Mi Contra Fa

Nalbinding sock

One sock done!  Sort of.

I had read that you should make the sock 10% bigger so it had room to shrink.  I think I may have gone more than 10%...

If it's not clear, the sock is way big around the heel, and slightly buckled.  I made it wide enough to sit comfortably under my heel, but the back of my heel is a lot narrower than that.  I think the "make a chain and fill in the circle" method would be easier to get a good fit.

I'm thinking of seeing if I can shrink this with some hot water.  Then I have to decide if I want to do the same technique on the other sock - it has the toe box and the blue under-the-foot part, but I haven't brought it back up yet.  I could cut off the blue and do the chain technique if I wanted...

Class notes from the vault

Just discovered I hadn't ever posted the Writing Research Papers class notes. Here they are!

Mysterious harp string breakage - solved

I have had my wire-strung Kilcoy harp for about a decade, and in all that time, I've never had a string break.  I had one go just before the winter solstice, and I had another go last month.

Well, I said to myself, maybe ten years is just the lifetime of these bronze strings.  They'll all be going soon.

I took out my poor neglected instruments two nights ago to tune them up.  Both were about two tones flat!  I started tuning, but it seemed really hard to raise past a tone - so, not wanting to snap strings, I left them tuned a tone flat.  The next night, I raised another semitone so that I was only a semitone flat. Almost there.

The third night, last night, I sat down to bring them all up to tune.  I took up my electronic tuner - and stopped.  The temperament indicator wasn't 'PG,' the Pythagorean I usually use.  As I cycled through my options to set that correctly, I noticed that the calibration indicator was no longer set to A = 440 Hz.  It was some random number like 483 Hz.  A memory came back to me in a flash - taking the tuner away from one of my boys, telling him to stop pushing buttons.

Oh crud.

I cycled the calibration back to 440 Hz and picked up a harp.  Sure enough, I was a half-tone sharp.  I relaxed all of the strings and, except for the new string that's still settling in, everything was in tune.

If I've been tuning almost an entire tone above where the harp is supposed to be tuned to (B = 494 Hz), no wonder I lost two strings!

Fall University 2016

Class notes!  A Guided Tour of Medieval and Renaissance Music and the new Early Period Music Theory.

The Guided Tour went all right. I think I had two students new to the SCA and two who were not.  My "shotgun all the music" approach was... not engaging.  I should have cut the songlist in half and encouraged more reflection and talking.  Was it really that important to have troubador and trouvere?  All three pieces of chant?  And so on.

Early Period Music Theory was better. Large class - 12 or so? - and mostly engaged.  The feedback was that the class was good, useful and helpful; that musical examples of the modes would have been good; and that the class should properly be 2-4 hours long.

I realized I'm teaching classes way too fast. I'm worried about running out of material, and there's this sense of "I have to tell them ALL THE THINGS because there will never be another chance!" So I cram and cram and cram stuff in.  If you're familiar with the topic, it's actually probably a good pace.  But for someone coming to it for the first time, it's a firehose.

So the first half the Early Period Music Theory should be its own class: The Gamut.  The modes can be a class, padded out with listening examples.  Mistress Arianna did an entire class on organum, whilst I tried to cram it all onto one page. She had musical examples, too.  There could be a whole class using Guido's Instamatic Melody Generator on various texts and seeing what we get.

I bought a webcam a while ago to make some YouTube videos.  Seems like I should actually do that at some point...

Weaving Sample

I got out my small picture frame and warped it up with some of my 50 yards of yarn.  I tried making teeny weeny harnesses for it, but it was fiddly and I got frustrated.  I downsized my width to just 14 or so warps (3/4"?) and have been using a pick-up stick (the new one from Pennsic... oh, I haven't posted my Pennsic loot yet, have I?).

I've got around 3" of weaving.  Initial impressions:

• The yarn is fuzzing up, just like the tablet-woven wool belt.
• I think my sett is not right - not enough warps per inch.  (I had to leave room for the pickup stick to, well, pick up.)  But I'm getting a nice enough weft-faced sample.
• No warps have broken yet but I can see how one might

Would a proper harness cause less fuzzing than the pickup stick?  Or would thread wearing on thread be about as bad?

It's very fuzzy and rather fine.  Maybe make a bookmark?

Update: Two of the finer warps were all but vanished, so I decided to take it off the frame.

The business card gives a sense of scale, and I was trying to trick my camera into focusing.

 

Off the loom

 Verdict: Only the very finest threads seemed in real danger of breaking, and that's with having a pickup stick rubbing them on every pick.  The somewhat thicker parts of the yarn were holding up fine.  I wonder if the problem is if you try and use these on a modern harness loom?  I bet those metal reeds would chew right through them. Still, would not want to tablet weave with these. I remember it getting a little dicey with sport-weight yarn- this might just come right apart.

While I was at it, I got out my first weaving (the long red and grey thing seen here) to make some baggies.  I got a new jewel chest at War, and I want to protect my pins and beads from dinging each other up.  Tiny little woolen sacklets coming up!

Hands hurt a lot after, though. Makes me think it was hand-sewing that caused the trouble in the first place.

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Fall University this weekend

I'm teaching two classes, the notes for which I'll post soon: A Guided Tour of Medieval and Renaissance Music, and Early Period Music Theory.

The Guided Tour has holes in it, as any attempt to summarize all of music across our period would.  I grabbed a lot of my favorites, pieces with melodies congenial to the modern ear, and most with pleasing accompaniment.  The class notes have a discography as well as links to YouTube videos (posted by artists) with the same or similar music for those playing along at home. Bonus: I have a sweet medieval mix CD for the car.

Every time I think I've got medieval music theory down pretty well, I learn that nope, there's some subtlety I got wrong.  This iteration of the class is much better than the previous one.  Or will be - I still have to gut and redo the section on organum.  But it's almost ready to go.

An Uncomfortable Realization

Or, The Moral Algebra of Performing 'The Scotsman'

Last Friday night, at the bardic circle at Battle on the Bay, there were several newcomers.  I thought, "What songs did I like hearing when I was new to the SCA?"  In the East at that time, "The Scotsman" ("A Scotsman clad in kilt left a bar one evening fair...") was so popular that within a year or two, it ended up on the "For the love of Mike, sing something ELSE" list.  I haven't heard it sung in a while, so I trotted it out.

As a joke, it's wonderfully constructed.  The blue silk ribbon sneaks in with nary a hint that it'll be a first-place award in the punchline.  It almost always gets a laugh.

So it was a little disconcerting when it came to me, all in a rush, that this is a joke-song about sexual assault.

Seriously. Swap the genders.  A drunk woman passes out, and two men look up her skirt and leave evidence that they'd done so.  That's not a joke, that's the six o'clock news.  And if it's not okay to do to a woman, it's not okay to do to a man.

But it's just a jooooo-oke.  Can't we make fun of anything anymore?

Did you know that over half of all sexual assaults in the US military are man-on-man?  Tea-bagging counts.  "Mushroom tapping" counts.  And, as rare as it is for a woman to report a sexual assault, it's even rarer for a man to. 

It's just guys being guys.

What, are you a wuss or something?

It was just horseplay.

Jokes like this are another way of signaling that sexual assault doesn't need to be taken seriously.  No big.  Betcha wish you hadn't been passed out, eh?  Rather be awake for that, yeah?

At least then you could have consented.

That's not the point of the song.

No, it's not. I don't think it's meant to do anything but make people laugh.

But 40 years on, it's getting clearer that really, it's not actually funny.  If the culture took sexual assault more seriously, maybe this could exist as a clear case of fantasy.  I know a joke whose punchline is "The American doctor thought for a moment, then took the American lawyer and threw him out the [airplane] window."  It's a Readers Digest joke, not all that great, and OMG it advocates murder!  Except not really.  In real life, there is no question that defenestrating people out of airplanes is not okay.

In real life, there are questions about whether or not some kinds of sexual assault are real or not.

OMG who made you the Song Police.

Nobody. I'm not the Song Police. I won't stop anyone from singing this. I won't even get up in their grill about "what you're really singing about."

But I think I've performed it for the last time.

50 Yards of Yarn

That represents about fifty yards, more or less, of fine single-spun wool yarn.  I did it on my top-weighted drop spindle with a hook, purchased at MD Sheep and Wool.

I (awkwardly and probably inaccurately) wrapped it around a ruler to get the sett.  Looks like 24 ends per inch.

I am planning to weave some kind of small sample with it.  I got told at BotB that "of course, practically, you'll need to ply" yarn to use it for anything.  I am curious to see if this is true, or if I can use singles.  (Singles were certainly used in period, but my understanding is that they made good use of the hairy top coat of the sheep for warp threads.  Those were longer and stronger fibers than the fluffy undercoat that's sold as roving to handspinners.)  And I'd rather find out on a small sample than on a big project.

10-Minute Monochord

 

10-minute monochord

 

 

I'm teaching my Early Period Music Theory class next weekend at Fall University. As part of it, I want the class to measure out and divide a diatonic scale and then play it on a monochord. Problem: no monochord.

No problem! The thing I made isn't pretty or period, but it gets the job done. It took about 10 minutes or so, using spare hardware around the house, with most of the time being spent fussing with the right way to wrap the fishing line around the eye bolt so it would tighten when I screwed it in clockwise.

1. I found a piece of scrap wood in the house about 18" long.  Anything longer than 14" or so would have done.  About an inch from one end, I screwed in a wood screw, leaving plenty of metal above the wood.  About an inch from the other end, I screwed in an eye bolt (eye screw?).  Exact distance between them doesn't matter, because I don't care about making this A = 440 Hz.  It's a diatonic do-re-mi scale player, and do can be whatever frequency it needs to be.
2. I got the 80lb fishing line from the cigar box lyre project and tied one end to the screw.  The other end went through the eye bolt, then wrapped around it, like you do for harps, zithers, etc. 
3. Turn eye bolt until fishing line gives a reasonable sound.
4. The moveable bridge is a stack of two LEGOs, with a half-height smooth-topped LEGO on the top.

 

 

 

            


Eye bolt/screw; screw; LEGO stack

To use:

1. Draw a line on a piece of paper.  30 cm is a good length.
2. Divide up a line into a diatonic scale or a gamut or what have you. 
3. Put line under the string.
4. Place the leading edge of the LEGO bridge on the hash mark for the start of your scale/gamut/whatever, and pluck the string.
5. Move the leading edge of the bridge to the next note marking, pluck.
6. Continue until you have heard all the notes you drew

 

Diatonic scale marked out and ready to play