Mi Contra Fa

Flute Research

I got my copy of Bone, Antler, Ivory and Horn in the  mail yesterday!  Flipping to the section on bone flutes, I found...

Fipple flutes?

Fipple flutes.

Sigh.

I have an ILL out on some of Graeme Lawson's reports on Anglo-Saxon bone flute finds. No offense to Arthur MacGregor, but if there's only two such bone flutes cited in his book, I may as well check them out in the original archaeological reports and see what the musicologist has to say about them.  Then I go back to the bone book to figure out how to make the thing.

Bathild Bling

This one isn't about music or performance.  I am simply much enamored of shiny things, and this very shiny indeed (it's gold!) seal matrix from the 7th century caught my eye.

(Hotlinking images is naughty, so here's a text link to the museum website.)

I love both sides of it - the stylized but still jubilant long-haired figure on the front (the museum says anyone from Jesus to Woden has been suggested, but... hey, maybe it's Bathild? The lady whose name is written all around?) and the more personal scene on the back.  The BBC notes that, as one might expect, most believe the very excited man and the woman are Clovis II and Bathild.

I especially love that they have a cross over their heads: an image that's described as "a fascinating erotic scene" by the Norfolk Museum is also blessed.  And why not?  They're married, after all.  The Wife of Bath would approve, I think.

Quena!

For Mother's Day, I took myself to the House of Musical Traditions and scored a bamboo quena.  It's a notched, end-blown flute (NEBF hereafter, because I am lazy).  Since I have no experience in making instruments of any kind, I thought I should get a real NEBF to see if/how I could play it, and how it was made.

I can get sound out of it, but not really reliably.  Progress! But need practice.  With this as a template, I can measure off proportions for trying to make a NEBF out of some PVC pipe I picked up at the hardware store.

I think I also need to lay hands on an actual archaeological report (or two or six) documenting some of the actual Anglo-Saxon flute finds.  I think I've sort of assumed that because I saw one bone flute in the news that was a NEBF, obviously all early bone flutes were the same.  That might not actually be the case.

Graeme Lawson's website lists his publications, which include analysis of several Anglo-Saxon flutes.  None of them are easily available (read: free and on the Internet) but I can check my local university card catalogue and see what turns up.

Mailbag: From Sweden!

I am always thrilled when people email me about the blog.  I am doubly thrilled, this time, as J.S. from Sweden wrote with some information relevant to the Roland project, and an offer to assist with understanding the Scandanavian sources.

He confirmed that the "medieval ballads" are just about what the Child ballads are for English-speakers: collected in the 19th and 20th centuries, but with subject matter that could be much older: "They are called 'medieval' because they usually have aristocratic protagonists in what looks like a medieval setting, plus that it is assumed that Scandinavians started to sing them when the ballad genre reached Scandinavia from the continent some time around the 12th century."  There are articles on the possible evolution of that ballad genre, and I will probably try to get my claws into them.

There were some ballads written down in the 16th century (I linked to some of the 19th century English translations of them a bit back), but again as in the English case, the tunes were all collected by folklorists in the late 1800s and early 1900s. 

So we're definitely in the "SCA-appropriate, period subject matter, not actually period" realm.  Still a worthwhile project, I think, though.

J.S. also cleared up some matters of translation:  "'Kaempevise' is, by the way, correctly translated as 'heroic ballad'. [Google translated it as 'Giant Display.']  (The usual ambiguity of translations: 'kaempe' can be both giant or hero, and 'vise' can be everything from ballad to nursery rhyme and lots of other words too...). 'Justin Bieber viser kæmpe Jesus-tatovering' means "Justin Bieber shows a big Jesus tattoo."

And now you know!