hudebnik

This was the weekend of Military Through the Ages, a large timeline living-history show held at Historic Jamestowne, just outside Williamsburg, VA. Our group, La Belle Compagnie, has participated in it every year for something like thirty years, although we didn't join La Belle ourselves until 1998 (and one or two shows were cancelled due to COVID).

NYC to Williamsburg is a fairly long drive, with unpredictable traffic delays on many segments of the route. So this year I took Friday and Monday as vacation days to make sure we had time to get there and back. We dropped the dogs at the boarding kennel Thursday around 5:30 PM, started packing the car, hit the road at 8:00, and stopped for the night at a hotel in Maryland around 11:30, then drove the rest of the way on Friday to set up our pavilion in the afternoon before driving a few minutes to the hotel where La Belle Compagnie had reserved several adjacent suites of rooms, where we had dinner and long geeky conversation with Labellies.

Up to alarm at 6:00, grabbed breakfast at McDonald's, and got to the site by 7:30 to unload musical instruments, put their modern-looking cases back into the car, and open to the public at 9:00 AM.

This year La Belle Compagnie had over twenty people, running ten different "stations": the fighting field where one of our HEMA experts demonstrated techniques of fighting with various weapons; the arming pavilion where a fully-armored knight showed off armor and weapons; the archers' hovel where several commons-born archers showed off their cheaper and plainer armor and weapons; the musicians' tent where shalmestere and I showed off musical instruments and played and sang a variety of 14th-15th-century music; the hall (the group's biggest pavilion) where the Lady of the house, her exchequer, and one of her attendant women showed off and demonstrated various things (I didn't get in there much so I don't know exactly what); the surgeon's station where a guy in a blood-spattered leather apron showed off surgical tools and urinals and talked about medical technology; the cooks' station where two women displayed a variety of herbs, spices, breads, pies, sausages, etc. that we ate for lunch; the armorer's station where a guy who makes armor acted as a merchant selling it, and invited guests to try on helmets, greaves, vambraces, etc.; and the fripperer's station, where another merchant talked about clothing, acting as a reseller of used clothing, and invited guests to try things on.

Saturday was quite busy: the Historic Jamestowne organizers reported nearly 4000 guests coming through the gates in one day, the second highest daily attendance the show has ever had, and we must have talked to a large fraction of them. shalmestere and I brought our fancy circular pavilion and set up two tables therein to hold musical instruments: various kinds of recorders, tabor-pipes, a tabor, a fydel/vielle, a citole, a harp, a shawm, two bombards (aka "alto shawm"), and a doucaine (aka "still shawm", which I explained as "the shawm's indoor voice"). The fiddle suffered an explosive trauma early Saturday: the gut holding the tailpiece to the button snapped, the tailpiece flew up to the fingerboard, the bridge and the nut went flying, and we were unable to play the instrument all that day. But Saturday evening, back at the hotel, I was able to cut a replacement piece of heavy gut and get things working again. We had a number of visitors who had lots of questions about music and instruments, and almost everybody wanted to see and hear the shawms (the most unusual-looking instruments we have), so we earned our keep for the day.

Sunday dawned warmer and drier, but with rain forecast for the afternoon, and the event organizers agreed to start kicking out the public around 1 PM so the re-enactors could get things packed up before the rain hit. La Belle had completely struck camp by about 2:30, and most of us went to a Chinese buffet for lupper (watching the rain start around 3:00) before hitting the road for home.

There were substantial traffic delays in Virginia and Maryland, and shalmestere and I weren't sure how far we would get before being too sleepy to drive, but when we stopped for a bathroom break, refueling, and driver-switch around 8:00, Google Maps said it was only another 3 hours to home, so we decided to try to push on. And indeed we got home before 11:30, and had the car unpacked by 11:45, so we could sleep in our own bed.

On the schedule for today: clean things, put things away, retrieve the dogs from the boarding kennel, buy groceries, maybe see a movie.

We were reminded of several projects to work on. Finish building a case for the harp: we have a fleece sleeve that more-or-less fits the harp, but it needs a flap that closes over the top, and it needs a more protective outer layer (of leather or heavy fabric). Make some hanging walls, perhaps block-printed with animal-minstrel patterns, so the inside of the tent doesn't look quite so Spartan. And as always, learn and memorize more musical pieces. It would be nice to have some written music in appropriate notation and construction, but I think to be plausible it would have to be at least a small book (not loose sheets), so that sounds like a big project -- and it might need to be somewhat different for a 1418 scenario than for a 1382 scenario (just as the men-at-arms have different armor for different time periods).

So the plan was

• leave the dogs at a boarding kennel today,


• drive to the Washington, DC area tonight,


• participate in a living-history show at Catholic University tomorrow (including a half-hour main-stage musical performance by shalmestere and me),


• attend a concert by the Folger Consort tomorrow (music from the early 14th-century Roman de Fauvel),


• attend our adult niece's confirmation Sunday, and


• drive home Sunday afternoon.

In particular, for the Catholic University demo we were preparing a set presenting the four seasons through 14th-15th-century English music -- none of that French, German, Flemish, or Italian stuff. This is tricky because an awful lot of written music (and other written material) in England got burned in successive waves of violence and looting: the 1381 Peasants' Revolt, the Protestant Reformation, the Counter-Reformation, the English Civil War, etc. And it used to be taught that England was the musical backwater of Europe until Dowland in the late 16th century. But we now know, by extrapolating from surviving tables of contents and textual references to English songs, that a lot of music was happening in medieval England. So the set list includes well-known English pieces that survive with music, such as "Miri It Is" and "Sumer Is Icumen In", as well as musical pieces that survive with only an English incipit such as "Wynter", instrumental pieces in sources with medieval English provenance, and English lyrics that survive without music but which shalmestere has re-set to tunes known in medieval England.

But on Tuesday, while walking the dogs, shalmestere twisted her ankle on some broken and uneven sidewalk: her ankle is now swollen and discolored, she can barely walk, and she's spent much of the past three days elevating and icing it. So we've called off the trip to DC for the weekend.

It was good to have a deadline forcing us to prepare this ambitious musical set, and it's disappointing to not perform that set tomorrow, but I'm sure we'll find an opportunity to do it somewhere.

I was on an expedition to See How the Other Half Lives -- specifically, the Poor White Trash half. At the time the dream opened, I had already made contact somehow with a host family whom I would visit for the day. Conveniently, they weren't halfway across the country, but just in North New Jersey, so shalmestere drove there and dropped me off. As we got closer to the address we'd been given (100 Whale Road), the houses and cars-up-on-cinderblocks got more and more disreputable, the frequency of Trump signs in lawns went up, and shalmestere got more and more worried about whether this visit was a good idea. I pointed out (not to ease her fears, but just as an interesting tidbit) that Interstate 95 was just one or two hundred yards away, and yet it looked like a different country.

Eventually we saw a short unnamed street that jogged to the right, at the other end of which was a street sign for Whale Road, paralleling the road we were on, so we took the jog onto Whale and started looking for house numbers. Just as we were running out of numbers, Whale Road veered left and there was 100, in front of a house even more disreputable-looking than most -- indeed, I could scarcely see any actual house behind the piles of trash. I got out, walked up to the house, and introduced myself.

Inside the house was equally disreputable and equally piled high with trash. But everybody was very friendly, and not so different after all -- they turned out to be Viking-era re-enactors. I wasn't clear on how they did their research, since I didn't see any books, but there could have been a substantial library hidden among the piles of trash for all I knew.

And I woke up.

It was a pretty good living-history show: the weather was quite good, neither too warm nor too cold, not too windy, not too sunny nor too depressingly overcast; we got a few spatters of rain just at closing time, when we were planning to pack up anyway. There weren't hordes of visitors, but a decent number, and we got to talk to them about armor, food & cooking, tents, music, fingerloop braiding, swordplay, etc. The Sunday show was cancelled due to weather forecasts of steady, often heavy, rain, so we packed up quite efficiently (under the threat of rain), went to dinner, drove back to sutragirl and snolan's house, unloaded stuff quite efficiently, stretched out things that needed to dry, and suddenly realized that we were all dehydrated and exhausted. I wasn't sure I'd be able to do it, but I mustered the strength to change clothes and spend half an hour or so in the hot tub with shalmestere, sutragirl, and snolan. <arlo-guthrie>And then we went to bed and didn't get up until the next morning...</arlo-guthrie> fairly late the next morning, in fact. Spent a pleasant, laid-back morning chatting and eating show leftovers, packed the car and headed back to NYC in the pouring rain. At least it's daylight and pouring rain, and we're not as tired and cranky as if we had done a show today.

[Writing this in the car:] We'll get home at a civilized hour, the good Lord willin' an' the crick don't rise (and I mean that literally -- there were a lot of soggy-looking fields a few inches below road level as we left snolan and sutragirl's house). Monday I have to teach a class at 9 AM, cover a colleague's class at 10 AM (since his wife is having surgery), teach a class at 11 AM, play a starring role in a faculty meeting on general education learning outcomes assessment from 12 to 2, and teach another class at 2:25. The rest of the week calms down a little, but I have a lot of homework to grade, and homework assignments to write, and a conference presentation to prepare before leaving town on Thursday to spend Friday and Saturday at the conference.

Let's see... what else has happened lately? shalmestere and I read Barbara Kingsolver's new book Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, a nonfiction chronicle of her family's "year of eating locally": they swore to eat nothing whose provenance they didn't know (which in general meant either they grew it themselves or bought it from local farmers they knew). They made exceptions for flour and spices, since neither grows well in southwestern Virginia, where they live, and since spices are so light and non-perishable that transporting them a few thousand miles from where they grow to where they're consumed doesn't have much environmental impact. The book inspired us to get to some farmers' markets in Manhattan (there are apparently none in Queens until May or June), and on Tuesday, after the probable last frost of the spring, I picked up a flat of broccoli seedlings, tore up a few square feet of the front lawn, and planted them. I don't know how much sense it makes to try to grow vegetables in a suburban front lawn, but our "back yard" is concrete, so the front lawn is the only place to even try such an experiment. (Actually, I had slightly more seedlings than I could fit in one row across the front lawn, so a few of them are in a pot on the windowsill -- not that I expect to get a harvest from a pot, but if any of the ones in the lawn die in the next few weeks, I can replace them.) Broccoli allegedly likes moist, cool weather, which we've certainly had for the past week. We'll see how they're doing when we get home.

Update: We're home now. Even going at or below the speed limit the whole way, we got home in less time than it took to drive down on Friday, because there was no traffic. Which doesn't make it an easy drive, in heavy rain for most of the 6-1/2 hours, but at least we're home before my bedtime.