The Armed Man
I stumbled across L'homme armé when I wasn't even looking for February's project. I rediscovered Vladislav the Purple's Medieval Melodies for Filking while looking for a free-use copy of Kalenda Maya in late January - it ended up being serendiptious, since L'homme armé features on the same PDF file as the spring song. Having the music, I idly played through it and thought, "That's a nifty song."
The Wikipedia entry offered a translation (taken largely from, and credited to, the program notes given by early music group Capella Alamire). It all seemed terribly SCA appropriate, if brief.
I do not personally consider Wikipedia to be an adequate endpoint to documentation, but locating information on the song itself, rather than on one of the many masses that took it as a ground, has been challenging. I have at least one good, solid article to look up at the university library: Lewis Lockwood, "Aspects of the 'L'Homme armé' Tradition," in Proceedings of the Royal Musical Association, 1973-74, pp. 97-122. Unfortunately, I did not get to the library before the end of February but intend to remedy that in early March.
Translation Notes
I speak no French. Still, a cursory glance at the original lyrics seems to show an unrhymed refrain and a short verse with an AAA rhyme scheme (possibly approximate - does "ier" exactly rhyme with "er" in French?).
My poetic skills failed to find an adequate restatement of the verse sentiments in AAA format. ABA, especially if the A's were more approximate than exact, I could do. This is an aspect of the work that could absolutely stand to be revised and improved if/when my poetic skills grow.
For the first verse, I ended up adopting the Capella Alamire-based translation almost wholesale, changing only the last word from "mail" to "chain," to almost-but-not-really rhyme with "proclaimed."
To otherwise fit the words and music, a pickup before the first bar was added to accomodate the English "the," and (much like in the original) the word "armed" must sometimes be pronounced as it usually is, as one syllable, and sometimes as two (arméd). Also, the single quarter note assigned to "d'un" in the original ("with a," at "with a hauberk of iron") was broken into a pair of eighth notes rising from D to G to accomodate the English "with a."
Extension
The song is quite brief as it stands, so I added two verses nearly copied from the first to continue to arm the warrior.
CHORUS:
The man, the man, the arméd man
The armed man
The armed man should be feared
He should be feared
In every land it is proclaimed
That each man should arm himself
With a coat of iron chain
In every place they give the word
That each man should arm himself
With a sharp and biting sword
They say in every town and field
That each man should arm himself
With a stout and oaken shield
Elements of Performance
I plan to perform this as a solo vocal piece with drum accompaniment. The switches in rhythmic modes make it quite confusing as a non-drummer to try and sing one rhythmic pattern while pounding another; on the other hand, it forces me to be much more aware of the changing modes and honor them.
The drum pattern I am using is a BUM-ba-dum, one strong and longer beat followed by two lighter, faster beats. At the beginning of the refrain, the heavy beat falls on the longer notes: the MAN, the MAN, the ARMéd MAN. There's a switch after the rest, when we get three notes of equal value, but the last of them falls on a stress: the armed MAN. Then we get the reverse of the beginning, with the stress falling on the shorter notes: the ARMED man SHOULD be FEARED. And finally, a return to the equal notes which, in time, I may choose to stress equally with even drum-beats: HE should be FEARED, or HE SHOULD BE FEARED.
The verses, on the other hand, maintain the long-short rhythmic mode almost throughout; the next-to-last measure reverses it briefly, preventing the verse from being entirely sing-song.
The changes in rhythm have been quite challenging to get into my head and my ear, but they add a great deal of interest and swing to the song.
Comments
You can follow this conversation by subscribing to the comment feed for this post.