Mi Contra Fa

ap Huw Measures: Cadences

There are 24 measures of cerdd dant in the ap Huw manuscript.  Looking at them today, wondering what the various punctuation marks might mean  - . and : and ) are used - I noticed something else.  Many, but not all, of the measures have sub-elements that are 4 'digits' long.  The ap Huw uses a binary tablature, with 0s and 1s corresponding to something like one measure of "away" or "home."  So I've been practicing mak y mwn hir, 1111 0000 1010 1111 0000 1011, as six lines of four-bar melody.  The actual melody is improvised, drawing on the "home" notes when there's a 1 and on "away" notes when there's a 0.* 

*With two caveats: One, I don't think I've got the notes sorted correctly into "home" and "away" bins yet, according to the Bragod website anyway.  Two, I definitely use the "home" or "away" note on the stressed notes of the measure, but maybe not on the unstressed.  I use the "other team" as passing tones or such.  Dunno if that's exactly right, but considering that a lot of the ap Huw ornaments sort of require it, I think I'm OK.

ANYWAY the point of the post is: Although there are 24 measures, if you look at the last four digits of each pattern, there are only 5 cadences in use:

1111

1011

1101

0011

0001

That seems like a useful thing to know!  Possibly also misleading - for example, while there is no 1001, there is a 10001.  Looking only at the last four digits may not be the right call when universally applied.  Still, I thought it was worth noting.

Spinning notes and flax

I have been working on my spindle.  It's just a dowel with a large glass bead on it (low whorl).  Version 1 had a notch cut into the top, like the Oseberg spindle, and that worked if I wanted to do a half-hitch.  But I'm intrigued by all the medieval spindles that are just long and pointy at the top - no notch, no obvious place to secure a half-hitch.  I went back to 15th Century Spinning and worked a bit more at trying to copy her technique.  I think I get it - you loosely hold the spindle between middle and ring finger, while thumb and pointer finger spin it.  Now the need for a tapered top becomes clear, as the 0.25" dowel did not want to spin easily between my fingers.  I whittled it down and did a little supported spinning - I will need practice before I can spin it between my fingers but not drop it.

I had the opportunity last week to stop by the American Revolution Museum at Yorktown (formerly the Yorktown Victory Center).  They are rebuilding the whole facility with a grand opening in the spring, but I did get to stop by the colonial farm for the flax processing demonstration.  (They also have a pig butchering-and-salting demo on Thanksgiving weekend, which would be really need to see!)  The flax processing had six steps.  (These are mostly notes to myself and my own memory - if you are reading this, you can Google "breaking flax" or "scutching flax" to see the equipment that's used.)

• Harvest, followed by drying
• Retting (rotting, essentially) in water
• Drying again
• Breaking.  This was the first demonstrated step.  The breaker is a wooden gizmo about waist height, hinged at one end.  The colonial-garbed docent first crushed the flax stalks between two flat surfaces at the open end of the breaker to crack the outer material. He said some people skip that step, but he thinks it's effective.  Then, he laid the flax stalks across the "teeth" of the breaker and slammed the handle down.  Lift, pull the flax a little towards himself, slam. Lift, pull, slam.  Lift, pull, slam.  Then he turned the bundle of flax around so he could smash the ends he'd been holding.  
• Breaking results in exposed flax fibers and a bunch of crunchy stalk bits.  The scutching board is next - a flat, vertical wooden board.  Hold the flax against the board and use a dull wooden scutching knife to scrape down, removing the worst of the crunchy stalk bits.
• Finally, the hackle. It's like a big toothy dog brush.  The docent liked to lay the flax through the teeth at about a 45 degree angle, but then pulled straight back towards himself, so that the fibers pulled more strongly against the teeth.  Just as you would do for long hair, he did the tips, then a little up from the tips, the half the bundle, and so on.  The short flax fibers and crunchy bits caught in the hackle are what he said are "tow," lower-quality flax that can be spun for lower-quality linen.  In his hand was the long-staple flax for making good linen.  And I got to take the flax home!

Only weird bit - the docent told me that linseed oil was toxic, so you had to be careful with the retting water and handling the linen itself.  Now, it does not surprise me that water which has had plants rotting in it isn't healthful to drink, but I thought traditional spinners often ran the flax over their lips to wet it?  Well yes, perhaps, said the docent, but it isn't good for you.

After I left, I remembered that oil-rich flax seeds are sold as a health food.  So I did some Googling.  Linseed oil is perfectly safe in normal doses.  Yeah, if you take a megadose of supplements, it can have some bad side effects, like doing straight shots of oil tends to have on a body!  The museum oddly does not have an email contact address, so I think I will write them a short note thanking them for the experience (it's a really cool museum and re-construction!) but also pointing out that maybe they should double-check that part of the docent script.

Kalevala Runo 3: The Singing Contest

My resolution to practice my harp again has mostly been working.  Keeping it very very limited in scope seems to have helped me actually do it.  So hurray!  Now to see if I can keep it up through the rest of the holidays.

My approach was to take one new period (or in this case, period appropriate) song to learn, and one of the ap Huw song structures to learn.  And the song I picked was "Vaka vanha Vainamoinen," from Lani Thompson's My Kantele Is My Teacher.  (I sneakily thought that a 5-note kantele tune on harp might then also get ported over to lyre.)  It's a Kalevala tune.

The Kalevala is the national folk epic of Finland.  It was collected and collated in the early 1800s.  No single singer ever sat down and performed the Kalevala, start to finish. Rather, Elias Lönnrot (the collector) gathered the songs of many poem singers and shaped them into a single coherent whole - sort of like what Thomas Malory did for the Arthur legends.  

Thompson helpfully included some of the lyrics for the tune - in Finnish.  I Googled them, and came up with... more Finnish lyrics.  But a touch of Google Translate helped me correlate the runo to John Martin Crawford's 1888 translation over at sacred-texts.com.  It appears to be Runo 3, about a young hotheaded rune singer who challenges the hero-god figure Vainamoinen to a musical duel. The translation isn't alliterative, like the original, nor rhyming, but it does scan in the original meter.  So I could sing it to the music that I have.

Now it also happens that I have The Kalevala Heritage, which contains old recordings of Kalevala singers (some were recorded on wax cylinders!).  And track 9, "The Singing Contest," is the same tune as the kantele tune I have.  The lyrics are not identical with the "official" Kalevala, but I'm not surprised by that.  Lönnrot included one "authoritative" version of the runo, but naturally it exists in different forms and lengths in the wild.

So I'm fairly well convinced that I've correctly matched the tune to the poem.  Next problem: Thompson gives three lines of a melody, each line 32 notes/syllables long.  Each line matches a Kalevala verse.  So I could sing three verses to the music I have.  Do those three verses have to all be part of a larger uber-verse?  That would really limit the ways in which I could cut down and re-organize this for performance.

Facebook to the rescue!  The Atlantian Bards and Performer's Guild page got me in touch with Hakon of Ponte Alto, who has also been studying Kalevala performance.  He said his impression was that you'd just keep cycling the verses through the available melodies, without worrying about matching groups of three verses.

After that, reading some of the liner notes to "The Kalevala Heritage" and also the notes on "From the Land of the Kalevala," I learned some more about the performance of the runos.  They were performed by pairs of singers, a master and an apprentice (more or less - a more and a less skilled performer).  The master would sing a verse, and the apprentice would repeat it - giving the master time to recall the next verse and possibly plan variations on the melody (as is done in other folk oral epic traditions, and I really need to write up my references for those). I listened carefully to my recording of "The Singing Contest," and it actually seemed like the three lines of music collapsed into one or two lines of music by the end.  I'll have to listen a few more times, but it may be the first verse Thompson gives was only sung once, at the very start of the runo (at least, by this particular singer for that particular performance).

Finally, lyrics.  The Crawford translation ran 16 pages when I put it into a Google doc.  I began cutting.  There was a definite tension - repetition is a huge poetic feature of the Kalevala, and yet repetitions are also the easiest things to cut!  I tried to leave a few in for flavor, but removed most.  I removed most of Joukahainen's lame attempts at wisdom (because that seriously went on for pages); I removed his mother warning him not to fight Vainamoinen; with sad heart, I removed the verse where Vainamoinen pretty much calls him a little punk and a bad driver, and to get off his lawn/road.  But after I got it down to 45 verses that I thought told the whole story, I went back with a razor and managed to get it down to 30.  That's about where my "Matty Groves" comes in.

Aaaand that's when I realized that this had gone well past "harp practice" and was becoming "major performance development project" and thought I should put up a few notes on what was going on. 

Music Goals

Decluttering, I ran into old papers and books for my music, and as usual, I started to feel like I should wanted to actually do something with them. (No shoulds!)

Trouble always is, I want to do ALL THE THINGS and so end up doing none of them. Too overwhelmed.

I'm going to go back to my piano classes from when I was ten.  I usually had some warm-up or technique exercises and some songs to play.  My son, almost ten, is usually only practicing one song at a time.  (So he says. The handouts that came home said to make sure he practices for 15 min, but if there's just one song and it takes 30 sec to play... He's not doing 30 reps, you know?)

I will take one (1) (uno) (not a couple) (just one) of the apHuw patterns as a warm up, and improvise on it.  Then, I will take one (1) (etc.) of the songs I have printed out - either the kantele ones, or the Regia Anglorum ones - and do it 5x through.  They are mostly super short, so this isn't a big time sink.  I think to start, I will do this on the harp.

Leechdom Recipes

I'm finally reading through my copy of Pollington's Leechcraft, which contains translations of three Old English leechdoms: the Lacnunga, the OE Herbal, and Bald's Leechdom.  I picked it up more for an interest in the charms, but then in Bald, something caught my eye. One remedy called for seasoned hen, boiled with cabbage/kale, and served to the invalid with good broth.  Chicken soup!

Now, there is an Anglo-Saxon cookbook out there; Duke Sir Cariadoc has written a negative review of it.  One flaw among several is the author's use of leechdom cures to authenticate her dishes, when the dishes look almost nothing like the leechdom cures 'authenticating' them.  I want to avoid that.

A quick tour through the Lacnunga last night turned up enough potential recipes for a meal, although not for a cookbook.  Some hew closer to the original cures than others:

• Honey Butter Beets: one cure calls for beets (unclear if root, leaf, or both) "boiled" in honey and butter.  Assuming this is some sort of saute, rather than literal immersion in a vat of boiling butter (frying), that's doable.
• Radish Digestif: Sliced radish sprinkled with salt, served with small amount of vinegar to sip.  Original cure (for heaviness of the stomach) did not say to slice the radish, but otherwise the same.
• Blackberry Drink: "Give him crushed bramble berries [blackberries] to drink."  We can do that!  I'd probably thin it out with some water to make more of an agua fresca and less of a smoothie, but could do either.
• Pepper-Wine Sauce: Original is an ointment, just pepper in wine, smeared on.  Pepper the wine and cook to reduce it, and you have a nice sauce for meat.
• Mashed Parsnips with Ale: Original had the (raw?) parsnip pounded and left to soak in ale or wine overnight, and then drunk by the patient.  Could be a raw parsnip salad, but I think I lean towards warm mashed parsnips flavored with a bit of ale.
• Celery Egg Salad: Okay, this starts to go farther afield.  The original cure was a salve: wild celery leaves, raw egg whites and vinegar, smeared on.  Chopped celery leaves, chopped cooked egg whites, and a vinegar dressing sounds like a reasonable salad.
• Beet Leaf Omelette: Also farther afield.  The original called for an egg-based poultice to be wrapped in beet leaves. If one used beetroot for the honey butter beets, one could put the beet greens into an egg dish (perhaps a tart?).
• Asparagus and Kale Saxondaise: This takes most of the food ingredients of a multi-step cure, which are in no way combined into a single dish but are rather 'layed on' in a particular order over several days.  Asparagus and kale are dressed in a Hollandaise-like sauce of egg yolks and bacon fat, seasoned with smoked salt.  (The original called for an eggshell-full of salt to the burnt, and the burnt salt used.  You could try this also.).  There is another cure that calls for a raw egg, soaked in vinegar for three days, to be beaten with butter, set a little over the coals (to thicken?) and then served.  So the idea of an egg-thickened custard or sauce isn't impossible.

With either some roast pork or beef for the pepper-wine sauce, or else Bald's chicken soup, and also some pottage or bread, you have the makings of a nice meal here, I think.  Not all at once - that's a lot of vegetable dishes.

There were a few others I'm not recalling (but that I wrote down), and there's still two leechdoms to go through.