• Welcome to The Worlds of Katherine Kurtz.
 

Recent

Welcome to The Worlds of Katherine Kurtz. Please login.

March 28, 2024, 05:52:35 PM

Login with username, password and session length
Members
Stats
  • Total Posts: 27,486
  • Total Topics: 2,721
  • Online today: 180
  • Online ever: 930
  • (January 20, 2020, 11:58:07 AM)
Users Online
Users: 0
Guests: 162
Total: 162
Google

Latest Shout

*

DerynifanK

March 17, 2024, 03:48:44 PM
Happy St Patrick's Day. Enjoy the one day of the year when the whole world is Irish.

Visionaries--Part One--Chapter Nine

Started by Evie, November 04, 2011, 09:36:39 AM

Previous topic - Next topic

0 Members and 1 Guest are viewing this topic.

Rahere

Ah, it's Ann and Charlie, I'll be seeing Bill next weekend so I'll find out then what Ardival is thinking. The buzz is actually from the brays on the harp, and has to be heard against something like Jonathan Shorland's pibgorns (the origin of the hornpipe was actually a horn pipe). Mine are one Aoyama, the gut a light-strung Pilgrim, the knee a Camac, but I'm under pressure to add a mediaeval to the set for my work on Dufay and earlier.

I was actually at Jeremy Barlow's launch of the reprint of the Playford Collection, you're quite right, there are some very old tunes in there. The other place to look is in the Northumbrian tradition, I've got to get me drones balanced in the near future. I've the right to claim some authority in two areas, according to the folk tradition, having been trained in Sussex maypole (the family's from Hampshire, so it's within reach) by Freddy Hambledon, and the family ancestry having passed through Newcastle after the '45 gives me access to that harp-and-pipes tradition.

The more serious end of UK musicology is somewhat wary of Child's work these days, as he follows in the wake of the other Victorian neo-gothicists who were socially compelled to adapt tunes à la Bunting, or worse, à la Kennedy Fraser. His thinking is more than somewhat constructive and needs unknitting and relinking, particularly now we have hyperlinking available. At least the Irish Traditional Music Archive has published most of the original Bunting notes, which approximately doubles the knowledge we have of the older modes. This also weakens the semi-automatic presumption that everything pre-1500 had to be a "motet", and pre-1400 "monody", as all you have to do is listen for the counter-beat in no end of early pieces to realise that some form of polyphony descended from the Nordic traditions. Probably rounds, in fact, but we are also working on church forms in the rondelli.

I was actually going to post a sketch for a possible score, but my PC ate it. Any way to post MIDI, otherwise it'll have to be ABC, if I can recover it?

My own work's going to be in the real world - I've found an angle on the Renaissance which is very interesting indeed, there's a Research Fellowship at the Warburg Institute in the offing, I'm testing my knowledge against their specialist groups at the moment. I'm currently heard to be muttering Latin under my breath as I move back once again from word-by-word translation into fluent reading, I'm just at that three-year-old stage where everything once more becomes internalised, and in a year or so I'll be at that irritating stage of realising what the implications of the etymology is. I was to be found yesterday correcting my lecturer on the origins of the Renaissance use of the Lamia! It's the price he pays for delivering a series of 16th century aphoristic woodcuts, there's a sub-text to most. Last week's discovery is to have firmed up on the effect of Boniface of Lausanne's 1239 resignation (central to the thesis) on Aquinas, and its echo in the 14th century into Konstanz and the rise of the Brethren of the Common Life. The gap I now have to bridge is the detailed exposition of the Doctor Angelicus' work in that last 50 years of the 13th Century until Ruusbroec in the 1320s.

In any case, were I to start writing (and it's likely to be turgid!) it would be in the Adept pages, one writes on what one knows. The original motivation on the Warburg study turned out to be within a spit of a hunting group, with an entire RC archdiocese on the dark side, KK can tell you more. Must stop, as I'm now on my way to chase down details on Johanna Arcis.

Rahere

Further to the last, Bill did a presentation on his range and started describing the different types, mentioning his trial of horsehair on a very lightly-strung Rosmarkie. Afterwards, because I'm negociating the purchase of a somewhat underloved Hoborough Galileo doppia (Ardival having taken Tim H's business over when he decided to retire and enjoy life more) I had to discuss with him whether he still had the string weights for the Galileo, and as we were pulling the leg of his young apprentice about the Purcell pub songs (you know, the ones where some stoney-faced counter has to sing a long drawn out "fumbled" only to find the lecherous base comes in with the word "king" right in the middle of it), I got to ask about those strings. It turns out he only used the word braided because the real term, cable-laid, is rather inaccurate for light strings. What he's actually been doing is twining three hairs together, then laying three twines up twisted so they come together into a miniature rope. That's going to force all the hairs together, stopping the buzz (ever twanged a hauser? I have, nice bass note). However, they still didn't last long. Such questions have to be paid for by an intelligent comment, of course, so I then picked up on his comment about gut strings beiong made from twisted sheep intestine, stretched and ground, to suggest that as both are effectively keratin, perhaps he could go further and pressure-die the braided hair into a more regular string. Bill took the point: I think we might soon see horsehair-strung harps become a reality, depends on the trial.