Mi Contra Fa

"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. 

Epics

I have this idea that I should do a big old series of story-songs.  Choosing the subject matter is the hard part.

• A few years ago, I wanted to do a Love Story cycle composed of translations of existing poems (Veni delectissime, Wulf and Eadwacer, Deor, Love's Longing, and The Husband's Message). They're all lyrics (I think), not narratives, but they look kind of like a story if you line them up and squint.
• Parts of the Heaney Beowulf.
• Eustace the Monk.  He's a swashbuckling monk-pirate-sorcerer-mercenary, and some version of him actually existed.
• Ditto on Hereward the Wake.  He was Robin Hood before Robin Hood was Robin Hood.
• I've already done a prose version of part of the Nibleung.  That whole cycle has tons and tons of stuff.
• Oh my gosh, I've been reading about the Merovingian Franks and they're like a freaking soap opera.  Even if you figure Brunhilde and Fredegunde were made 50-100% more villainous than they actually were by the churchmen they pissed off, they're still pretty amazing.

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...

 

Holy Pork Chop goes to the East!

Maestra Sol la Cantor sings The Holy Pork Chop Song!

 

New MP3 for Non Sofre (Holy Pork Chop Song)

Only took me two months to pull this together for Mistress Linette:  Link goes to MP3.

"Veni, delictissime" Performance Development

Dun Carraig is having a Beowulf-themed birthday event in about a month, and I've been asked to perform. Which means it's time to actually get some of these dusty pieces performance-ready!

I really do find Sequentia's tune (on their "Lost Songs of a Rhineland Harper" CD) for "Veni, delictissime" better than what I came up with, so I will shamelessly co-opt it.  The piece is so short, I'm thinking that I'll do the Latin and the translation.  I mean, it's three short verses and I can whip through them in 30-45 seconds.  Doubling the performance time is hardly a burden.

I think the tune has mutated in my head.  I should listen to the CD to refresh.

Roland: Tunes

Remember this page of Norwegian folks songs?  #10 on that page is our song.  Click through to find two different tunes given.  The first tune is the one used by Trio Medieval and Glitterind.  The second tune is the first one given in that Danish 1908 book of Faroese tunes; there are four tunes total given.

They are similar but not the same. Most notably, in the second and fourth lines, the more modern contour proceeds through scale degrees 5-3-4-1-3-2-7-1.  The dance tune proceeds 5-3-4-3-1-3. (EDIT: Scale degrees are for Dorian mode.  Add 1 to all the numbers to get the scale degree for the major scale.)

The "2-7-1" cadence is a major folkie thing, IMO.  The Faroese dance does give an alternate tone on degree 2 for the very final cadence; it gives 3-5-1, with a smaller note on 2 written under the 5.  Harmony on a fourth?  A variant? I'm not sure.  And some of the other tunes at least do use scale degree 1, although not that I noticed in that particular telling pattern.

I'm not surprised that I had a hard time telling that the tunes were in fact different at first look.  But now I know why the video of the Faroese dancers didn't quite sound like the other performances.

I'll have to give a more careful listen to some of the Faroese tunes.  It's sort of a philosophical question - all the tunes under consideration are only documentable to the 20th century, but the Glitterind tune with that cadence sounds even more 20th cen to my ears.  But it also sounds good.

Tablature for comparing the two tunes under the cut.

Roland: Revision

"Olivant" in the original was not "Oliver" but rather "oliphant," the elephant ivory horn.  I was wondering why Oliver was blowing Roland's horn!

The original has "blaumen" (blue men?) for the Moors.  Okay, the religious war theme is tricky enough already without going there.  I just call them Moors for the most part.  I use 'heathen' a few times, hopefully understood as a descriptor and not a pejorative?

I saw in the Faroese songbook that their version has masculine rhyme, too.  So nyah!

Tidied up the scansion in verse 3, corrected a few typos.

-----------------

"Six of my earls will stay at home to guard the rings of gold
The other six in heathen lands are swinging their iron cold"

CHORUS
Ride they out from Frankish lands on horses finely saddled
Blow the horn Oilphant at Ronsavollen      (or Roncevaux, dealer's choice)

Raised they up their silken sails high upon the masts
Sailed they to the heathen lands before two weeks had passed

Oaken oars and anchors strong then touched the clean white sand
Next was Roland, king's own friend, the first upon the land

Slaughtered they at Roncevaux for two days and for three
On Roland's sword the Moors did die; a scythe they could not flee

The sun in the sky was blotted out as Moors their spears did throw
A frightened fellow Frankish man asked Roland his horn to blow

He set the horn to his bloody mouth, the blast heard o'er the fray
Over mountains went the sound; it was heard three days away

Charlemagne the mighty king cries with grief and woe:
"What has passed with my own dear friend that he sounded such a blow?"

Charlemagne the mighty king came to the heathen land
Dead lay Roland, king's own friend, his sword still in his hand

Buried at home were the mighty earls and many a tear was shed
Their ship was full of gems and gold and the heathens were left for dead

Roland: More help from Sweden

J.S. from Sweden confirms that the Trio Medieval/Glitterind tune for "Rolandskvadet" is a popular, common tune to sing in Norway.  He provided fifty Norweigan variants on the lyrics, as well as a link to this page.  Of the contents of that, he says:

[I]n the 1840s, Norwegian folk song collector Magnus Brostrup Landstad found 27 stanzas of the Roland song in a handwritten songbook of Laurantz Groven from ca 1800, but there were pages missing in that book, so that the first "complete reconstruction" of the Norwegian version was published in 1890 by Moltke Moe who "reconstructed" it by filling the gaps with his own poetry and changing the order of stanzas to make it more congruent with the Karlamagnús saga. Moe's lyrics are those which are most often sung in Norway today.

The same website says that there exists only one tune from Norway to this ballad which was collected by Hans Seeberg and Olea Crøger in the 1840s from a singer in Seljord in the Telemark region. However, it is seldom used; the Norwegians mostly sing the ballad to a Faroese dance melody which was introduced in 1934 by Klara Semb in her songdance circles. Since the Faroese ballads usually have much longer refrains than the Norwegian ones, the Norwegian lyrics were not long enough to fill out the melody, and so Hulda Garborg translated the Faroese refrain to Norwegian.

Which Faroese song?  J.S. points to this Danish collection of tunes, published in 1908.  Songs 54a-d on pages 124-125 are all variants of the Faroese "The Battle of Roncevaux," and their refrain is exactly the one used in the popular Norwegian version of the song.  And here's a YouTube of the Faroese dancing that dance. 

It's... doesn't sound quite the same, except the cadence on the refrain, but when I look at the transcribed sheet music, I definitely see the very strong similarities.

Trying to find that 1840s tune, I turned up some field notes preserved in... a national library?  I don't see this ballad on those leaves, but the library assigns it the title "Ludvig Mathias Lindeman: [Folkemelodier II]. 'Melodier fra Thelemarkeni."  Seeberg and Crøger are recognized as 'Creators' but Lindeman is the 'collector.'

Lindeman! We've seen him around here before.  "Melodies from Telemark."  Another page of music, with the Ramund that confounded me  before.  Searching for Lindeman's book brings me back to the same collection I examined before, and could not find any Roland in.  Either the referenced website is in error, and there is no tune for Roland in Lindeman's collection, or I'm just not recognizing it.  (Or there's another collection, possibly entitled "Melodies from Telemark," that's not available digitally.)

Anyway!  I think that runs the song's provenance pretty much into the ground.  So what do I do with it?

I'd be lying if I tried to pass it off as "Anglo-Saxon."  It's Continental, in subject matter and in poetic form. 

The tune is as neo-medieval as anything I'd come up with myself.  It's got a narrow melodic range (a fifth) in D-Dorian, and has a simple contour with lots of flat spots.  Guido d'Arezzo would approve of the construction, I think.  And the tune is catchy.  The subject matter is period.

I think it'll make a good performance, albeit an "SCA appropriate" rather than a period one.  But despite its range fitting exactly onto my lyre, I think it should be done a capella or else with harp.  I'll think that over, because of how tempting it is to do epic material with an instrument that probably accompanied epics, but the rhyming form is just plain later than the instrument. 

Mailbag: From Sweden!

I am always thrilled when people email me about the blog.  I am doubly thrilled, this time, as J.S. from Sweden wrote with some information relevant to the Roland project, and an offer to assist with understanding the Scandanavian sources.

He confirmed that the "medieval ballads" are just about what the Child ballads are for English-speakers: collected in the 19th and 20th centuries, but with subject matter that could be much older: "They are called 'medieval' because they usually have aristocratic protagonists in what looks like a medieval setting, plus that it is assumed that Scandinavians started to sing them when the ballad genre reached Scandinavia from the continent some time around the 12th century."  There are articles on the possible evolution of that ballad genre, and I will probably try to get my claws into them.

There were some ballads written down in the 16th century (I linked to some of the 19th century English translations of them a bit back), but again as in the English case, the tunes were all collected by folklorists in the late 1800s and early 1900s. 

So we're definitely in the "SCA-appropriate, period subject matter, not actually period" realm.  Still a worthwhile project, I think, though.

J.S. also cleared up some matters of translation:  "'Kaempevise' is, by the way, correctly translated as 'heroic ballad'. [Google translated it as 'Giant Display.']  (The usual ambiguity of translations: 'kaempe' can be both giant or hero, and 'vise' can be everything from ballad to nursery rhyme and lots of other words too...). 'Justin Bieber viser kæmpe Jesus-tatovering' means "Justin Bieber shows a big Jesus tattoo."

And now you know!