I may have found a reason to record

A lot of SCA bards cut albums.  A few have asked me if I have one, and the answer has always been "Aw, HEEEEEEEELLZ naw!"  I need this to be my hobby.  And while I may be serious about doing it well and serious about teaching, I need to stay on this side of "serious" in general, right?  I need this not to feel like a job.  And producing a CD, and then trying to promote said CD in order to recoup costs, would start to feel like a job.  And then it would stress me out and make me enjoy it less.  I went through this years ago with acting, I learned my lesson.  I love this a lot, but I don't wanna go pro - not even semi-pro, not even hemi-demi-semi-pro.

But I think I've found a reason to record my songs.  I've reached the point where I have too many songs to keep reliably practiced up.  So I find that I'm spending all of my time practicing the songs I haven't played in a while, rather than writing new work.   I feel like I'd like to record my songs so I can have them somewhere in a practiced, finished state.  I want to be able to take out a CD and say, "that's my song!" or to listen to it to remind myself when it's time to practice it up again.  Mostly - I just want my songs to feel finished.  Then I'll feel freer to move on to other music.

I think if I record my songs to have an album, it'll drive me nuts.  But if I record them for myself, then it'll be alright.  And I'll also have an album.

So Aeron and I are looking into home recording equipment now.  I don't want it to be a big, studio-digitally-post-production-mastered ordeal, right?  But at the same time, the idea is for my songs to feel "finished," and the lap-top mic recordings you've heard on my blog sound anything but finished.  So we'll see.  If anything comes of this, you'll read it here first (assuming I remember to blog before I Facebook).  And it will be a digital download, because dealing with CDs and jewel-cases and album covers and whatnot are what we're trying to avoid here.  :-)

Why I'll play harp music from period if I damned well want to.

When last we met, I lamented the extreme paucity of harp music that survives in written form from period.  There's the Mudarra piece I mentioned for double-harp and, for the wire-strung harpists in the audience (ie - not me), there's the Robert ap Huw MS (recorded after 1600, though not by too terribly much, and certainly including much older songs).

BUT THAT WON'T STOP ME!!!  I have found, in my couple of years as a harping bard, that what I love the most is the sort of musical anthropology that goes along with early music.  Troubadour or early German music is more fun for me than later period stuff because we don't entirely know what it sounded like.  We have to use what little we do know in creative ways, like using the tuning of a lyre to tell us what a German harp c. 800 might have played or lists of who paid what to whom in X's court to figure out what instrumental accompaniment troubadours used.

And in the same vein, I get a kick out of recreating what we lack when it comes to period harp music.  Finding parallels between early harp and lute music and then creating new harp pieces based on that is even more fun than learning a pre-existing piece.  Just because we don't have the music doesn't mean we can't play something awfully close to what period harpers would have played.

And I find that to be terribly exciting.  ^_^

Sestina fail!

Just when I was all ready (with my excel spreadsheet) to start writing my sestina for the afore-mentioned competition, I find out that the website for the 2011 event is still advertising last year's competition, and that no sestina will be necessary at all.  Well...eff!  I suppose it's for the best.  This was gearing up to be a dangerous sestina.

The problem is, the details for the real competition haven't been made public yet.  The only other competition I might have anything to do with in the coming weeks is on the theme of, "Perform something!  Anything you want!"  I kinda have that covered.

This is a problem because here's what I've discovered about myself as a writer - I have lots of ideas and inspiration, but I won't get anything done unless I have a deadline.  Melodies, music - that'll all happen as a matter of course, but poetry will not (reliably) be written unless I'm on a deadline.  And it's no good giving me arbitrary deadlines (as my don will tell you).  I have to have some kind of competition riding on completion by the deadline in order to get things done.

Bleh.  Does anyone want to have a friendly poetry-writing race or something?  Loser bakes cookies for the winner?  I mean I could, in theory, just buckle down and write one of the songs I've had bouncing around in my head.  But that keeps not working.  :-\

Things are proceeding all happy-like!

Already talked about last week's very enjoyable bardic night.  I have, since then, gone to an event and met up with yet another great group of musicians.  We jammed, we talked, we had a great time and I hope to see more of them.

I've also identified some competitions and displays coming up that I'd like to be a part of, if I can wangle rides to the events.  This would involve writing a sestina.  This is ambitious.  I am jazzed!

I've finished 2 out of 61 arrangements of the Folger Dowland MS, which I'll post here pretty soon.  I'd like to get some rough recordings of at least part of one first, so you can hear what they're supposed to sound like as well.  And I've pretty much decided not to arrange the fragments in the MS, so my current ratio is a little better than 2:61.  Jazzed about all this too.

And if I ever work myself up to braving the cold after dark, I'll head out to Storvik's dance practice (to play, not to dance).  One of the guys from bardic night heads that up, and it sounds like a fun group!

So.  Meeting people in a new place, playing music - all is right with the world.  :-)

What's Isolde working on?

I'm too uninspired/buried in unpacking (just moved!  w00t!) to dredge up a focused or, like, y'know, interesting post, but I'm going to post sort of a generic "no really, I'm not just slacking" update mostly to keep myself feeling like I'm getting somewhere.  Right.

So what's Isolde working on?

Three Words:  This is a song by Mistress Eliane Halevey from Northshield.  It's gorgeous, it reminds me of Northshield, and I wanted to have it under my belt.  So I wrote a harp part for it, and I almost have it performance-ready.  When Eliane sings this, she has a drummer or the audience accompany her with a simple beat and sings it acapella - it works really well.  So I've incorporated that beat into the harp part, which is hella fun.  The harp part itself is meant to build in intensity as the song moves forward, and I really hope I achieved that.  Performance will tell.

Goliard:  Doña Antonia Santiago da Lagos, of Ansteorra, wrote a poem for the occasion of Master Thomas of Tenby's baronial investiture.  It stuck with me, I wanted it under my belt as an "Ansteorra" song, and so I'm setting it to music.  It's metrically similar to "Frog Goliard," so I'm making it a sort of goliard/coranto...thing.  I'm hoping to have it done by Ealdormere's coronation at the end of the month, but who knows.

Clarseach:   I have one.  It needs new strings.  I have new strings.  I need to put the strings on the harp.  And then....then, my friends, there will be hella posting, cuz I have ideas!  MBWAHAHAHAHAHAAAAA!!!

I guess it's something about music and melodies - given the right words, they eventually just jump into my head.  It takes practice to get them right, but they'll happen whether I'm distracted or not.  Not so with poetry.  So when I have a lot of upheaval, like planning to move back to Atlantia while moving to a new house in Ealdormere, it seems that poetry takes a back seat.  I miss it, though.  I'll try to set aside some time to get something written before I head back South.

Where did Isolde go?

Where is Isolde going is perhaps a more apt question.  With a bright forward-looking face and sad backward glances, I left Northshield.  My husband and I have moved to Atlantia for training for new jobs - Foreign Service Officers, to seal our nomadic fate.  We thought we might be here as long as a year, and I was looking forward to getting to know the bards and fighters around here.  Turns out we'll be leaving in August.

So where are they sending us?  We thought somewhere in Drachenwald was likely, and would be nice.  Someplace on the outskirts of Drachenwald even more likely, and we wondered if we'd have the stamina to keep up any SCA involvement.  Someplace marked "here there be dragons" was even more likely - someone has to go to Chad, after all.  So where are they sending us?

They're sending us to freaking Ealdormere!  So for the next couple of years, at least, very few bets are off.  :-D

In the meantime, Aeron and I will try really hard to hit up at least a couple of fighter practices and maybe an event or two.  We'll both be teaching at The University of Atlantia this weekend.  I honestly don't know if we'll be here long enough to make friends, but I hope we do.  I'll be back here for a while when it's time for me to start training, and we'll be back at some point for DC tours someday too.

So if you'll be at the university this weekend, or know someone who will, say hi to the new girl with the harp.  That'll be me.  :-)

I AM ISOLDE! RESEARCH GODDESS!!! RAWR!!!

There are two songs who's melodies I particularly wanted to take a look at - "Lai Non Par" and "Lai Markiol."  So I trot my happy self down to the library to get a copy of Hendrik van der Werf's Extant Troubadour Melodies, the seminal collection of, you guessed it, extant troubadour melodies.  Checked out.  Blast.

Far from daunted, I figured the only other person likely to have it checked out was the professor in charge of the Early Music Ensemble, and that I'd beg it off of him for a few days at rehearsal.  So I get to rehearsal, and before I can even broach the subject, he tells me about this great book he has, and would I like to borrow it.  HELL YES I'D LIKE TO BORROW IT, THANK YOU!!!  I giddily drag it home on the bus (it's rather large), eagerly crack it open, and...not there.  Blast.

Utterly betrayed by van der Werf, I turn to the internet where I find generous fragments of the melodies, which thank you I already have in books and I want THE WHOLE THING!!!  But I do find some helpful footnotes...

To make a long story short, I spent this afternoon tearing through books in three languages (one of which I actually speak) and eventually find one book devoted to both songs, containing transcribed melodies in all their complete, stemless glory.  Deux lais en langue mixte, by Dominique Billy.  Yes, I did a geeky little end-zone dance there in the stacks which may or may not have involved antlers.  No, I do not speak French, so Billy's no doubt brilliant analysis and commentary will be utterly lost on me.  Fortunately, however, dots on a page transcend the petty constraints of national dialect.

VICTORY IS MINE!!!

On Translation

Some people say that poetry is untranslatable.  I've found myself thinking along those lines before, and yet I'm really quite happy with the way my Bertran de Born translation came out.  What makes that poem great is the cadence and the imagery - flowing from the gay springtime to the gay and bloody mele at a galloping pace evokes the mad, perverse glee that's what I love about the piece.  And I think that's more or less preserved in my translation.

Then there's verse that I just can't bring myself to translate.  Take, for example, Mikhail Lermontov's "Выхожу один я на дорогу"  The link leads to a page with the poem in both English and Russian, and includes further links to audio of the poem read aloud, in Russian.  Surf around for more classic Russian poetry.

What I love about this piece is the sounds of the words.  These words are not just arbitrary markers of abstract concepts, rather the very sounds that Lermontov chooses express the images and ideas they stand for.  "Сквозь туман" (skvohz tum-an) in the second line evokes a darker, thicker, warmer feeling than "through the mist," and recalls the rich, full "oo"s and "oh"s in the first line.  The poem is full of that, and I can't render English that preserves what I love about this poem.  I've yet to see a satisfactory translation - the one included in the link is a good and valiant effort, but it doesn't make much effort to preserve the music of the poetry.  What you're reading is not the poem I love.

To take an example relevant to the SCA, let's return to the troubadours.  The only song by a trobaritz (female troubadour) that survives with a melody is "Ah chantar," by the Comtessa de Dia.  Here is the third verse, in Old Occitan:

Be.m meravill com vostre cors s'orguoilla,
amics, vas me, per qu'ai razon qu'iem. duoilla;
non es ges dreitz c'autr' amors vos mi tuoilla
per nuilla ren que.us diga ni acuoilla;
e membre vos cals fo.l comenssamens
de nostr'amor!  ja Dompnedieus non vuoilla
qu'en ma colpa sia.l departimens.

This verse speaks of the author's confusion at her lover's sudden coldness, and fear of losing him to some other woman.  Most of the lines end on the feminine rhyme "way-lia" (or-gway-lia, dway-lia, etc), and to me it sounds like a wail or a plea, like an expression of confused hopelessness.  She breaks from this rhyme scheme in ordering him to remember the beginning of their love.  This expression of strength is accompanied by a masculine rhyme, strong, unusual enjambment and "oh"s and "r"s which provide a powerful foundation for the melodic high point of the verse.  Without understanding a word, you can tell by listening that she goes from helpless to angry and back to helpless during this verse.

I love singing this piece because when I do, it seems that my mouth and my mind are one, that the disconnect between what I'm thinking and the sounds I can use to represent that is gone.  I've given translating this piece a shot, but I've yet to produce a single line in English that preserves that seamless marriage of sound and thought.  What I love about this piece is not really what she says - she was neither the first nor the last to write a "My man done gone and left me" song.  But I'm in love with how she says it.  I haven't given up completely, but I'm not sure I can bring myself to tamper with that.

Enter the Well-Tempered Harpy

When I first started getting interested in SCA bardic, lo those 4 or so months ago, I scoured the internet for examples.  I wanted videos, lyrics, sheet music, research, anything I could get my hands on to tell me what on earth I'd be getting into if I took my new harp to an event, with the intention of playing the thing for like people and maybe singing too.  What I found was helpful, but I didn't find nearly as much as I'd hoped.

Hence this.  I've decided to add my voice to the web.  Over the next few whatevers, I'll be adding songs I've written or translated, oodles of geektastic documentation and the occasional rant, musing or "OMG LOOK AT THIS CRAZY SONG I FOUND" moment.  Starting out, the blogs, websites and online nooks I found of other SCA bards really helped me get my bearings.  So if some n00b to SCA bardic ever runs across this site and goes, "huh," then I'll have repaid my virtual karmic debt.

On the one hand, I feel like a bit of a tool putting my work and thoughts on the internet like I know what I'm talking about, being somewhat new to the bardic arena.  On the other hand, what the hell?  At worst, it'll be an amusing chronicle of my progress from suck to non-suck.  :-)  Stay tuned for songs.