Rational Delight

Waving my hands in the air

Karen Myers — Thu, 17 Apr 2008 16:50:00 +0000

These days I play the fiddle.

It wasn’t always thus. I had classical piano training as a child, and taught myself guitar, both folk and classical, as a teenager. I can’t remember ever learning how to sing -- I assumed everyone could (I still think that). My mother was trained as a classical pianist in Antwerp but she was diverted from that life by WWII and an American GI. She became interested in jazz theory when I was quite young, and I enjoyed learning what she was doing with basic music and harmony theory.

So there I was in my 30s, an experienced amateur singer in medieval-to-classical choral works and a variety of ethnic and traditional genres, and I still spoke string and keyboard a bit. Suddenly one day, listening to traditional Scandinavian multi-fiddle tunes, it occurred to me -– why couldn’t I do this? After all, how hard could it be? I got to the basic level of “village fiddler” after a while, and it’s all been a bonus from there.

Today, I play music for Scandinavian dancing. (I’ll speak more on that genre some other time, but if you like Irish music, I recommend the traditional fiddle music of Sweden, Norway, Finland, and Denmark.) What I want to talk about now is the psychology of playing the violin for this music, specifically how the physical movement of the playing impacts the overall communication.

I understood the principles of the strings and stops before I started, and I knew how the bow was used to produce the sound, but I was not prepared for the significance of the musical gestures imparted by bowing. Playing a guitar is an activity with small hand movements. But bowing... this is the land of big gestures.

For example, much of the dance music is in the form of "polska", a dance with 3-beat measures, and the bowing is conventionally “down”, “up”, “down-up” for the 3 beats. One of the distinct characteristics of the Scandinavian polska is that the second beats are often asymmetric, varying by region or by dance type, or for expressive variation within the tune. So, not only might the second beat be “early”, you get there by “throwing” the bow up into the air early, and in some regional dances the dancers also rise on that beat, as if pushed up by the fiddler.

Stefan Ohlström playing Vödåspisn (Polska from Boda)
transcription

Think of the gesture of flinging up your arms in enthusiasm. Though your hands are constrained by the requirements of bow control, still the shoulders rise sympathetically, and the whole body follows, for the fiddler as well as the dancers. There is a complete alignment of this particular gesture of dramatic pleasure with the mechanical requirements of the performance.

Polska dances from other regions have different dialects. Sometimes the floating second beat with its up-bow is used for a different sort of emotional expression. In this example, the gesture is the shoulder lift and head tilt of regret or sympathy (“Oh, that’s too bad”).

Jonas Hjalmarsson playing Polska av Viktor Gabrielsson (Polska from Älvdalen)
transcription

In either case, there is the human gesture of a raised arm (and shoulders) and a head movement that expresses a different emotion, and the gesture can accommodate the mechanical needs of using an up-stroke to produce the notes.

On other instruments, the effect is muted (cello) or absent (voice), but on the violin it’s a perfect match. The “body English” that goes into a passionate piano performance is expressive, certainly, but it lacks the specific gestural mimicry and can only emulate, in timing and volume, what comes naturally in our physical modes of communication. For these fiddle tunes, it’s as though you wave your hands in the air and somehow the emotion embodied in the gesture is communicated through the music. It’s magic.

For further reading:
The Musical Gestures Project
Meaning in Music Gesture

Little Musgrave

Karen Myers — Mon, 03 Mar 2008 15:37:00 +0000

The traditional ballads of the British Isles are renowned for their vivid, but objective, style. Descriptions are generally impersonal (in contrast to the lyric songs), and characters establish their motives via direct dialogue, as in a play.

One of the better ballads is Little Musgrave, number 81 in Francis James Child’s collection The English and Scottish Popular Ballads: 1882-1898. Child collected as many manuscript and printed versions as he could find, and also described related ballads in Scandinavia and elsewhere in Europe. For Little Musgrave (familiar to Americans as Mattie Groves), he collected 15 versions, the earliest of which is dated 1658. Beaumont and Fletcher mention it in The Knight of the Burning Pestle (1613), the earliest known reference. 400 years have worked their usual transformation on the material, preserving what best pleases the singers.

Since we need a concrete example for discussion, I’ve selected a version recorded by Nic Jones, part of the English Folk Revival movement, on his album Ballads and Songs (1970). He heard or read more than one version, and in this recording collated elements of several around an American version. Like all such performances, this is a combination of traditional material and personal choices. He presents a very clean distillation of the story. Text. Audio.

Ballads often have several scenes or incidents. What strikes me in this ballad is the cinematic nature of the scene transitions.

Scene 1: Lady Barnard entices little Musgrave and guarantees secrecy by setting a page to watch for her husband
Transition: We follow the page who travels straight as an arrow to Lord Barnard in the greenwood
Scene 2: Lord Barnard learns of the adultery and arranges to travel home to surprise them
Transition: We follow the horn call from the greenwood straight to the lovers in bed
Scene 3: The lovers discuss and then dismiss the warning. Followed in place by…
Scene 4: Lord Barnard arrives, taunts the lovers, kills little Musgrave, and kills his wife.

One could easily come up with a different version of this story -- Lord Barnard receives word from one of his spies, little Musgrave wakes up and contemplates leaving -- but oh how much more effective the narrative is with its realized transitions. In each case, a person with divided loyalties is responsible (in other versions of the ballad, the page declares “although I am my lady’s footpage, I am Lord Barnard’s man”). On the one hand, we follow the runner to the greenwood, and on the other we follow the horn call back to Lord Barnard’s castle, as if we were flying through the air on the sound.

Singers, even those who learn a ballad in a traditional context such as a family, make personal choices about verses to include or omit, word choices, things to focus on. As you can see from a sample of the different versions collected by Child, this ballad is a structure with a cluster of common elements but a great deal of variation. Nic Jones’s performance contains some especially apt choices.

The extraneous elements (rewards for the page, regrets over the killing of the wife, Musgrave’s motives) are all pared down. The more barbaric versions of the wife’s killing are gone, the “folk process” (whatever that is) tending to reflect current sensibilities over time. The entire focus of the song is now the seduction, the choices, and the deaths. The ballad carries in all its versions an internal pause where the alarm of the horn competes with the sheltered bower of the lovers; if they had made another choice at that moment, they might have escaped the consequences. This performance poignantly repeats the first verse at the end, reminding us that the initial choices might also have been different.

As is common in ballads, the heroes do not lie; they face death bravely. Other versions have Musgrave wishing he could evade the consequences of his action, but this version is more subtle. Instead of dialogue, we see Musgrave move slowly to his death, the slowness being the sole manifestation of his regret. To make this reluctance more immediate, we switch to the present tense in verse 23.

Finally, perhaps it’s accidental, but I am struck by the rhetoric of verse 4: “What would you give this day, Musgrave, to lie one night with me?” Both day and night are little Musgrave’s last.

The path not taken

Karen Myers — Sat, 01 Mar 2008 15:13:00 +0000

Let’s start with something simple. What makes this photo so appealing? (larger, largest )

This comes from a recent January meet with the Nantucket-Treweryn Beagles in the Shenandoah Valley of northern Virginia. (You can find the full photo essay here.) It’s a view of an interior road of a largish farm in a rural area. Despite the timeless air to the place, I know these oaks are less than 100 years old, and that the path probably intersects a public road not far from where it vanishes here, but none of that matters to how the picture registers with me.

There are formal elements that are pleasing -- the straight lines of the fences contrasted to the winding line of the lane, the various vertical angles, the flat lane against the low hillocks in the distance, the proportions of sky to land. But I find I have projected personalities and narrative into the scene, and that is the foundation of its appeal to me.

The oak trees own or guard this path, the one in front clearly the leader, with the others, lightning-shortened and leaning deferentially, in his court. Only the king oak reaches into the full sky. This is a numinous, fairy-tale setting: if I start down that path into the unknown dark, I will surely have an adventure and my life will be changed.

Without the path, the oaks would be handsome but story-less. Without the stormy lower sky, the path would be less of a gateway -- the darkness is not necessarily sinister, just unknowable. The formal receding lines of fence and path create a visual focus of interest in the dark place where the path vanishes from sight, and that synchronizes with my curiosity and pulls me into the shadow.

The king oak may thrust into the well-lit winter sky, but his minions are trapped in the darkness. If I pass the guardian, nothing will stay my feet from trying to discover what lies beyond.

What's it all about

Karen Myers — Thu, 28 Feb 2008 18:03:00 +0000

I am a minor performer in the musical and visual arts, with a keen interest in language, mathematics, and related crafts, such as textile production.

As a fiddler and singer, I encounter tunes that trigger my intellectual curiosity: why does it work that way, how did it return to that spot, what makes that effect possible, and so forth.

As an amateur photographer, I stumble upon compositions that are surprisingly effective. Why and how do they work?

How does language instantiate its historic roots, with rhetoric surviving across the centuries?

I am drawn to exploring what is happening in these situations, how my sense of delight is triggered. The analysis is just as interesting to me as the initial perceptive act.

My goal is to illuminate how my own mind works (and maybe yours, too), and to let you listen in. This will not be a platform for academic studies and broad conclusions in psychology and the arts. If you explore with me, you'll be learning about traditional British and Scandinavian folk music, the field sports, dead languages, live crafts, and a variety of esoteric areas.