Mi Contra Fa

Other ballads I may learn

The Brown Girl - not really on-theme but I like the general F U sentiment.

Crow and [Mag]Pie - For the "Just don't have sex then" crowd.  Raymond Crooke sings it.

The Queen of Elfan's Nourice - When you already have a child but you have to care for a different child instead.  Rachel McDonogh sings it.

The Broomfield Hill - When you have to ensorcel a man because if you don't let him have sex with you, he'll kill you.  A. L. Lloyd sings it.

Lizie Wan - Very much the same as Jellon Grame, except with bonus incest.

 

 

Jellon Grame

Another ballad, shortened.  Raymond Crooke performs it.

O JELLON GRAME sat in Silver Wood,
He whistled and he sang,
And he has calld his little foot-page,
His errand for to gang.

‘Win up, my bonny boy,’ he says,
‘As quick as eer you may;
For ye maun gang for Lillie Flower,
Before the break of day.’

The boy he’s buckled his belt about,
And thro the green-wood ran,
And he came to the ladie’s bower-door,
Before the day did dawn.

‘Ye are bidden come to Silver Wood,
But I fear you’ll never win hame;
Ye are bidden come to Silver Wood,
And speak wi Jellon Grame.’

‘O I will gang to Silver Wood,
Though I shoud never win hame;
For the thing I most desire on earth
Is to speak wi Jellon Grame.

She had no ridden a mile, a mile,
A mile but barely three,
Ere she came to a new made grave,
Beneath a green oak tree.

O then up started Jellon Grame,
Out of a bush hard bye:
‘Light down, light down now, Lillie Flower,
For it’s here that ye maun ly.’

She lighted aff her milk-white steed,
And knelt upon her knee:
‘O mercy, mercy, Jellon Grame!
For I’m nae prepar’d to die.

‘Your bairn, that stirs between my sides,
Maun shortly see the light;
But to see it weltring in my blude
Woud be a piteous sight.’

‘O shoud I spare your life,’ he says,
‘Until that bairn be born,
I ken fu well your stern father
Woud hang me on the morn.’

‘O spare my life now, Jellon Grame!
My father ye neer need dread;
I’ll keep my bairn i the good green wood,
Or wi it I’ll beg my bread.’

He took nae pity on that ladie,
Tho she for life did pray;
But pierced her thro the fair body,
As at his feet she lay.

Fair Mary of Wallington

Gonna see about chopping this down to performance length.  Raymond Crooke's performance for the tune.

WHEN we were silly sisters seven,
sisters were so fair,
Five of us were brave knights’ wives,
and died in childbed lair.

Up then spake Fair Mary,
marry woud she nane;
If ever she came in man’s bed,
the same gate wad she gang.

‘Make no vows, Fair Mary,
for fear they broken be;
Here’s been the Knight of Wallington,
asking good will of thee.’

‘If here’s been the knight, mother,
asking good will of me,
Within three quarters of a year
you may come bury me.’
 
She had not been in Wallington
three quarters and a night,
Till on the ground she coud not walk,
she was a weary wight.

‘Give my respects to my mother,
[as] she sits in her chair of stone,
And ask her how she likes the news,
of seven to have but one.

‘Give my love to my brothers
William, Ralph, and John,
And to my sister Betty fair,
and to her white as bone.

‘And bid her keep her maidenhead,
marry shoud she nane; 
If ever she came in man’s bed, 
the same gate will she gang.

She took out a razor sharp
that was both bright and fine,
And out of her left side has ta'en
the heir of Wallington.

There is a race in Wallington,
and that I rue full sare;
Tho the cradle be full up,
the bride-bed is left bare.
 

New cat-egory of repertoire?

I dwell within the lands of fair Atlantia, between the mountains and the sea.  And as it happened one day, someone noticed that "Atlantia" was but one letter away from "Catlantia," and a virtual fellowship devoted to pet memes and sharing pictures of actual pets was born.  As the Bardic War looms, it seems to me that it would be good to represent Catlantia - as an Atlantian ally, naturally.  

"Pangur Ban" is a natural period piece to perform.  I have Henry Beard's "Poetry for Cats," and I already perform his "Grendel's Dog, from Beocat" often.  Geoffery Chaucer puts a parable about cats in the mouth of the Manciple.  And there's something about a possible Cattes Tale?  (Is this an academic joke? Signs point to yes).  And naturally, that granddaddy collector of animal tales, Aesop, has a few with cats.  And a few more.

And here is a lengthy ballad about a Mayor of London and how he gained his fortune by a cat, just post-period in 1612.  Alas that the cat does not play a larger, more Puss in Bootsy role - he just sells the cat to a king for gold.  And lo, a tune is given!  I need to check out the page a bit to see from whence the tune comes - at a guess, 18th cen at earliest - but it's better than a poke in the eye with a sharp stick.

Edits: But wait, there's more...

• The Wife of Bath compared to a cat
• Pseudo-Chaucerian cat poetry from Medieval Pets
• I wondered if cats featured in Reynard tales!  Evidently yes, but the story is not one a cat-lover would enjoy.

Anglo-Saxon Drinking Song Lyrics

SCORE.  A thousand thanks to Kalara Zrinyi, who posted a link to a story on wassailing, which in turn contained a reference to a song allegedly sung by Harold Godwinson's men on the night before the Battle of Hastings.  It referenced Cecil Sharp, who in turn referenced Wace.

Caveats:

• Written down by an Anglo-Norman
• At least 100 years after the Conquest
• In a document chronicling William of Normandy's righteous ascent to the throne
• Which is now lost, and all surviving copies would have been scribed by Frenchmen who would have no idea what they were looking at when they transcribed the Old English

I am willing to accept all those caveats!

Original, per Sharp:

Bublie creint e weissel
E laticome e drinchheil
Drinc hindrewart e drintome
Drinc helf e drinctome

He translates this as:

Rejoice and wassail
Let it [the bottle] come and drink health
Drink backwards and drink to me
Drink half and drink empty

I am suspicious that "drin to me" is "drink to me" and "drinc to me" is "drink empty," but it does make more sense that way.

 

Composing for alliterative poetry

Sigurth and Brynhild came out really well.  I decided to make it singable, and want to lay out the process as I'm currently exercising it.

Write the Poem

I still compose poetry on paper, not orally. 

Memorize the Poem

The next few steps go much more easily if I've got the poem in memory. Also lets me work aloud and in the car.

Recite the Poem Aloud

I tried to pay close attention to my vocal pitches, as used in recitation.  Where were the natural lifts and falls, and could I use that to guide the melody?

Visualize the Stresses

Recitation didn't unlock a perfect melody.  I turned to an older idea I had.

Alliterative verse (English and Norse) contains four stresses per line, with unstressed syllables placed according to several templates.  The meter is defined, but not regular. So my approach is to assign four pitches - one per stress - and then use linking notes to fill in the unstresses.  Pickup notes appear and disappear at will.  Generally, after I work through the poem, a general pattern emerges.

I could definitely do this on the harp, visualizing the placements of the notes by looking at/playing the strings.  Since I was using commuting time, I imagined the notes. I started with a "high, low; high, low" pattern for the first line of each quatrain.  That sounded too firetruck-siren-y, so I modified my image of the pattern to "high, low; medium, low."  Suddenly, it came out sounding much better.

Interestingly, it also suddenly took on a home-and-away character, entirely unintentionally.  I thought maybe I was doing "re, la; fa, re."  Turns out it was "la, re; mi, re."  "re" is my home/tonic in Dorian mode, so its dominant is "la" - I expect them to go together.  "Fa" is in their family too. The associated "away" is do-so, with "mi" associated.

Get the Repeated Melody Pattern

Since the Norse verse uses quatrains, I thought I'd have four lines of melody.  Well, three - I intended to have the melody for line 1 and line 3 be the same.  I came up with a pattern that seemed to work.

Start to Practice It. Work Out the Details.

Practice shakes out a bunch of things.

1. I lost my second line of melody and started using a melodic couplet, repeated, for each quatrain.  I am still not sure how I feel about this. My test audience of one did not find it too repetitive/cloying, but I am not sure.
2. I found where my literary ways sabotaged me.  Syllables that I designated as stressed in the written poem did not always come out stressed as I sang through it.  English being what it is, in all cases but one, I can shift emphasis without putting a stress on an obviously unstressed syllable.  Example: I was singing "THAN my own LIFE," when I needed an m-alliteration.  "than MY own LIFE" is what was meant.  That's a valid way to stress that sentence - it's not like my old "pork CHOP, pork CHOP" problem.  On the other hand, I should not have alliterated "aMEND" with "misTAKE".  It sneaks by on paper, but becomes very obvious when sung.
3. I found the places where I wanted to vary the melody, mostly for dramatic emphasis.  One of the nice features (? I think it's nice?) of this style is that I can vary the notes for my unstresses to keep it from being too monotonous.  (I'm sort of thinking of the runo music I've got... the structure of that is probably a different post.)  But there are a few verses where I just entirely replaced the first line of music.

Add Color, If Desired

Brynhild is angry in this song.  I sing her lines in an angry voice.  Someone using the traditional ballad performance style (very little emotion expressed) would skip this, obviously.

Add Harp, If Possible

I just got to this stage.  I first try to find my melody on the strings - that's the only way I can figure out what the accompaniment should be.  I still use very simple open fifths - "re la" underneath those parts that operate at "home," and "so do" under the "away" notes.  Mostly.  The short excursion to "away" in the first melody line doesn't seem worth trying to cram an accompaniment shift - there's a little dissonance but that's okay.  The second melody line goes "do so do re" - it's entirely "away," until the final stress brings it home.

I'm still new to singing with the harp, so this part is challenging.  I'm working on pacing the accompaniment so it lines up with the stresses in the melody.  Also, the first time through, it made it weirdly difficult to perform the "variant" melody lines I mentioned in bullet 3, above.  Hoping some practice clears that up.

"Love's Longing" tune

Long time ago, I did a translation of "Nam languens," one of the Cambridge Songs.  It's a short little thing of clear grey light and salt wind, and I rarely perform it as it doesn't have a tune. 

I mentioned it as a companion piece to "O Come, My Sweetest Lover" over the weekend, and a couple days later, I find myself trying recalling some of the words to a tune that, after I think about it for a minute, is the St. Magnus Hymn.  It needs tweaked to fit, but it works pretty well!  That great dramatic rising section halfway through it hits right at "through the cold and through the snow" and I think it's gonna work great. 

The Fortunes of Men

"The Fortunes of Men" is a bit of gnomic wisdom in the Anglo-Saxon Maxims.  In brief: "Some people will die horrible deaths (like these); some people will have awesome lives (like these).  You get what you get and you don't get upset."  Michael Drout, of Anglo-Saxon Aloud, translated it.

For whatever reason, I decided it would make a good song. Maybe it's all the dying, just in time for Halloween?  Quite a lot of the phrases are right out of Drout's translation, but it was still some work making the meter and rhyme work.

Anyway. First draft. Syllables in (parentheses) are pickups or extra unstresses at the end of a line.  They're "good enough for folk music" but I'm still trying to clean them up.  The chorus has a tune, but not the verses yet.

The Fortunes of Men

Often it happens, a child is born
Into his mother’s fair arms
Teach him and tame him until the time comes
Trying to keep him from harm
Clothe him in colors, and care for him well
While at your full breast he clings
Nobody knows while the young child grows
Exactly what winter will bring

Chorus:
These are the fortunes of men, of men
These are the fortunes of men
Some are raised high, and some are cast low, and
Death comes for all in the end

Hoary-heath stepper, the wilding wolf
One man will kill and will eat;
Hunger another fells, mother will mourn
Son had no meat nor no wheat;
Loss of the light of the eyes for this one,
Feet which are lamed for that man;
One in the war in a red pool of gore
Dies for his lord’s last command

Featherless, falling from treetop on high
He seems to play in the air
Spirit departs, goes away from this world
(When he) falls on the tree roots all bare;
Wolf-head another, his misery cold
Treading an alien track
Friendless is he, has no lord to provide
(No) brother he has at his back

Bloody bone-coffin all broken on gal(lows)
Raven takes eyes from his head;
One at the mead-bench, he’s slain by a sword
Wine-words he should not have said
Steward serves the mead, and a man drinks his fill
Drinks it again and again
(Men) call him self-killer, his mouth slurred with drink
Angers his lord, is condemned.

Not all men’s lives are all toil and pain
Given to some is great good
Mead-cups and treasures, his wealth beyond mea(sure)
Hall made of stout and strong wood;
Battle-fame loud, or a master of war
Skill with the sword or the bow
Talent for table-games, played in the hall
Winning the dice with a throw

Wonder-gift given to goldsmith the skilled
Maker of glittering bands
Often he ornaments mail-coats of kings
Kings give him prizes and lands
Falconer trains the hawk proud on his hand
Slaughterer-sparrow he tames
Does on the jesses and feeds him in fet(ters)
Princes will give him word-fame

One man amuses his brothers at board
Brings to men cheer at their beer
At the lord’s feet, the old wise harper sits
Nails on the strings ringing clear
Song leaping out for the men in the hall
Tales given tongue when he speaks
(Of) all of these fortunes that someone might find
This is the fortune I seek

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.

Google Penace: Lyre notes of nobody

Someone uses the search term "lyre notes of nobody" from google.com.ph to get here.  A lot.  I'm not quite sure what they are looking for.

Here's the melody line and lyrics for "Hey, Ho, Nobody at Home" by Ravenscroft.  I know a different tune for the fifth bar, and of course almost all of us know the revised Victorian lyrics.  It was originally "Fill the pot, Eadie," not "Yet I will be merry."  The absolutely! scandalous! reference to drinking had to go, and was replaced with the more generic "merry."

The melody, alas, spans an octave, so you won't fit it on a hexachord-tuned six-string lyre.  It's not pentatonic, so you won't fit it on a pentatonically tuned lyre, either.  You could, however, take that low E in Bar 2 and transpose it up an octave.  Tune the lyre from G to E (or transpose the music down to wherever your lyre is tuned) and you're good to go.