Mi Contra Fa

Back in the saddle

I seem to be back.  My youngest is two and a half, which makes some things easier.  Also, the fandom which was consuming my brain is fading and releasing its iron grip on my creative faculties.

Looking back over two years of intermittent posts, I see a few projects that need wrapping up, and many more things that need plain practice, not blogging, to become performance-ready.

• "Roland" deserves a project page and is otherwise ready for me to learn the tune and words.
• "Nam languens" never got a tune.  Needs one, then needs a project page.
• "Sweetest Lover" is all right, but I should practice the Sequentia version too.
• "Miracle, New Joy" needs practice
• One or two new classes need handouts posted.
• For completeness' sake, I should post the country-and-western "Ariadne's Song" I wrote at the same time as "Christ and Theseus."
• I should decide if I want to make "Christ and Theseus" a performance piece.
• Finish reading "Rhythm of Beowulf" and figure out what it means for performance.
• By golly, gin up one of my poems with lyre accompaniment!
• Resubmit the ILL for the flute records
• Make the garb
• Review all the repertoire I haven't been practicing for 2-3 years and get it back in shape. No biggie.
• LYRE BOOK
• The Big Book of Early Harp References

...just a small list, you know.

 

Lyre Wrist Strap Fix

My tied-on wrist straps have seemed low.  They hold the instrument to my hand well enough, but I can't relax my arm into them and still reach the strings.  I recall that at least one of the extant lyres has mounts for a strap, and they're higher on the arms.  My knots won't hold up high, though.

Solution: Add friction! Photo essay below the cut.

Roland: Tunes

Remember this page of Norwegian folks songs?  #10 on that page is our song.  Click through to find two different tunes given.  The first tune is the one used by Trio Medieval and Glitterind.  The second tune is the first one given in that Danish 1908 book of Faroese tunes; there are four tunes total given.

They are similar but not the same. Most notably, in the second and fourth lines, the more modern contour proceeds through scale degrees 5-3-4-1-3-2-7-1.  The dance tune proceeds 5-3-4-3-1-3. (EDIT: Scale degrees are for Dorian mode.  Add 1 to all the numbers to get the scale degree for the major scale.)

The "2-7-1" cadence is a major folkie thing, IMO.  The Faroese dance does give an alternate tone on degree 2 for the very final cadence; it gives 3-5-1, with a smaller note on 2 written under the 5.  Harmony on a fourth?  A variant? I'm not sure.  And some of the other tunes at least do use scale degree 1, although not that I noticed in that particular telling pattern.

I'm not surprised that I had a hard time telling that the tunes were in fact different at first look.  But now I know why the video of the Faroese dancers didn't quite sound like the other performances.

I'll have to give a more careful listen to some of the Faroese tunes.  It's sort of a philosophical question - all the tunes under consideration are only documentable to the 20th century, but the Glitterind tune with that cadence sounds even more 20th cen to my ears.  But it also sounds good.

Tablature for comparing the two tunes under the cut.

Roland: Revision

"Olivant" in the original was not "Oliver" but rather "oliphant," the elephant ivory horn.  I was wondering why Oliver was blowing Roland's horn!

The original has "blaumen" (blue men?) for the Moors.  Okay, the religious war theme is tricky enough already without going there.  I just call them Moors for the most part.  I use 'heathen' a few times, hopefully understood as a descriptor and not a pejorative?

I saw in the Faroese songbook that their version has masculine rhyme, too.  So nyah!

Tidied up the scansion in verse 3, corrected a few typos.

-----------------

"Six of my earls will stay at home to guard the rings of gold
The other six in heathen lands are swinging their iron cold"

CHORUS
Ride they out from Frankish lands on horses finely saddled
Blow the horn Oilphant at Ronsavollen      (or Roncevaux, dealer's choice)

Raised they up their silken sails high upon the masts
Sailed they to the heathen lands before two weeks had passed

Oaken oars and anchors strong then touched the clean white sand
Next was Roland, king's own friend, the first upon the land

Slaughtered they at Roncevaux for two days and for three
On Roland's sword the Moors did die; a scythe they could not flee

The sun in the sky was blotted out as Moors their spears did throw
A frightened fellow Frankish man asked Roland his horn to blow

He set the horn to his bloody mouth, the blast heard o'er the fray
Over mountains went the sound; it was heard three days away

Charlemagne the mighty king cries with grief and woe:
"What has passed with my own dear friend that he sounded such a blow?"

Charlemagne the mighty king came to the heathen land
Dead lay Roland, king's own friend, his sword still in his hand

Buried at home were the mighty earls and many a tear was shed
Their ship was full of gems and gold and the heathens were left for dead

New garb plans

I ransacked my fabric stores and turned up some pink linen.  It's actually almost exactly the same color as the madder-dyed linen I see here, so score!  I admit I was vaguely planning on woad-blue, but since I've already got the pink, pink it is.

This polyester "china silk" looks to be about the right shade of purple.  My nearest good fabric store has real silk of a similar shade, but lighter intensity.  On my last garb project, an Aregunde robe, I used polyester for the silk when the "100% wool" I ordered online was nothing of the sort.  I wasn't going to put real silk on fake wool! 

(Heh.  I was looking at pictures of the San Vitale mosaics yesterday, and I notice the museum reconstruction of Aregunde's veil is a red version of Theodora's lady-in-waiting's.)

Given how little I'll need if I just trim the sleeves, and since the polyester has a minimum 10-yard order, it may be cheaper to go with the real deal this time!  If the color ends up being good.  Maybe I'll go over there tonight and have a look.

Performers need clothes, too

It's time to buy or make some new clothes.

I'm going to go off of the 7th century description of naughty nuns who dress too well, as given in three translations by Gale Crocker-Owen in "Dress in Anglo-Saxon England."  Fine linen undertunic, red or blue overtunic, sleeves striped with purple silk, bright or colored veil (showing hair around the face) held in place by a fillet. 

I already have my Desborogh necklace-inspired necklace (A Met Museum repro, different mostly in being more symmetric and lacking the central cross) which is also 7th c.  I may attempt a pouch  like the Swallowcliffe Down burial one.  The lyre still wants a fur-lined bag like the Sutton Hoo lyre had; I doubt I can swing beaver but sheep fleece is possible.

I'll try to do some amount of research into the appropriate shades of color.  Amazingly, Wikipedia was actually concretely helpful in giving an example of Tyrian purple.  (Whelk-dyed purple may be all right, especially if the silk was imported. I need to go to my books and see if we have any surviving colors.  I know I've seen some lichen purples cited in Viking contexts.)

I go back and forth on whether or not the silk stripes ought to be decorated, and if so, how.  Still under consideration.

Roland: More help from Sweden

J.S. from Sweden confirms that the Trio Medieval/Glitterind tune for "Rolandskvadet" is a popular, common tune to sing in Norway.  He provided fifty Norweigan variants on the lyrics, as well as a link to this page.  Of the contents of that, he says:

[I]n the 1840s, Norwegian folk song collector Magnus Brostrup Landstad found 27 stanzas of the Roland song in a handwritten songbook of Laurantz Groven from ca 1800, but there were pages missing in that book, so that the first "complete reconstruction" of the Norwegian version was published in 1890 by Moltke Moe who "reconstructed" it by filling the gaps with his own poetry and changing the order of stanzas to make it more congruent with the Karlamagnús saga. Moe's lyrics are those which are most often sung in Norway today.

The same website says that there exists only one tune from Norway to this ballad which was collected by Hans Seeberg and Olea Crøger in the 1840s from a singer in Seljord in the Telemark region. However, it is seldom used; the Norwegians mostly sing the ballad to a Faroese dance melody which was introduced in 1934 by Klara Semb in her songdance circles. Since the Faroese ballads usually have much longer refrains than the Norwegian ones, the Norwegian lyrics were not long enough to fill out the melody, and so Hulda Garborg translated the Faroese refrain to Norwegian.

Which Faroese song?  J.S. points to this Danish collection of tunes, published in 1908.  Songs 54a-d on pages 124-125 are all variants of the Faroese "The Battle of Roncevaux," and their refrain is exactly the one used in the popular Norwegian version of the song.  And here's a YouTube of the Faroese dancing that dance. 

It's... doesn't sound quite the same, except the cadence on the refrain, but when I look at the transcribed sheet music, I definitely see the very strong similarities.

Trying to find that 1840s tune, I turned up some field notes preserved in... a national library?  I don't see this ballad on those leaves, but the library assigns it the title "Ludvig Mathias Lindeman: [Folkemelodier II]. 'Melodier fra Thelemarkeni."  Seeberg and Crøger are recognized as 'Creators' but Lindeman is the 'collector.'

Lindeman! We've seen him around here before.  "Melodies from Telemark."  Another page of music, with the Ramund that confounded me  before.  Searching for Lindeman's book brings me back to the same collection I examined before, and could not find any Roland in.  Either the referenced website is in error, and there is no tune for Roland in Lindeman's collection, or I'm just not recognizing it.  (Or there's another collection, possibly entitled "Melodies from Telemark," that's not available digitally.)

Anyway!  I think that runs the song's provenance pretty much into the ground.  So what do I do with it?

I'd be lying if I tried to pass it off as "Anglo-Saxon."  It's Continental, in subject matter and in poetic form. 

The tune is as neo-medieval as anything I'd come up with myself.  It's got a narrow melodic range (a fifth) in D-Dorian, and has a simple contour with lots of flat spots.  Guido d'Arezzo would approve of the construction, I think.  And the tune is catchy.  The subject matter is period.

I think it'll make a good performance, albeit an "SCA appropriate" rather than a period one.  But despite its range fitting exactly onto my lyre, I think it should be done a capella or else with harp.  I'll think that over, because of how tempting it is to do epic material with an instrument that probably accompanied epics, but the rhyming form is just plain later than the instrument.