Mi Contra Fa

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. 

Roland for BotB

The theme for Battle on the Bay 2015 is "Normans," so I started poking around for a good verse translation of "The Song of Roland."  My copy from college is nice, and even poetic, but the poetry is free verse-like.

The first one I came across was this new translation, which comes in "normal edition" and "performance edition" - with the text broken up by speaker, for multi-person staging.  I looked at the Kindle previews and it seemed okay.  But in the course of looking for some reviews of it, I came across a mention of the poetic edition that preceded it.

Dorothy Sayers, it turns out, before inventing Lord Peter Whimsey, had an advanced degree in Old French.  And her verse translation of "The Song of Roland" is the Penguin Classics edition!  Some reviewer dinged it for the archaic terms she uses on occasion.  Now, I don't have any problem with "bliaut," but I admit that using "County" instead of "Count" (e.g., County Roland) threw me.  But you know what? That's readily fixed by changing "County" back to "Count."  It may throw off the syllable count of the line, but since there's no fixed meter, the audience will never know.

I've taken laisses 128 - 138 and edited them way down, to about 780 words.  (My 10-min "Beowulf" is 830 words, so this should be a reasonable length. We'll see how it goes as I rehearse it.)  "Roland" uses a lot of repetition as an emphasis device, so I cut a good deal of that out (but not all of it).  I edited out other references that didn't seem critical to get the word count down.

This part of the text is toward the end of the great battle, when all but 60 knights of France have fallen.  Roland asks Oliver how they can possibly inform Charlemagne of what's going on, and Oliver tells him off. (At the start of the battle, Oliver had suggested they signal the king, and now it's too late).  Archbishop Turpin reconciles them, and Roland blows Oliphant three times.  Each time, we cut away to Charlemagne, who hears it, but treacherous Ganelon downplays it.  Finally, another advisor tells Ganelon to cut the crap, and Charlemagne's troop (in a really scenic set of laisses) turns around and heads back - but they will not come in time! 

I am thinking harp accompaniment for this one - more appropriate for Norman era than the lyre.  A vielle would be the best, but I don't do bowed strings.  Maybe I'll try a tune to sing it to.  Something to work on at Pennsic!

24 measures

The (Welsh) ap Huw manuscript gives 24 "measures," sort of like chord progressions (but not really), in its characteristic "binary notation" of 1's and 0's.

Welsh bardic poetry has 24 different verse forms.

A first cut at lining them up is... not terribly encouraging.  There are some measures that would apply very well to some of the poetic forms, but many that don't.  If you're assuming a one-syllable-to-one-number ratio - that is, that: 1101 * 1101  corresponds directly to two sets of four syllables. 

I may be wrong to jump to the conclusion that because 24 = 24, these two things are obviously meant to go together.  For further reading, Standing Stones has a good discussion, this page from Bill Taylor might help, and this FAQ by Mistress Tangwystl (Heather Rose Jones) is interesting.

KASF 2010 Documentation

This was my first Persona Pentathalon.  Some of the entries (the veil) were, ah, not very impressive.  Others (the poems) weren't too shabby at all.  One (the Thing in the Box) provided amusement and merriment all day long.  It was a good time.

Project Overview
An outline of the person who owned all these items.

Red Wool Veil and Fillet
A fancy veil. 

"O Come, My Sweetest Lover" translation and performance
From the Cambridge Songs, as modernly reconstructed.

"Wulf and Eadwacer" translation and performance
From the Exeter Book.

Tafl Board
A tafl game to while away the hours.

The Thing in the Box (NSFW)
Every generation thinks they invented sex...

 

New idea for accompaniment

Ages ago, I had this idea that, to sing/chant alliterative poetry, one should assign fixed tones to the stressed syllables, and then fill in the other syllables as needed.

I was thrilled to find that 'The Rhythm of Beowulf' suggested a similar scheme, a year or three ago.  (Where does the time go?)

Yesterday in the car, I was trying it out.  At a first go, it's really really hard to let go of years and years of singing one way and suddenly sing another.

Then I thought: What if... I played the 'stress notes' on the lyre or harp, and sang the others?  Dividing the work between hands and voice might help maintain the separation between the fixed pattern and the changing ornamentation - sort of like the principle behind playing guitar chords, I guess.

Wow, okay, it sounds a lot less novel when I put it like that. Heh.

Still, that's similar enough to some of the kinds of improvisation that I have done that I think I might be able to get it to work.  Will have to try soon!

Coupled Hands, Early Harps

I hauled out my copy of Coupled Hands by Ann Heymann last night, and located the Bagby early harp essay I'd been looking for (it was in Duffin, not Knighton).

Bagby quoted the harping bits of Tristan, and noted how little it sounded like melody-over-arrpegio style harping.  Then he brought up a book on Shona mbira that he came across, and how similar the descriptions of mbira players are to the medieval descriptions of harpers, and how the effects of the music played are similar.  He insists that he doesn't want to "transcribe mbira riffs" for the harp, but suspects that this "tightly interwoven" structure might be suitable to a small 10-13 string romanesque harp.

The usual suspect pointed out that mbira music uses a 3:2 cross-rhythm (hemiolas, but with the 3 and the 2 played on separate hands simultaneously rather than interjecting the rhythmic change into the melody - the 1-2-3, 1-2-3, 1-2, 1-2, 1-2 that's Hemiola 101).  I'm going to go out on a limb and say that I doubt cross-rhythms were a major feature of early harp.  This doesn't mean that Bagby's intuition is incorrect, but to achieve "tightly woven" texture, I think we'll need a different specific technique, one that's more reflected in the Western musical tradition.

I've seen Ann Heymann play live, and she hits a lot of the notes that Bagby calls out: the flashing, hypnotic hands, the ornamented, living music that coils around on itself in endless variations.  Heymann has pioneered a lot of research into historical harp technique, and "Coupled Hands" is her answer. (Or was, in 2001. I expect she's continued to refine and update it.)  I've had the book for most of a decade and done little with it, so I pulled it out for a review.  I was also interested to see how it might play with "Key Techniques for Harp" (which does have a few pages on coupled hands that I should review more closely now).

"Coupled Hands," the book, is three things: a theory of practice, a set of techniques, and a tunebook.  The theory is groundbreaking: Heymann rejects the melody-over-arrpegios and looks to highly ornamented melodies, like the Scots pipers and fiddlers employ.  Accompaniment is a single string, played with a stressed melody note, plus whatever one can build out of the resonances of the melody (Heymann plays wire harp, which has a long sustain).  Melody is divided between the two hands, with a strong bass hand taking the stressed notes and the treble hand taking unstressed ones.

I was expecting a long list of techniques, a la the ap Huw manuscript - but there's not.  Two major bass hand methods, plus the ap Huw thumb choke to enable quick, clear melody ornamentation in the treble.  The bulk of the book is tunes, all notated in Heymann's style, showing the application of these methods.  Having heard her play, I don't think "more" automatically equals "better" - this small handful of methods is extremely versatile.

That said, the ap Huw figures seem to be relegated to unstressed ornamentations in this paradigm, when my (very limited) experience with the pipes makes me want to put grace notes right onto the major stresses.  One could execute an ap Huw figure with the bass hand on the stress, I suppose, but one would have to drop the accompaniment string to do so (or play it with the treble hand? but then that leaves treble hand out of position for the next bit of melody...)  Obviously I need to read Marshalsay's pages on integrating the two.

I'm also a little dubious about the fixed nature of Combination Technique - the same two fingers always sound notes, and two different fingers always damp.  Always.  With treble hand stepping in to play whatever comes directly after the stressed note, I suppose bass hand is spared trying to ever play the same note, rapidly, with the same finger... Really, what I need to do is actually try it.

Slippery like sand

I've had the Winchester Troper "Kyrie" on repeat in the car for a few days now and I still can't say I've got the thing memorized.  There are so many notes, so much stepwise motion, so few syllables to help remember what comes next - I am not at all surprised that this style of music required the invention of a system of notation.  Nor does the form of the earliest notation surprise me - I find myself thinking that just a wavy line to help me remember if the next step is up or down or on a new syllable would be perfect.

I'm also making no progress in directly adapting the tune to the Nam languens poem.  The antiphonal verses are so different than the "Kyrie" itself - it works for that song, as structured, but it really doesn't work for a cohesive single poem.  And the music of just the "Kyrie" proper is just too short to stretch over eight lines.

So I really need to tuck the "Kyrie" into the back of my head as inspiration and just compose new music.

Gnomic Verses with Harp

A tech-enabled experiment!

Poem: A selection of the gnomic verses from the Exeter Book as found in "The Earliest English Poems," trans. Michael Alexander, Penguin Books 1991.

Music: A progression of open fifths: DAda (x4), CGcg (x4), repeat for one minute ending on DAda

Recording software: Audacity

Microphone: Initially, the mic on the webcam was picking up too much noise so I tried the directed mic-on-a-stick I have (a $10 cheapie).  Noise problem solved, audio quality fairly wretched.  On a different computer, I did once get a good recording off of this thing...

Recording Notes: Place mic near harp soundboard to record music.  Place mic near mouth to record words.

Mixing: I recorded the music and spoken word components separately, in different Audacity files.  Then I copy-pasted the spoken word track into the music project and "Saved As" a third project.  I had to balance the two tracks a bit, turning down the harp and turning up the words.

Technical Difficulties: Make sure Windows Vista Defender is NOT running before doing ANYTHING.

Result: Can be heard here (MP3, ~ 1 Mb). 

Conclusion: It's not exactly a show-stopper, but there's nothing wrong with the very simple progression as an underlay.  I stress again that they were recorded separately, with no attempt to align the words with the shifts in the music.  The recording itself is fairly crap, but it does let me hear roughly what I sound like without me having to play, recite and listen all at the same time.

Future Work: Try it with lyre. Also, memorize the selection of text.

What I Do With My Lyre

Again, for those who may be coming in late, the instrument under discussion is the six-stringed Saxon lyre.

Improvise Music
The main thing I do with my lyre is noodle out tunes on it.  Using the playing technique described yesterday, I can sit and make up music.

I use rhythmic or melodic themes or tropes to keep things sounding different, or sometimes I will play in another mode.  I vary tempo and mood between pieces as well.  There is really quite a lot you can do, melodically, on six strings.

Accompanied Singing
So far, I have one performance-ready piece: my sung translation of Wulf and Eadwacer.  I have tried strumming only about one note per measure, and every note.  Both seem to work pretty well.  I still generally play with the Dorian drone on, and just echo the sung melody.

Accompanied Recitation (Current Work)
I have only tried this a few times.  Two early attempts used harp to accompany Anglo-Saxon poems (the Exeter Book riddle for "fire" and For Silvanus Perrin).  In both cases, I used two octaves' worth of fifths (e.g., D-A-d-a), moving almost randomly around the harp - just sure to end on tonic.

Those seemed to go over all right, but the music and poetry didn't seem well-matched.  I'm not sure if they need to be.  I'm not sure if the music should be all over the place, for 'interest,' or if just a home interval (D-A) and an away interval (C-G) would be sufficient.  They feel boring to play, but the listener will be primarily attending to the words, not the music.

I have listened to Benjamin Bagby and Ann and Charlie Heymann do recited early medieval poetry to more complicated music (on lyre in Bagby's case) but I'm not yet sure exactly how.  Bagby says he improvises, but also that the themes are mostly settled after years of practice.

Experiments in private have been dodgy.  It's hard to recite, play and listen to yourself do both at the same time.  I believe I will need to enlist technology.  Audacity allows for the recording of multiple tracks of sound.  I can record myself reciting a poem, and then record different kinds of accompaniment, from a single repeated interval, to "home and away" intervals, to different melodies underlying the text.  Then I can listen to them separately, to hear what they sound like.

Patterns

Here's a short video, developed for math and science curriculum at schools, where a modern movie soundtrack composer explains how he uses patterns to write music.

A lot of medieval and Renaissance music uses repeated patterns, melodic and/or rhythmic, too.  The main trick is, they are often different patterns than the one a modern composer would use. 

This is why, to compose modern medieval music, you need to listen to and learn about actual medieval music - to understand what patterns work, and which don't.