Hello -

I play and record music and have had a fairly substantial curiosity on the
subject of music in ON and its relationship to the performance of the
material from that culture that is available to us. It should be noted that
the number of references to Eddic or skaldic poetry in saga without musical
accompaniment is certainly far more common than reference to performance
that does feature music. I haven't undertaken an inquiry into the subject
adequate to warrant a decisive conclusion, but my impression is certainly
that the familiar verse material that we have artifacts of now was primarily
or exclusively performed without music. There are ballads from all of the
Scandinavian countries and at least some of the Viking Age colonies, such as
the Faroes, whose origin is at least immediately subsequent to the Viking
Age, if not before.

Jorge Luis Borges wrote fictional material about archaic Germanic lays being
sung with the accompaniment exclusively of the harp. He certainly was an
avid student of archaic Germanic verse, and it would surprise me terribly if
this was a reference to a valid tradition, but of course it could certainly
also be fictional construction.

Finally, I think that it would be inappropriate for me to go into an
exposition of the different types of tuning systems, and therefore the
likely ON tuning, on thsi list. However, 12 equal intervalic tuning was not
used by any culture until the 17th century. Most cultures seem to have
naturally adopted a system called just intonation, one of the implications
of which is that instruments would be intrinsically limited to one, or at
the most a few, different scales. The system of 12 equal intervals per
octave was employed to allow an instrument to play numerous scales, with the
accuracy of a given scale correspondingly diminished. You can read more
about just intonation by performing a search of the Internet, I'm sure. I
don't have any references that I can provide offhand.

Best regards.

>From: "akoddsson" <konrad_oddsson@...>
>Reply-To: norse_course@yahoogroups.com
>To: norse_course@yahoogroups.com
>Subject: [norse_course] Re: Jawharp contra Wagner
>Date: Thu, 21 Sep 2006 11:38:18 -0000
>
>Good link below. I have an interest in reconstructing the authentic
>norse poetic and musical performance of pre-christian times. I also
>like and listen to rimur, nordic folk music (even play some of it).
>I have followed the Sequentia reconstruction, but am not all that
>satisfied with the results, as the group seems too 'operatic' and
>studied to my ears. Rimur, although post-christian by many centuries
>and therefore less authentically norse, are more interesting to me,
>as they seem to preserve something more similar to what I imagine
>authentic norse performance to have been like. I imagine that the
>average 'singer' was untrained in the modern sense (not Sequentia),
>that he was rural (not surprising), learned his art from the older
>local singers, and used a tonality different from that represented
>by the modern 'well- or even-tempered' 12 tone scale. All of this,
>of course, is true about rimur (also about nordic folk-music on the
>whole). Furthermore, I imagine that such a rural 'singer' of old
>would have had some musical accompaniment (see other oral cultures
>on this point), but that this would have been typically sparse and
>performed by a musician/musical specialist (probably one, but maybe
>more in a higher class, court-setting) who was trained to accompany
>such performance. Also, I imagine that such performances, typically
>in a rural setting, would have included some prose-links/story-
>telling between sung/chanted/intoned verse-sections, as well as some
>solo musical pieces (slættir), whose rules and tradition would be as
>complex as that of the poetry (compare the surviving traditions with
>their ornately nordic, poly-tonal, highly structured, virtuosity -
>solo fire, but accompaniment-style in performance with poetry). Now,
>we can easily reduce that the times/rythmic-types used were the same
>as those lying behind pre-christian, traditional germanic verse, for
>example fornyrdislag or ljodahattr. This tells us something about
>the time, which would have been hammered out by a steady foot, just
>as in surviving nordic traditional music. The grey area, of course,
>is tonality. What scales/tones were really used by authentic norse
>singers of old? We can figure that tonality was regional and learned
>from older, local performers (shown by all surviving nordic musical
>traditions, including rimur), and that singers (and musicians) had a
>personal style, highly influenced by their masters, but identifiably
>their own on some telling points. Now, the tonality of any randomly
>selected, modern performance could just as easily be taken from
>church-music as from pre-christian music. Indeed, there is reason to
>believe that many, perhaps most, of the scales found are foreign in
>origin, and thus not truely representative of authentic norse music
>or poetry (a fair amount of ink has been spilled on this topic). The
>problem is that we do not possess any stringed instruments (fiddles,
>langspil, harps, etc.) or bored ones (bone-flutes, willow-flutes,
>etc.) where the tuning/tonality is a)preserved intact and b)deemed
>to represent typical tonality at the time. Folk were raised with a
>certain tonal-background, much as they were with a cultural one in
>general. They 'heard' music a certain way and could, not doubt, deem
>any music native or foreign by ear. Now, I have done some research
>on musical intruments of the time (as have many others more learned
>than I on this topic) and have discovered the following, which I do
>think is Odin's golden-key, so to say, for us modern folk (the quiet
>revenge of the aged-one against the killers of germanic music): the
>mouth-harp. This simple, portable instrument is found everywhere in
>Germanic soil, as it was discarded when the tongue broke and a new
>one obtained. It was cheap, easily made by any smith wanting to make
>a little extra money. In my research, I have read about, visited and
>seen iron- and viking-age mouth harps. Now, this intrument is Odin's
>golden for the following two reasons: 1) it was actually played by
>actual norse persons in norse times (with no other musical, cultural
>or religious back-ground than a norse one, as far as we can tell)
>and 2) unlike other intruments (surviving or not) thought to really
>have existed at the time in norse culture, the mouth-harp cannot be
>tuned - it has only one tonality. Play the mouth-harp in the museum
>and it will still sound exactly like it did when it was made, given
>only that its tongue is intact. No tongue? Make a copy and it will
>still sound identical. This gives us a tonality (with a tonic note,
>a primary scale and microtonal series), which singers must likewise
>have used while being accompanied by this instrument. How popular or
>truely representative was this instrument? Archeaology tells us that
>it was very typical. Consider also the affordability and portability
>issues: 1) most folk were poor and good instruments expensive 2) the
>mouth-harp is portable - just but it in your pocket and set sail. It
>is logical to assume that ancients loved music as much as we do, and
>that aspiring musicians took their instruments everywhere, just as
>many moderns still do (despite recording-technology, music-players
>and less demand for actual live performance). One imagines that, in
>ancient times, a man heard no music unless 1)he sand or played 2)he
>had contact with someone who sang or played. A great environment to
>sell cheap, easily made instruments in, indeed. As there is no real
>doubt that old singers would have been accompanied by a mouth-harp,
>often if not exclusively, and that some/most of them would likewise
>have played it themselves (though not while singing, obviously), can
>be not assume that the harp's tonality also occured in singing? This
>would seem a natural enough conclusion. Now, I certainly do wonder
>why Sequentia, for example, did no use this instrument, and why the
>other viking-age musical reconstructions that I have heard do not
>use it either. Perhaps the instrument is considered too primitive or
>not glamorous enough for moderns with romantic ideas about the noble
>ancient germanics' musical tradition. Wagner or not, one singer and
>one jawharp player would be, I think, typical enough of an ancient
>performance. Thoughts welcome.
>
>Regards,
>Konrad
>
>
>--- In norse_course@yahoogroups.com, "llama_nom" <600cell@...> wrote:
> >
> > THE LINK: I just came across this book online: "Kv��askapur:
>Icelandic Epic Song", by Hreinn Steingr�msson. It looks interesting
>although there's a lot that's too technical for me to understand.
>It discusses the possibility that the traditional Icelandic
>singing/chanting style might go back to very early times, and that
>Old English poetry could have been performed in a similar way.
>Unfortunately some of the special Icelandic characters don't show
>up, so watch out for missing '�', etc.
>
> > http://music.calarts.edu/KVAEDASKAPUR/
> >
> >
> > THE CORRECTION: For some reason I absentmindedly added 'ik' in that
>first line of the would-be Gothic verse in my reply to Konrad, which
>should have read: 'Brikan skal airis, bro�ar,' (an attempted
>translation of ON 'bresta mun fyrr, br��ir').
>
>Noted. Nice ;)
>
>
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