Mi Contra Fa

Book Review: The Improvisation of Musical Dialogue

I am behind on commenting on the books I've been reading.

Summary: Super eggheaded discussion of why performance is an act of creation every bit as important as composition.

As an Amazon Prime member, I was able to 'borrow' Bruce Ellis Benson's "The Improvisation of Musical Dialogue: A Phenomenology of Music" on Kindle for a week.  I'm glad I did, but I don't know that I'll pick it up.

Oh, it was interesting. And when he finally started to talk about the early music movement, I was bookmarking like crazy. Yes, that's a good point! Yes, those are the sorts of questions we have to resolve!  Yes, yes!

But it is, at heart, a philosophy book.  What is a work of music?  Is it the score?  Is it the score plus a particular performance? Is it some Platonic ideal that lies hidden?  Who creates the work?  The composer or the performer? What role, if any, does the audience play?  

Those are interesting questions, particularly since Benson's goal is to challenge the 'Western art music' ("classical" music, which can encompass everything from the Baroque to postmodern) concept of the "true work," birthed by the composer, with the performer relegated to the role of a dutiful servant enacting the composer's wishes. He goes on for a good bit about jazz as an alternative paradigm, where the musician's improvisation is a critical aspect of the creation of the work.  Early music, also rich with improvisation, gets a short section as well.  

This is all discussed in a rich swirl of philosophers I've heard of in passing, and some I'd never heard of.  Lots of lingo, although Benson seemed to do a good enough job of explaining it.  I had to reread a few parts, but I was never hopelessly lost.

But this isn't exactly a practical how-to guide.  I recommend it to frustrated performers who want some grade A academic arguments to toss around during A&S chit-chat time, when they want to assert their legitimacy as creators and artists.

Practice

I have gotten back into a regular musical practice. While this is good for me, it doesn't lend itself well to blogging.  

I've made progress on Karen Marshalsay's "Key Techniques for Harp." That got me back to the ap Huw manuscript, and I'm reading Paul Whittaker's thesis. His take on the tunings makes some sense to me.  I've also been monkeying with the "24 measures" of Welsh music as given in the MS - sort of a series of chord progressions, except there's only two chords, 1 and 0.  Reading Whittaker, I'm getting more sure that I have totally incorrectly parsed what's a 1 and what's a 0.  Onward!

I assumed that 1 would be Dorian home (plus a third and a fifth above) - like it is for, say, Brian Boru's March.  Then 0 would be a whole step below Dorian home, with its associated third and fifth.  It's more like 1 is home and 0 is an away that's a whole step above, but there's at least one note shared between the two.  

The 7 Warranted Tunings are then thrown into the mix. If I'm reading Dooley right, exactly what pitches are home and away change based on what tuning you are using.  So 1 can be Dorian, if you're in that tuning. If you're in the most basic and commonest tuning, 1 is actually the major key!

Runo 3 is ready for voice-only performance. Still don't know how to use harp or lyre with it. I have the melody with fingerings down on nylon harp. Accompaniment isn't solid yet, and I haven't done damping for it (for use on wire). Seems like I ought to be able to apply several of the things from Marshalsay to it...

I have also acquired two books that are the start of learning Old English. And I even started to read them. (Unlike some books, which sit talisman-like on my shelves, as if owning them is enough to gain their knowledge.)

And I was finally hit with inspiration for an "Atlantian style" song I have been wanting to write for a while. Right now, it's not saying quite what I set out to say... that should probably be its own blog post.

 

 

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.  

A Viking Meal: Part 2

Work the night of the dinner:

• Emptied blackberries into strainer in a bowl to drain.  (Should have used the juice for the beverage!)
• Cut the pork shoulder into "morsels" per the recipe (~0.5" cubes).  Belatedly realized that boiled fat, while yummy to nutrition-starved Vikings, was not so yummy to us.  Trimmed fat from the meat.
• Briefly and partially browned the meat in two batches in a skillet; transferred to pot, covered with water.  Brought to boil, down to simmer.
• While meat boiling: Melted half stick of butter (which was half of what the recipe said, if I did the conversions right) and added mustard; stirred while it foamed for a minute or so.  Added chopped scallions, sauteed for a few minutes.  Added salt pork (out of order from the recipe - I wasn't sure I'd be able to fry it per their instructions once all the kale was in), fried it.  Added chopped kale in batches.
• The recipe called for equal weights of pork and kale.  I got one pound of kale into the pan and decided that was plenty of kale.  This was a good decision.
• Removed greens from heat.  Tested pork; it was done.  Removed from heat, fished pork out of stock. Meat wasn't tough!
• This all took ~30-45 min.  The wheat would take 30-40 min to cook, and I had 1.5 hours before guests arrived.  
• In the next hour, I pulled leaves off of an entire clamshell of thyme, put the turnips into water and heated it up once so it wouldn't take long to boil later, transferred ricotta and blackberries into nice bowls, tidied up the dining room.
• T-minus 30 minutes, added 2 cups of stock to the greens. Put some thyme in a tea-ball, put in with turnips. Brought stew and turnips up to a boil.  Added wheat to stew, reduced to simmer. Cooked both ~40 min, adding pork back in to stew at 30 min mark.
• Mashed turnips; drained liquid; added 1-2 Tb butter. Served it forth.
• Transferred stew to serving bowl. Stirred thyme into stew.
• Honey drink: ~1/4 c. honey in 12 oz hot water; dilute with ~36 oz cold water and 2 sippy boxes of apple juice.

Results

Boar Stew: Two thumbs up! Good porky flavor, nice balance with greens, wheat provided good chew.  Stupid thyme was totally worth the effort, added good flavor.  Questions on whether this could be a feast or camp meal - might be worth trying a one-pot version.

Buttered Turnips: Were buttered turnips. Perfectly acceptable, but nobody's going to be asking for the leftovers. I don't think the teaball of thyme made much of an impression.

Cheese and Berries with Honey: Simple, light and fresh-tasting. Apparently my years-long objection to ricotta only applies to Mom's Inside-Out Manacotti.

Honey Drink: Sweet, with just a small acid note from the apple juice.  Straw color, slightly cloudy from juice - looked reasonably mead-y in a glass horn.  Better than the oxymel last year, but unremarkable. I think this dinner really wanted beer.

 

A Viking Meal: Part 1

I am cooking the annual SENEA dinner, taking some pages from An Early Meal (AEM).  The AEM recipes are for four, and I'm having 5-6, so I doubled them. Le menu:

• Boar Stew (AEM)
• Boiled Turnips (AEM)
• Cheese with Berries and Honey
• Honey Drink (Ann Hagen)

And Lady Sabine is bringing some bread.

Boar Stew

Had I gotten my act together earlier, I could have had boar and wheat berries for this.  As it is, we're having pork shoulder (2 lb, darker, more flavorful than pork loin) and einkorn wheat (1 lb box purchased).  Einkorn is an ancient wheat variety that was mutated or cross-bred into bread wheat.  I could not find wheat berries for love or money, even in Whole Foods.  I used to be able to buy them at Weis.  Maybe they are no longer 'on trend'?  The dish also calls for kale (2 lb) and wild leeks (1+ lb, although it trimmed down to less).  I don't know how wild leek compares to cropleek, but the picture for this dish looks as much like a pottage as a stew - everything cut rather small.  Big inch-wide rounds of cropleek didn't seem to go, so I bought spring onions/scallions.  There was no pancetta at the store, but there was salt pork (4-5 oz), and my Internetting tells me that those are approximately equivalent?  I mean, bacon would have worked, too. The recipe also called for ground mustard seed (3 Tb) and fresh thyme.

Night before prep:

• Chopped spring onions. Should I have used all of the green leaves?  I usually stop when the leaves go all hollow.
• I bought bags of pre-cut kale, so that's done
• Chopped the salt pork
• Ground mustard seeds in a mortar 
• Meant to chop up pork shoulder but did not get to it

Turnips

One of those "no duh" recipes.  Boil turnips (3 lb), mash with butter.  I cut the root tip off of a turnip while I did some other prep, and it didn't seem to turn brown. So I peeled and chopped my turnips.

Cheese with Berries and Honey

The dessert course. I thought about making fresh cheese, but just punted and bought 28 oz of ricotta.  I got frozen blackberries (2 lb) rather than fresh - first, less expensive. But second and more importantly, the frozen ones are usually smaller and more flavorful than the big but watery fresh ones, and closer to the wild blackberries my grandpa used to pick.  Wildflower honey.  It's just all going on the table and folks can have what they like from it - plain berries, berries on cheese, cheese with honey, etc.  My prep here was just to leave the bags of berries in the fridge to thaw.

Honey Drink

Ann Hagen suggests, in one of her Food and Drink in Anglo-Saxon England books, that an unfermented drink of water boiled with honey may have been drunk as well as fermented mead.  I could have made Mistress Sorcha's quick mead recipe if I'd thought about it ahead of time, but I didn't, so... honey drink.

I go back and forth with serving this or cold maythe (chamomile) tea.I like chamomile, but a lot of people don't.  Also, it's not at all clear that a tincture of maythe would have been drunk as a beverage.

Review - Viking Women: The Narrative Voice in Woven Tapestries

I do bardic and I'm starting to do textiles, so Lena Norrman's dissertation/book titled "Viking Women: The Narrative Voice in Woven Tapestries" certainly caught my eye.  It was an interesting, if sometimes opaque, read.  Amazon has it for $100, and I would say don't buy it at that price unless this is exactly the sort of thing you are interested in.  

What is in it:

• Chapter 1: Visual and Verbal Art: Orality, Poetry, and Representation in Classical Greek and Old Norse Narratives

This was sort of a discussion on weaving metaphors used to describe poetry, and weaving itself, and famous stories about weaving, and a lot of women's studies terms that were tossed around without any explanation.  She makes a case for weaving being a form of communication, even if all it is saying is, "I am a rich person wearing diamond twill."

• Chapter 2: Culture, Gender, and Storytelling

This and Chapter 3 are the real heart of the thing.  The basic hypothesis is that, since most women did not have a voice in the public sphere, they preserved their stories not in poems but in tapestries or embroideries.  The single biggest 'a-ha!' in the book is the idea that the women who wove the tapestries should be considered as much authors as the men who wrote down versions of the ancient oral poems.  These aren't just decorations - they are sequential art, like comic strips, and the artists have chosen which 'panels' to 'draw' to tell a particular version of a story.  Naturally the tapestry is preceded by the oral poem or tale, just as the written version is - but those oral poems exist in a (documentable) profusion of variants, leaving an artist plenty of latitude in choosing which elements to present.

• Chapter 3: Visual Poetry, Weaving Meaning: Micronarratives in the Nordic Oral Tradition

This is the author's interpretation of the Overhogdal tapestry as showing scenes from the Volsung saga and the Nibelungenlied.  I agree with some of her takes on the scenes - I thought it was Gunnar in the snake pit, too - but I'm less convinced on others.  A figure she supposes is Sigurd with his sword, Gram, is pretty clearly holding an axe, for instance.  

Between this chapter and the previous one, an idea is developed that masculine versions of these stories focus on gold, war, monster slaying, etc., while feminine ones focus on interpersonal dramas of love and betrayal.  Thus, some of the songs in the Codex Regius were, if not by women, then for them - an example of the poet tuning the performance for a particular audience.  It's an interesting hypothesis, although suspiciously in-line with our modern ideas about what men's and women's entertainments are like.  Men like blockbusters and explosions! Women like romance and period dramas!  And maybe they do, but women also like Star Wars and men also like The Godfather.  In an honor culture, betrayal is an inherently dramatic theme with resonances for men and for women.

On the other hand, if the author's reading of Overhogdal is at all right, the women in the tales (Brynhildr, Guthrun) are featured prominently.  Certainly when I first read those legends, it was the role of the women (Guthrun in particular) that caught my attention and inspired my art.

• Epilogue: Saint Birgitta and Gendered Verbal Performance in the Scandinavian Middle Ages

A short epilogue about a 14th century holy woman, who wrote about her visions and was revered as a teacher.  She is held up as an example of a woman speaking in the public sphere, but needing to claim authority direct from God to do so, and some of the negative reactions that got.  Oddly, not compared to, say, Hildegard von Bingen?  Julian of Norwich?  Feels like someone on her committee wanted it added at the last minute.

• Bibliography!

I am unreasonably excited about the bibliography.  In Chapter... 2? 3? there's a discussion of the few women in the sagas who are public poets.  I have been wondering if such existed, and now I have a roadmap to finding them.  There's a further wealth of primary sources (sagas and poems to read) and secondary literature covering the intersections of narrative, performance, textiles, and women's studies, which is an area I'm finding myself very interested in.

All told - I don't regret my purchase, but it's a lot of money.  This is pretty much exactly the wheelhouse I find myself in these days, so it was worth it to me, but if your interest isn't quite as focused - Interlibrary Loan.  

This is not a good book if you are looking for detailed information on how to make tapestries like Oseberg, Overhogdal, or Skog.  It is not a detailed analysis of any of them - even on Overhogdal, she focuses on the 'micronarratives', the small scenes placed among the larger procession of animals.  It's a book about storytelling, when the stories happen to be told as tapestries.

Bits of string

Looking for linen thread for weaving, I stumbled back to the same store that offered the Overhogdal Tapestry book.  I decided this was fate and got a copy.  Most of the pages are dedicated to possible interpretations of the images and the story of the tapestry's discovery. But there is good information on how it was made.  And great pictures!  By a close inspection of the images, I found at least two ways the soumak is worked.  If, as you go from right to left and back again, you wrap your snare so the wrap-back is on top of the prior stitch, you will get V-like rows that look a bit like knitting or tablet-weaving.  But if you go over as you work in one direction, and then under as you go in the other, you get a twill effect.  Hard to explain in words, a picture would be better.  You'd see the same thing if you worked stem stitch back and forth, which this is largely similar to.

I tested both techniques on my tapestry sampler, which hasn't been touched since... was it Battle on the Bay?  I think I understand them.  I am trying to decide if I am pulling the tapestry off the loom so I can weave a seat cover for Pentathalon. 

In other string news, I am seriously doubting my ability to finish the socks in a month.  I thought my hand was fully healed, but just 1-2 hours of work over the weekend seems to have put it on a bad path again. Not going to mess with it.

But! I've also found a reasonably-priced source of sand casting material, so a pewter seal is back on the table as a possibility.

Three Bard Books

I have made a grand total of three books so far.  Here's the retrospective.

Left to right: Book I (2010), Book II (2013), Book III (2015)

Book I: Poetry Written as Poeta Atlantiae

I attended KASF 2010 with a Persona Pentathalon entry.  I'm a little fuzzy on the dates, but I either was, or had just stepped down as, Poeta Atlantiae.  I thought I ought to represent poetry at the Festival, so I printed out all the poetry I had written as Atlantia's poet. I didn't use special paper or fonts, just Times New Roman on whatever was in the printer.

Computer-printed poetry on standard copy paper

I read a few webpages on modern bookbinding, and sewed all of the pages into a single quire.  I did use one piece of cardstock on the outside of the quire, which would serve as the endpapers.  Since I didn't have any idea how to actually sew a binding, this is what held the book together.

A single multi-page quire, whose outer, thickest foila are glued to the bookboards as endpapers.

The whole project was more arts and crafts than Arts & Sciences, but it was fun.  I used a thick boiled wool (scraps from my Order of the Owl cloak) as the cover, since it needed to stand up to the Elmer's Glue.  I made some ornaments of twisted wire - a golden frame, and a compass star (my primary charge). Bookboards were scavenged from an old book. Trim the corners of the wool, fold over, and glue.

Boiled navy wool cover with twisted wire embellishments sewn on

I calligraphed my name and the date on the first page.  I aspire to a mediocre hand.

Calligraphed title page

Here endeth the tale of Book I.

Book II: Bardic Performance Repertoire

I used to memorize all my repertoire.  Then I had kids, went to fewer events, and found that if I wanted to perform at all, I should probably have a crib sheet nearby.  I wanted something more discreet and easier to carry than a big binder, so I thought I could make a book.  This time, I learned a bit about Coptic bookbinding before proceeding. [Posts on the goal-setting, information seach and development, further development, and results for this project.]

The pages were copy paper again.  They mostly have my original work on them, but there's also some stuff that's not mine.  There's a few entire pieces, some titles, or first lines to jog my memory.  I also left blank pages on purpose, and I've written in new stuff on them.  I've tried to do some large initials and other medieval techniques for distinguishing the start of a new piece.

Typewritten original poetry

 

A handwritten golliardic verse (not mine) and a handwritten original song

 

Abstract crayon illumination provided by my younger son

This one had multiple quires of a few sheets each, and the text block was stitched with waxed linen thread in kettle stitches.  The book boards were scavenged again, and they already had a nice red cover and nice white endpapers. I didn't put a cover over the boards, because I liked the red.

Ten (?) quires of two bifolia each. With copy paper, I could have had a lot more pages per quire.

Kettle stitches worked in waxed linen thread

I tore one of the quires while stitching on the front cover. Otherwise, it came out really nicely, and has been very useful for me.

The Red Book of Canterbury

Book III: For Hand-Writing

The Storvik Early Northern European Adhocracy did bookbinding this spring.  I led the group, based entirely on my work on the Red Book.  For paper, we used heavy cardstock in a cream color, which I found recommended somewhere on the Web as a reasonable cheap substitute for parchment (as far as weight goes; texture and curl are not accurately modeled).  I bought book boards for the group, and a big spool of waxed linen thread, and curved needles.  I'd used an S-curved needle for the Red Book, and really wanted plain curved ones for this.

We made quires of two bifolia each, which was more reasonable with the cardstock.  We did something like 10-12 quires and stitched them up.  I'd learned about endbands in the meanwhile, so we put those on, too.

Eleven (?) quires with endband visible.

The covers were stitched on.  I used some garment leather I bought in... 2013? as a cover.  (I had the vague idea of making a Swallowcliffe Down belt pouch with the leather, but it's the wrong type and weight.)  If this had been real parchment, oak book boards, and veg-tanned red goat hide, I'd have gotten hide glue, but it wasn't, so it was back to Elmer's.  I cut a piece of cardstock in half and used that for endpapers, glued on last of all.

Book III open to first page. Book board is visible between endpaper and textblock.

There are no cords - I think that's more Carolingian binding and less Coptic.  I do remember seeing Carolingian book reconstructions with leather tabs sticking up at the top and bottom, so I snipped the leather cover to let me fold the leather over each book board separately.  Worked pretty well! (Except where I snipped in the wrong place, so now the bottom tail is in two parts.)

All the pages are blank, and my plan is to prick them and blind rule them.  I go back and forth on using plain handwriting and calligraphing whatever goes in here.  If I do use calligraphy, I think it'll be a modified hand, with modern-looking 's,' 'g,' 'v', etc.

A small and modest book

New tapestry book

Tapestry Weaving: A Comprehensive Study Guide came in the mail yesterday.  I only got a few pages into it - so far, mostly the basic stuff I found on the Internet, although some very useful rules of thumb on determining sett and weft thickness.

Haven't ordered a loom yet.  May wait until post-Pennsic and see how the bank account looks.

Edmund Ironside Literary Roundup

In this corner: Edmund Ironside: Shakespeare's Lost Play, a c. 1590 play in five acts.  And in this corner Alfgar the Dane or the Second Chronicle of Aescendune A Tale of the Days of Edmund Ironside, a Sir Walter Scott knockoff novella from the Victorian era.

If the play is a lost one, Shakespeare would undoubtedly prefer that it remain that way.  It's not very good, as far as I can tell.  Eadric is the villain, and by far the most interesting character.  Canute is the antagonist, and gets the next most screen time.  His characterization is all over the place - tender towards his young wife, barbaric towards his hostages, noble toward his foes, but also not too proud to win by deceit.  Maybe it's supposed to be "deep and nuanced" but it comes across as more "random and scattered."  Edmund is The Hero - we first meet him showing concern for his common troops - and... well, not much more than that.  There are the required speeches about the indomitable English spirit, naturally.  

The play ends with the Edmund/Canute duel (which is suggested by Eadric in this version, in a last-ditch effort to get Canute to win).  Canute yields, they become besties, and... curtain, with Eadric swearing revenge.  Or something.  The tragic assassination and Eadric's comeuppance are nowhere to be found.

Eadric has a few soliloquies that aren't wretched, but he doesn't have much depth.  Iago, at least, nursed a grudge, had a motive.  Eadric's just a petty, petty man, climbing as high as he can over as many bodies as it takes.  His reason for preferring Canute over Edmund seems pretty weak (Edmund's father elevated him from low birth to high position, so seeing Edmund reminds him of his poor birth? Really?).

The melodrama was much more fun.  There are not one but two! secret passages in this small novella.  Eadric is the moustache-twirling villain he's meant to be.  Edmund accepts him back to court, not because Eadric is a devilishly smooth talker (to an extent that the author can't even really sell it) but because of political realities.  Edmund doesn't trust him, and rightfully so.  The titular "Alfgar the Dane" is the main viewpoint character, and he ends up as Edmund's right hand.  He gets captured by the Danes, so we see Swein Forkbeard, Canute, and Eadric through his eyes.  The author does a much better job setting up all sides as sympathetic (Swein's attacks are precipitated by Ethelred's massacre of Danes on St. Brice's Day).  It also follows the action to it's actual conclusion, with the death of Edmund and the execution of Eadric.  Edmund is still fairly Stock Hero Character, because melodrama.

There's an odd bit where a youth is Fridged (via martyrdom).  I guess it's not really odd, it's just odd seeing it happen to a male character.  Speaking of, THE POWER OF CHRISTIANITY is sort of a theme in the book - the author obviously seems to want to be writing Stories for the Improvement of Young Men, so there's a heavy moralizing component.  

I will definitely be leaning more on the novella for any material I generate on this theme.  The play is free to a good home.