you it," I am saying, "I have this idea and I'm really excited about it.  I'm going to write a few hundred words on it, which might be way more than it deserves.  I really hope you'll read it and like it, because I think it's a neat idea!  But really, I'm talking about lolcats and oral tradition and I understand that's a little specific for 10:30am on a Monday morning.  Or, really, anytime."

Take home lesson: This is why filks and pop culture references will never die in the SCA.