Some Early Music and Folk Dancing

This remembers me, as my daughter said once when she was about the same age as her daughter is now, of a tape, bought almost twenty five years ago, that conjured images of wintry landscapes and short hard lives.



I'd quite forgotten that I have a twelve inch long playing record of the Lays of Guillaume de Machaut. There's all sorts of stuff mouldering in Berwick, and my books too, few of them fiction, which I rarely read, not that I read much at all these days.

A man needs to live alone. If only I could make some money.

This is not mediaeval but it entranced me in 1969, or thereabouts and did form some part of the long train of thoughts and fantasies that led me to undertake post graduate study at the wrong university. Had I stayed at Sheffield and taken up the very generous offer that was made to me I might now be a happier and slightly richer man, fool that I be I went to York and have regretted doing so ever since, though I enjoyed studying under Martin Carver:



I'm sure we have a tape, somewhere, of the Mediaeval Baebes:



About fifteen years ago, in Sheffield, there was a minor controversy surrounding a 'trendy rev' who used lights, smoke and music to spread his message. The usual accusations were made that he was trying to establish a 'cult' but his approach was nothing new: The early church used light (stained glass and candles) incense and music and chant to entrance its audience, and entranced they were.

I include this merely because my thoughts are on the Pre-Raphaelites and I knew a fellow, not so very long ago, who claimed that Millais painted the picture in a stream at the bottom of his great (or great great etc) grandfather's garden, somewhere in north eastern Surrey, if I recall correctly. Who knows, it may be true:






I have a version of this:







This may not be what academics consider 'authentic' but I'm certain the mediaeval commoner would have appreciated it:





In about 1994 or 5 I saw a husband and wife duo, he French and she French Canadian, I think, at the Crucible Theatre in Sheffield. They played Breton folk music (if I recall aright) on bagpipes and hurdy gurdy, two of my favourite instruments, although I've always hated the noise made by the Scotch pipes.



I have a more robust version of this:



This too:



This rots too:



Here's a Pavane (I'd forgotten the word):



Now my evening will be compleat if I can just find a bransle.



And:



Here's Mike Smith again:



Back to bransles:



I stopped looking for early music on YouTube years ago but things have clearly changed since.

I was a member of Handsworth Traditional Sword Dancers for four years, from 1992 until I moved, mistakenly, to York in 1996. I've done this dance many times in practice but never actually danced out, as they say (never mind the applause, the dance isn't finished until the 'lock' is formed and held aloft:



For eighteen months, in 1991 and 1992, I was a member of The Seven Champions Molly Dancers and did dance out with them several times (I moved to Sheffield in 1992 and could no longer attend the practices). I could have danced at Sidmouth in 1992 and had just enough to go but I owed my accountant almost the same sum so paid him instead. I missed a chance that I shan't be given again but I did the right thing, unlike those bastards who refused to pay me.

Here are The Seven Champions performing a dance I remember well:



I've done this one as well:



The boots, I still have mine (1954 WD ammo boots), are hobnailed (I removed the hobnails one evening at a Handsworth practice) and tend to slip on hard pavement. The toe cap of the right boot still has a gouge caused contact with a stud on another dancer's boot.

I've heard this before. Beowulf is a poem I knew well: I had to translate one third of it, that is about one thousand lines, into good idiomatic modern English as part of my degree. In this unread and insignificant blog it is perhaps excusable to record that I attended only one seminar and disregarded the set text and translated and learned by heart the thousand lines and achieved firsts in four translation tests, with a single pencilled emendation of a word that was correct but, as I knew when I wrote it, I had used two lines earlier. There was an alternative, as my tutor pointed out, and he wanted me to use it, as I knew well enough. At the time I was disgusted that I had only been given two seventy fives and two eighties, and blamed myself. These days I don't care.

HWAET! We Gardena in gear dagum theo cyninga thrym gefrunon, or something like that. My Klaeber, the pages of its glossary grimy with the sweat of a few weeks intense work, is in Berwick with Swan (Swann?) the spine of the latter broken as a sacrifice to pragmatism. It took me two and a half days to learn the first slug of three hundred lines by heart but I learned the fourth slug of two hundred and fifty in less than six hours. I can remember very little now. I do recall that Scyld Scething does not mean King Scyld but Scyld the son (or follower or kinsman) of Sceth (Sc makes sh sound, as in scip and scit - which Bosworth and Toller translate, in the phrase scit wurde as 'foul language', if my memory serves me aright)



This isn't appealing ...



but it does remind me of this (the which film this accompanies being amongst my most liked and the catalyst for a row in the cinema that used to be housed in the riverside park surrounding the abbey ruins behind the King's Manor in York, wherein I was once a very cynical post graduate student, between myself and The Mrs Gruff, although I am not sure we were then married):

Back to something like what I heard in Sheffield:



This is the only track from The Piano that I really like: