April 11, 2010

Resource for Elizabethan Songs, and a fledgling bardic wiki

I just stumbled across this website, and I'm oh so glad I did!  Magic Music is a compendium of 30 Elizabethan songs with words, melodies and documentation.  Each song is documented to a primary source prior to 1600 - so you can sing these in the SCA with abandon and not worry about the authenticity snob lurking around the corner (or in your brain...if you're me).  And, if you resemble me in that respect, you'll have a great time nosing through the hefty bibliography that's included.  Big, big props to Courtney Allen Powers for putting this together!

Right, so I wouldn't have found that site if I hadn't first found this site:  A Circle of Bards.  This site is just getting off the ground, but as you can see, it's already quite useful!  It's meant to be an online compendium of SCA bardic works.  Right, there are already plenty of those, many of which are linked from the site's bardic resources page.  But I think this page has the potential to go beyond what's already out there.  The wiki format will make it possible for the song collection to be more diverse and exhaustive than other individual collections that I know of (and it's searchable!), and the forum and calendar could lead this site to be a bardic hub of sorts.  I really hope it takes off.  Big, big props to Master Niall Dolphin for putting this one together!

2 comments:

  1. *Blush* you are very kind Isolde

    -Niall

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  2. Thank you for your kind words, you are exactly the kind of user I wrote it for. It was in defense against the dark arts of the authenticity nazi as you note. When I joined I really wished for someone to point to a tune and just say, "That's OK, here's the documentation." so I could just get on with playing some music. Twenty-Five years later, I became someone. Thanks again, C. A. Powers

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