Entry tags:
Da Weekend
We spent Saturday and Sunday with La Belle Compagnie at Military Through the Ages, an annual timeline living-history show at historic Jamestown, VA that this year hosted dozens of re-enactment clubs ranging from a 500 BCE Greek phalanx to today's National Guard.
It's a long drive to Jamestown/Williamsburg, but COVID has cancelled so many things in the past two years that we have lots of unspent vacation time, so we took Friday and Monday off work so we could drive there and back without being totally fried. So now we're home, with the car unpacked and the refrigerator restocked, having driven only about six hours today. Totally worth the vacation time.
The weather at this show is usually cold and wet, so![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
shalmestere had made me a lovely new gown of snuggly, warm blue wool, finishing just in time to get a weather forecast with highs around 80F on Saturday. So I wore an older, lighter-weight wool gown on Saturday, and the new blue one on Sunday when the high temperature was in the 60's. There was no rain (yay, taking down and packing dry tents!), and every few minutes we caught a glimpse of the pair of ospreys that nest in the bell tower overlooking the site.
La Belle had a quite respectable twenty or so people this weekend, divided among nine "stations": gentry weapons and armor, music, spinning and dyeing, games, medicine, cooking, medieval "fast food", the upholder/fripperer/used-clothing-dealer, and the common-born archers with their cheaper weapons and armor. Our schtick at this show, as at most living-history shows, is to lay out a variety of musical instruments on a table and talk to visitors about them, interspersed with demonstrations using musical pieces of the 14th and early 15th centuries. Which went well: our shawm reeds behaved themselves, no strings broke on the citole, the fydel, or the harp, and we didn't play anything really badly. We realized on the way down that one or two of the harp's wooden tuning pegs were splitting and unusable, so we stopped at a Home Depot for an oak dowel and some tools, and I made a new tuning peg in the hotel room Friday night. Replaced a fraying harp string in the hotel room Saturday night. The pirouette/mouthpiece on my shawm suffered a cork malfunction, and I had to rip off some of the cork with my fingernails to get it onto the instrument at all, but it still plays.
At least three different people on Sunday asked basically the same question: "how far back do we have written music that modern people can read?" Which leads into the whole field of early musical notation, which we've been studying for ten years or more, and on which I've taught a number of classes... anyway, we tried to keep the answers under an hour long. On the way home we discussed getting some parchment and making a little book (probably just a single gathering, say 8 pages) with written music in the notations of the time, so we can show people what it looks like rather than just telling them. And, listening to various professional recordings of medieval music in the car, we made lists of other pieces we should memorize for performance at shows.
It's a long drive to Jamestown/Williamsburg, but COVID has cancelled so many things in the past two years that we have lots of unspent vacation time, so we took Friday and Monday off work so we could drive there and back without being totally fried. So now we're home, with the car unpacked and the refrigerator restocked, having driven only about six hours today. Totally worth the vacation time.
The weather at this show is usually cold and wet, so
shalmestere had made me a lovely new gown of snuggly, warm blue wool, finishing just in time to get a weather forecast with highs around 80F on Saturday. So I wore an older, lighter-weight wool gown on Saturday, and the new blue one on Sunday when the high temperature was in the 60's. There was no rain (yay, taking down and packing dry tents!), and every few minutes we caught a glimpse of the pair of ospreys that nest in the bell tower overlooking the site.La Belle had a quite respectable twenty or so people this weekend, divided among nine "stations": gentry weapons and armor, music, spinning and dyeing, games, medicine, cooking, medieval "fast food", the upholder/fripperer/used-clothing-dealer, and the common-born archers with their cheaper weapons and armor. Our schtick at this show, as at most living-history shows, is to lay out a variety of musical instruments on a table and talk to visitors about them, interspersed with demonstrations using musical pieces of the 14th and early 15th centuries. Which went well: our shawm reeds behaved themselves, no strings broke on the citole, the fydel, or the harp, and we didn't play anything really badly. We realized on the way down that one or two of the harp's wooden tuning pegs were splitting and unusable, so we stopped at a Home Depot for an oak dowel and some tools, and I made a new tuning peg in the hotel room Friday night. Replaced a fraying harp string in the hotel room Saturday night. The pirouette/mouthpiece on my shawm suffered a cork malfunction, and I had to rip off some of the cork with my fingernails to get it onto the instrument at all, but it still plays.
At least three different people on Sunday asked basically the same question: "how far back do we have written music that modern people can read?" Which leads into the whole field of early musical notation, which we've been studying for ten years or more, and on which I've taught a number of classes... anyway, we tried to keep the answers under an hour long. On the way home we discussed getting some parchment and making a little book (probably just a single gathering, say 8 pages) with written music in the notations of the time, so we can show people what it looks like rather than just telling them. And, listening to various professional recordings of medieval music in the car, we made lists of other pieces we should memorize for performance at shows.
no subject
I'm glad to hear that all the instruments behaved, even if you did have to make some on-site repairs. I like the book idea; are you thinking one page per notation style, in chronological order, so you can give a tour? "Tried to keep the answers under an hour" sounds about right. :-)
I'd be tempted to answer that it depends on what you mean by "can". If they're asking "how far back can I read it" and the asker is a modern musician with no experience with early music, that's a different answer than "how far back can you (who have studied it) read it". And, of course, within the set of people who've studied, there's still variation; you can sight-read stuff I would struggle more with, I think, even though it's not new to me.
no subject
How far back could an average modern-trained musician read the music without much additional training? We figured this was some time in the 16th century: there are few bar lines, and some of the clefs are unfamiliar, but you can be told those things in a minute or two, after which it's just a matter of practice.
How far back can anybody living today read the music with reasonable confidence? For rhythm, some time in the 13th or 14th century; for pitches (if you don't insist on A=440), some time in the 12th.
The music-book project raises questions of purpose and venue. When we first joined La Belle Compagnie, most shows were "first-person", "in character", with a single coherent temporal and geographical scenario (e.g. "It's 1386, and we're traveling through Spain as part of John of Gaunt's retinue as he presses his claim to the throne of Spain; we're not expecting combat, which is why we have so many women in camp, but we want to impress the locals, which is why we have archers and men-at-arms.") For that sort of show, we don't want anything visible to the public that couldn't have existed in that year; the book might contain examples of 13th-century, early-14th-century, and late-14th-century notation, and both French and Italian, because all of those things actually did coexist (sometimes in the same manuscript), but it would have to cut off at the earliest year we expect to use as a show scenario. Any given opening would probably need to be organized the way openings were organized at that time (one common organization for a 3-part piece has the cantus line at the top of the left page, tenor line across the bottoms of both pages, and contratenor line at the top of the right page).
Last weekend's show had a focus year (1410) but no scenario, it was mostly third-person, and we could talk about not only what was happening in 1410 but what "will" happen in 1415, 1453, and up to 2022. Sometimes we use the metaphor of a "museum tent" that presents things from a modern historical perspective that wouldn't have existed in that form at any one time in the past. So for example the spinning-and-dyeing station included a science-fair-style posterboard with a grid presenting examples of various fibers dyed with various combinations of dyestuff and mordant. And at some third-person shows in the past, we've brought not only medieval-style recorders but Renaissance and Baroque recorders, so we can demonstrate the differences. For that sort of show, we might want a page per 50-year interval, starting in the 11th or 12th and ending in the late 15th, with a split between French and Italian notations in the 14th century.