24 December 2011 · 12:10 pm

Week 16: Shepherds arise, A virgin most pure

A merry Christmas from 52fs!

Here are two more seasonal songs to mark the last week in Advent. (The white album is all seasonal – they’re not all Christmas songs, but they’re all songs for the long nights and the turning of the year.)

Shepherds arise: a three-part arrangement of this Christmas Copper song (four if you count octaves). I was originally thinking of adding an instrumental part as well, but I decided the audio spectrum was quite full enough as it was!

A virgin most pure is a two-part arrangement, plus whistle and melodica. My source for this one is the posthumous Young Tradition album the Holly Bears the Crown, on which it was sung by Shirley Collins and Heather Wood.

On these two tracks I not only wrote harmony lines but sang them from the dots. I’m not boasting, particularly, just boggling slightly – I’ve never done either of those things before, & never thought I could. Amazing what you can do when you try.

As you may have noticed, week 16 was longer than average; I’m abandoning the Thursday-to-Wednesday week I started with and going for a more conventional Sunday-to-Saturday. So tomorrow, the 25th of December, will be day 1 of week 17 in the 52fs project. (I knew there was something I meant to celebrate…)

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24 December 2011 · 11:50 am

FS16: Shepherds arise

This surely needs no introduction! In a singaround, this is one of those songs where you can’t sing too loudly – or add too many harmonies. There are five of me here (two singing in unison, one in octaves and two in harmony). One of the harmony lines is taken from the Coppers, and one is made up.

The Coppers’ version is definitive – to the point where everyone else who sings this faithfully preserves the lines they garbled. (I did change ‘prepare’ back to ‘repair’ in the second line, but I kept the downright peculiar “David’s city, sin on earth”.) I had the Waterson:Carthy version on A Dark Light in the back of my mind when I was recording this; it’s also worth mentioning that Jon Boden and friends did rather a fine job on it on AFSAD. But really, the only thing you can do wrong with a song like this is not to sing it.

Sing! Sing, all earth!

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24 December 2011 · 11:35 am

AS09: A virgin most pure

A two-part arrangement this time; the second vocal part is partly copied from Heather Wood’s line on the Young Tradition’s version and partly made up. The drone is melodica, looped; the double-tracked whistle is two separate recordings, one in each channel. I learned (and scored) this in G, only to discover that when I tried to sing it my voice was automatically adjusting it down to Gb by the end of the first refrain. This version is sung in F (and even then it gets a bit squeaky at times – must work on the top end).

I learned this from the version sung by Shirley Collins and Heather Wood on the Holly Bears the Crown. (This is why I only sing five of the seven verses – that, and the feeling that it was getting quite long enough.) The album is credited to the Young Tradition with Shirley and Dolly Collins, and the arrangement on this track is credited accordingly to Collins/Collins/Wood/Wood/Bellamy. However, the only musicians are Shirley Collins and Heather Wood (vocals) with Roddy Skeaping (bass viol); my guess would be that it’s either a Collins/Collins arrangement or Collins/Collins/Wood. It certainly has a kind of Dolly Collins ring to it – there’s a particular quality to her arrangements, a kind of rich plainness. Less, to a point, is definitely more.

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13 December 2011 · 7:10 pm

Week 15: The Holly and the Ivy, the Boar’s Head Carol

Getting properly into the Christmas spirit with a couple of old choral belters.

What else have these songs got in common? They’re both shortish (they’ve both come out at exactly one minute 49); and they’re both proper old – early-modern or even medieval old. Oh, and they both supposedly contain pagan and pre-Christian imagery, and if you want to believe that it’s up to you. There’s a lot more I could say about this line of thinking, and at some stage I probably will – not here, though.

The Holly and the Ivy is sung unaccompanied, in parts, in unison and at one stage in an echo chamber (unintentional, but I liked the effect so I left it in).

The Boar’s Head Carol is also unaccompanied, in four parts, most of which I worked out myself. I’m really, really pleased with the result – check it out. You may conclude that I’m really, really easily pleased, but no matter.

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13 December 2011 · 7:06 pm

FS15: The holly and the ivy

This one will be pretty familiar, although I think there’s a bit more to it than meets the eye. It’s not as tightly written as the Maiden that is Matchless, but the tripartite division of white (divine purity), blood-red (sacramental blood) and thorn (agony of the cross) has a definite Christian exegetical quality about it, while the accompanying verses are practically a catechism. The final “bark”/”bitter as any gall” verse adds the bitterness of mortality to the list, then hits back with the redemption of souls through Christ’s sacrifice. (I left this verse out, probably wrongly, as it wasn’t in most of the sources I was using.)

As for the arrangement, I worked hard on these harmonies – with a bit of help from friends on Mudcat – and possibly a bit too hard; the effect isn’t quite as satisfactory as on the Boar’s Head Carol. Still, this was my first attempt with self-written harmony (and the Boar’s Head the second); upward and onward!

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13 December 2011 · 6:56 pm

AS08: The Boar’s Head Carol

I’ve always loved this song, and I’m particularly pleased with the way this recording’s come out, so off you go and listen to it.

Perhaps it’s because I did Latin O Level – rephrase that, it’s definitely because I did Latin O Level – but I’ve always had a soft spot for macaronics, songs that dip in and out of other languages (usually Latin). Unto Us A Child Is Born is another seasonal example. In case your Latin’s getting a bit rusty, the chorus here translates as “I bring in the boar’s head, giving thanks to the Lord”; the single lines of Latin at the end of the each verse translate as “as many as are at the feast”, “[let us] serve it with a song” and “in the royal hall”. The last line of all means “it is served with mustard”(!).

For the arrangement, I had a copy of the sheet music with four vocal parts, but in the end I only used it for part of one line; the rest of the harmonies I either got from Jon Boden & friends’ AFSAD rendition or made up myself. Writing them out, and playing them against each other with Noteworthy, was essential; some combinations that look fine on the stave sound dreadful when played.

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5 December 2011 · 11:28 pm

Week 14: A maiden that is matchless, Come love carolling

Week 14 brings the first two selections for Advent, Christmas and the turn of the year – beginning with Advent.

A maiden that is matchless is a brief but densely-written medieval poem in praise of the Virgin Mary, beautifully set to music by Dolly Collins (some of which I play here on the flute).

Come, love, carolling is a composition by Sydney Carter on a similar theme: Mary’s pregnancy, seen from her perspective, focusing on the experience of having God as her own flesh and blood. The arrangement here is after Bob and Carole Pegg’s version on the album And now it is so early, although I’m using melodica instead of guitar.

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5 December 2011 · 11:18 pm

FS14: A maiden that is matchless

If Christmas is a time to celebrate a baby being born, Advent must be a time to celebrate a pregnant woman.

This is an anonymous medieval poem which subsequently entered the tradition; the arrangement here is after Dolly Collins. For a ten-line poem, the imagery here is surprisingly dense and complex. The first line alone refers to Mary as a “maiden” (i.e. virgin) who was “matchless” (without a mate), a tautology which works to draw attention to everything that was unusual about this particular maiden: she did have a partner (Joseph), but conceived as a virgin, making her both a mother without a mate and a unique – matchless – maiden. Packing that lot into five words is pretty good going. There is plenty more to comment on; I’ll just note the way that the central six lines enact a gradual approach to Mary asleep in her bed, parallelled with images of successive stages of growth. It’s clever stuff.

Not many people sing in Middle English these days, and even fewer can understand it. If you modernise a piece like this, on the other hand, I think you need to do it properly. Most renderings of this poem fall between two stools, partially modernising the language and leaving Mary as a maiden that is “makeless” – a word that means nothing to us. I’ve compromised by singing the modern English, while also singing the Middle English (using period pronunciation). As well as two voices and flute, there’s a reed organ drone on there and a bit of melodica.

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5 December 2011 · 11:00 pm

NS13: Come, love, carolling

The subject matter of this track will appeal to some more than others; if you’re a militant atheist, you should probably look away now.

Sydney Carter’s songs were written out of an intense but idiosyncratic Christian faith. His Lord of the Dance has become such a cliche that we may forget how odd, even heretical, the idea of Christ dancing was at the time (any resemblance to the figure of the dancing Shiva was entirely intentional). This song is less heterodox but just as forthright: the verses state in typically plain language what Christian doctrine implies – that for nine months, the last of which we now call Advent, Mary was pregnant with God. (Christian doctrine makes some very large claims in places, and Carter was never shy of spelling them out.) The chorus (“All the while, wherever I may be, I carry the maker of the world in me”) is another matter: Carter stressed that this is not specific to Mary (“the chorus can apply to anybody”). The Quaker George Fox, a hero of Carter’s, held that there was “that of God in every one”.

The arrangement is one of the more complex ones I’ve recorded; by the last chorus there are melodica, recorder, a rather squeaky G whistle and drums all going at once (and all recorded separately). If I did it again I might use a simpler drum pattern, or else work to a click track. See what you think, anyway.

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3 December 2011 · 6:11 pm

Shifting the gear

(Based on comments posted at fRoots.)

The Indigo album marks the first quarter of the 52fs year: 13 songs down, 39 to go. With that in mind, here’s a quick retrospective post on the project.

Songs posted so far: 34
Traditional songs: 22
Contemporary songs: 12 (authors: Peter Bellamy, Bellamy/Kipling, Peter Blegvad, Noel Coward, Bob Dylan, Green Gartside, Richard Thompson, Lal Waterson, Joss Whedon)
Whistle tunes: 3
Songs with backing: 11 (including all the last eight)
Backing instruments: 4 woodwind, 3 free reed (including a melodica I didn’t own two months ago), drums (not played for 30 years), voices, some programming

I had no idea there was going to be all this playing involved when I started! The next frontier is harmony; the ‘white’ album (over Christmas and New Year) is going to feature a fair amount of singing in parts, something I’ve never done before. It’ll be great, probably.

So, what have I learned so far?

1. My voice sounds very different when recorded. Very very very different. Obviously I knew this already, but spending a lot of time with my recorded voice has really brought it home to me. Lots of takes, lots of close listening, and you start hearing a voice that’s very different from what you thought you were producing…
1a. …and start thinking “maybe I need to work on that”. In my head I’m always giving a peak performance – that hypnotic Musgrave I did that time, that back-wall-nailing Trees They Do Grow High… Listening back, this turns out not to be the case; a lot of the time, particularly on first takes, what I hear is just this bloke singing…
1b. …and sometimes not in a terribly distinctive voice – although sometimes I do listen to a take and think “that’s me – I’ll do more like that”. I’ve been singing all my life, and singing in public on a fairly regular basis since 2004; it seems weird to be thinking about ‘finding a voice’ now, but there it is.

2. Although I’ve always seen myself as an unaccompanied singer, it turns out that accompanied singing is a lot of fun…
2a. …especially drones (which I never thought I’d get into)…
2b. …but also harmonies, rhythm tracks, chords (I love my melodica)…
2c. …although doing them all multi-tracked is an incredible time-sink…
2d. …which imposes definite limits on how close to perfection I can afford to get…
2e. …and layering separate tracks recorded without a click is an absolute no-no, unless you really enjoy wielding the virtual razor-blade in Audacity. There’s timing that sounds absolutely regular, and then there’s timing that is absolutely regular, down to the tenth of a second – and that’s a lot harder.

3. Uploading home recordings to a Web site is not going to enable me to give up the day job. (Fortunately I like the day job.) Obviously I knew this already too, but it’s really been brought home to me…
3a. …that there aren’t millions of people who like listening to this stuff, at least not online, not all the way through (why don’t people just leave the thing playing?) and…
3b. …there definitely aren’t millions of people who like downloading it; and, more generally…
3c. …the Web is no place to build a profile, unless you’re very talented, very photogenic, very lucky or gifted with a herd of football-playing pigs; it’s a great shop-front, but I think you still need to build awareness in the real world. There is just too much music out there for a single project like this to make much of a splash. (Or maybe it’s a slow-burning splash; there have definitely been more plays per day per track of the songs on the Indigo album than the ones on its Violet predecessor. We shall see.)

4. Bandcamp’s statistics distinguish between ‘complete’ (>90%) plays, ‘skips’ (stopped before 10%) and ‘partial’ (>10% but <90%). The number of partials and skips is extraordinary, not to say slightly alarming. (On the other hand, the songs with the most partial plays generally have the most full plays as well, so I suppose it all works out.) Aggregating all three, my top five tracks are:
1 Lord Bateman
2 There are bad times just around the corner (Noel Coward)
3 Derwentwater's farewell
4= Us poor fellows (Peter Bellamy)
4= The unfortunate lass

On full plays alone, the top five (or seven) are:
1 Lord Bateman
2 The unfortunate lass
3 There are bad times just around the corner
4 The cruel mother
5= Derwentwater's farewell
5= Us poor fellows
5= The death of Bill Brown

Propping up the table (sorted on all plays together) are

28. Hughie the Graeme
29. St Helena lullaby (Rudyard Kipling)
30. Serenity (Joss Whedon)
31. Percy's song (Bob Dylan)
32. The unborn Byron (Peter Blegvad)

(I'm excluding the album-only House[s] of the Rising Sun from the list; hence the last place is number 32, not 34.)

Things look slightly different if we sort on full plays, as there are six songs for which the 'complete play' count is stuck at zero – these songs haven't been played all the way through at all. What are you like, world? There's some great stuff here:

The unborn Byron
The death of Nelson
Percy's song
Boney's lamentation
Dayspring mishandled (Rudyard Kipling)
Danny Deever (Rudyard Kipling)

Generally the newer stuff seems to have gone down less well than the traditional songs – which are, after all, what this site is all about, so I can't really complain.

5. Even if I were the only audience – which I'm not, although (as we see) for a couple of tracks it's a close thing – it's an incredibly enjoyable and absorbing project; I'm learning all the things about music I've always vaguely thought I ought to know, as well as some unexpected but useful things about my voice.

Here's the link to the album again: 52 Folk Songs – Indigo. Roll up! Roll up! And here are links to a couple of personal favourites, plus a couple which may have had less attention than they deserve.

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