Temple, Michele. 2001. The Middle Esatern Influence on Late Medieval Italian Dances: Origins of the 29987 Istampittas. The Edwin Mellen Press, Lewiston. ISBN 0-7734-7428-5

One of the benefits of being one of my SCA apprentices is that I will tend to keep an eye peeled in the Kalamazoo bookroom for something you might find interesting ... or challenging. (This isn't a guarantee, of course. I might not spot anything relevant. But I'll look.) So with my apprentice kiria_dk being interested in dance and music (along with lots of other fun things, of course) my eyes lit on this book long enough to decide it could fall both in the "interesting" and "challenging" categories.

This book is a study of a set of Italian Istampittas -- a type of dance tune that evolved (like many dance genres) into more of an instrumental performance piece and that may in some cases also have had lyrics set to it. (See also French estampie etc.) But the author specifically explores what she believes to be Middle Eastern influences on the particular forms of this set of tunes, that set them apart from other tunes in the genre. The discussion and comparisons are copiously illustrated with notated tunes, which was one of the primary reasons I decided to pick the book up. (After all, reading about music is all very well, but what's the point without a chance to play it?)

Now, I'm well aware that we have no direct evidence for the steps of the istampitta/estampie, so the "challenging" part of the gift is fairly open ended: anything from "learn some of the tunes" to "take one or more of the tunes and do something else interesting with it" to "make your best imaginative stab (but grounded in research) at what an istampitta dance might have looked like".

Isn't it fun to have an apprentice to torment?

Certain answers to this are skewed by my use of workout playlists.

1. What song do you play the most?

Beatles: Yesterday. In fact, my top 12 most frequently played tunes are a subset of my Beatles workout set, resulting from a combination of being a really great groove and being the first single-band workout list I put together.

2. What song do you play the least?

Can't really answer that because when I transferred my music library from an external drive to the MacBook, it reset all my play counters. So only about a fifth of my tunes have a non-zero play-count at the moment. And about half of those only show a single play. In reality, I've listened to all the music items at least once (although that can't be said of all the audio books yet). No, I take that back, I have two items in my "new albums" folder that I haven't listened to in full yet (although I've mined them for workout tunes). So at the moment, "least" would be a 15-item tie between the majority of Chris Williamson's Real Deal album and one item on Heart's Bebe Le Strange album.

3. What's the last song you added?

That would be the aforementioned Heart: Bebe Le Strange album.

4. What's your favorite playlist?

Since I put together playlists pretty much exclusively for gym music, and the favorites tend to rotate with whether I'm getting tired of them, this changes from week to week. But at the moment I'm quite energized by my Tijuana Brass set and a classical playlist I titled "Chases and Forced Marches", which starts out with Fucik's Entry of the Gladiators and Khachaturian's Sabre Dance, works its way through several quick marches like Strauss's Radetzky (which comes in at a sweat-inducing 217 bpm), finishes up with Stravinsky's Infernal Dance of King Kastchei and the "chase" section of Rossini's William Tell Overture, and then has Von Suppe's Light Cavalry Overture for a cool-down.

5. What king of iPod or mp3 player do you have?

I've got an original click-wheel iPod (only recently deemed unrechargeable), the original shuffle, the 2nd gen shuffle, and an iPhone.

I desperately need to put together some new exercise playlists in iTunes. Currently I have 12 half-hour sets -- that is, half an hour plus an additional cool-down song -- although not all of them are for everyday use. (The "marches" playlist is for light days, since I can't get a full 500-cal workout out of a 120 bpm tempo.) I don't like using the same set more than once a week, and even at that I tend to rotate them out of use after a month or so. It's interesting seeing which bands and performers fit my needs best. The Beatles come in three speeds: way too slow, right in my zone, and brief sprints only. The Carpenters are great: a nice variety of speeds within my overall required range (roughly 130-180 bpm) and a good solid beat (duh!), similarly Paul McCartney, also Simon & Garfunkel. ABBA has just barely enough to cobble a set together: mostly too fast or too slow. Carly Simon, way too slow; Eagles, alas, ditto. Elton John, solidly in the zone. Heart: a few at the slow end but nothing in mid-zone. Gordon Lightfoot, a couple in mid-zone but mostly way up in sprint territory. Queen has a nice range of tempos but I'm working mostly from a live album and the tempo consistency and intro material is a problem. Some favorite performers just never quite hit the mark: Steeleye Span is all at barely-warming-up speeds, Plethyn's all way too slow, any entirely too many great bands are enamored of constant tempo changes. Hmm, looks like I have enough tempos plotted out to put together a Beach Boys set. It's a starting place, anyway.

Having put together an entire exercise set this morning from a "Best of the Andrews Sisters" album, I suddenly noticed how gender-bending some of their recordings are when viewed from the right angle. Some cross-gender point of view is inevitable when you had an all-female group singing songs from the point of view of (at the time, by definition male) soldiers leaving/far from home, and especially the point of view of those soldiers addressing either their (female) sweethearts back home or occasionally women met overseas.

So, for example, the first-person voice of Apple Blossom Time -- though sung by female voices -- expresses traditionally male roles ("I'll be with you to change your name to mine", as well as the assumption that it is the singer's agency that will reunite the two). Although the focus on aspects of the expected wedding ceremony expresses traditionally female concerns, the song is straightforwardly a (heterosexual) man's song that simply happens to be performed by a woman's voice.

But although Don't Sit Under the Apple Tree has many of the same characteristics of the previous item -- 1st person POV of an absent soldier ("'Till I come marching home") addressing an overtly female sweetheart back home ("The girl ... fits you to a T") -- when the song enters the middle section we get the singer's gender overriding the song-POV-gender in the pronouns. The refrain is separated into a lead-and-echo with the lead voice retaining first person ("anyone else but me") but the echo-voices picking the line up with 3rd sg fem ("anyone else but her"). In the song's original temporal context, both military and social gender roles and available models of sexuality would have blocked the literal scenario that the song sets up (i.e, a female soldier addressing a female sweetheart with expectations of marriage as a goal), but listening to the song today, it's almost impossible not to have that scenario evoked as one of the natural readings of the text/performance.

A similar conflict in singer vs. POV gender comes when the intro to Bei Mir Bist Du Schoen sets up a first-person POV admiring a male addressee ("Of all the boys I've known -- and I've known some") in contradiction to the grammatical femininity of the addressee in the chorus ("I could say 'Bella! Bella!') and the social agency inherent in the POV voice ("I am begging for your hand") and perhaps the greater likelihood at the time of a man being in the position of wanting to court someone in a non-English language. Given that the grammatical gender issue with "bella" may slide by many listeners, the conflict here resolves (to me) more in the direction of a (heterosexual) female POV/singer appropriating male social agency -- but this may be because I find the gendered noun ("boys I've known") more intrusive than a gendered pronoun ("anyone else but her").

Hmm, I may have a future as a post-modernist after all! (Just kidding.)

Now I really and truly am all done with xmas shopping, even for the workplace Secret Santa and for 12th Night items. I've printed out the xmas card mailing spreadsheet so I can start addressing envelopes at lunch tomorrow. And I've realized that in addition to packing for the trip east, I should pre-pack for 12th night, since even with the best of scheduling, I'll be leaving for the event the same day I get back in town. (In worst case, I may barely get home long enough to switch suitcases.)

Concert Review: Chris Williamson & Friends at the Freight and Salvage ( Read more... )

Unrelated Rumination: On Flirting with Straight Women ( Read more... )

No date-filter post this time because my blind date was still laid up with the flu I ended up going with Plan B, i.e., thread_walker. And, may I say, I had as much fun as you can have on a date without it actually being a date date. We took off straight from work and ended up at Naan & Curry on Telegraph for dinner (mmm lamby goodness) and then had over an hour until concert time so -- since she'd never really seen the Berkeley campus before, we did an ecclectic tour of my favorite spots: cool statuary, elegant buildings, wooded paths across creeks, the basement of the Life Sciences building where they have the T-Rex skeleton.

The Guthrie concert was superb. It was the perfect mix of old favorites (he did all the ones I was really hoping to hear), new songs, and assorted works by friends and family (including a couple of his father's song's, familiar and not). For all of his rather laid-back folksy performing style, I was struck by how technically impressive his musicianship is. (A typical example was a ragtime piece performed on the guitar.) The only technical flaw, in my opinion -- and it may be just a matter of personal taste, was that the handful of pieces done with the electric guitar had a guitar/voice balance so slanted towards the former that you could barely understand the lyrics even if you knew what they were supposed to be. (This wouldn't be a flaw in a rock performance, of course, but for a folk singer, I expect more intelligibility.) The audience sang along enthusiastically on the appropriate items: the refrain of Alice's Restaurant, the chorus of This Land is Your Land, and a very short and poignant peace song brought out as an encore.

This being Berkeley, it was a very loyal and sympathetic audience: laughing at all the in-jokes and '60s references, as well as being appreciative of how much of the old material was still politically and socially relevant. During the intermission, thread_walker and I amused ourselves by leaning over the railing of the mezzanine lobby and determining (on superficial evidence) who and what various of the attendees were. The aging hippie who I decided had become a successful stockbroker. The Guy Dragged Along By His Date who was attempting to show he had a sensitive side. The angsty 20-something who thought it might be a good event for picking up chicks. The wiry community activist who wore her white hair in a long ponytail. The middle-aged couple who were reliving their transgressive youth by dragging their jr-high-age sons to the concert in hopes of making some emotional connection (and because the kids had to write a paper for school about some artistic performance). I should reiterate that, other than the physical descriptions, these characteristics were all purely inventions of our imagination. Did I mention what a fun date thread_walker is?

Met with the tree guy Saturday morning and he's going to do the whole batch: remove the broken apple, cut back the encroaching neighbors, remove the annoying fig, do a standard prune job on the almonds, take out the diseased juniper, and trim a couple other things. A chunk of change but a reasonable price based on previous tree work. He'll fit me into his schedule within the next couple weeks.

After that I packed up the harp and went down to the Crosston ball. I really need to organize my Renaissance dance music better so I don't have to work so hard every time I'm trying to put together the set list for an event. (Packets of music were provided, but that doesn't take into account all my various performance notes on which parts and arrangements work best on the harp for each piece.) It was a delightful event: good attendance and a delicious potluck where about 80% of the contributions were historic.

(Some readers will know what 25th anniversary the subject line makes allusion to.)

Last night was installment 2 of the Cal Performances date nights. (You have to be on the Date filter to read that aspect of the evening.) The performers were the Tallis Scholars doing 16th c. sacred vocal music. The venue, rather than the larger on-campus Zellerbach Hall was the First Congregational Church, two blocks south of campus. Now, keeping in mind that the Big Game (Cal vs. Stanford) is today, and that the game itself is at Stanford, I didn't expect any serious traffic effects, although I imagine there were various spirit activities planned last night. But when I turned up Durant from Shattuck and got within a couple blocks of Telegraph, traffic abruptly came to a halt. There I was, waiting at the light at Dana (one block west of Telegraph) when suddenly the Cal marching band comes down Dana from the left, commandeers the intersection with strategically placed tubas, and turns in formation to march up Durant. I then decide to turn right and get to the Durant parking garage via Channing, one block over, but just as I've positioned myself for the turn, the band does an about-face, comes straight back at me, then swings to continue down Dana in their original direction. Unbeknownst to me, their original plan to continue up Durant was stymied by the enormous traffic snarl at Telegraph caused by a patchwork power outage. (I thought the flashing police lights were simply extra traffic control around spirit activities or the like.) So I get to the Durant garage and the lights are all out and the entrance is blocked by a city pickup truck. This is annoying, but I know all sorts of other possible parking strategies. The problem is, my date (who, by cell phone report, was about three blocks behind me) doesn't necessarily know them. So I phone her, let her know the deal and tell her to find whatever parking she can and I'll be waiting in the coffee shop as planned. While I am sitting in the coffee shop, the power goes completely out in that building. The staff explains that there's some issue with a cable or a transformer ... ah, here we are. Random buildings in the vicinity have power, others don't. My date shows up, we share a sandwich, then head down to the FCC for the concert. The FCC doesn't have power. The pre-concert lecture (which I skipped) is being given by the light of the candles on the altar and there's emergency-exit lights, but they tell us they can't, in good conscience, continue with the concert if they don't have full power for safety reasons. If the power doesn't come back by 8pm, we'll be offered refunds or ticket exchanges. As the deadline approaches, a new possibility is offered -- on the spur of the moment, they've been offered space in the Presbyterian church a block over, which does have power. I think if the performers had been anything other than a small a capella group the transition might not have been possible (and since we had to change to open seating, if I'd shelled out big bucks for premium tickets I might have been peeved), but the acoustics were perfect and the space was, if anything, even a better layout (semi-circular pew area so more people were closer to the performers) than the original space. An extremely enjoyable concert. (I may review it in more detail later, but other than saying "gosh, cool" I'm not sure I have the technical knowledge to evaluate it.) People in other parts of the country can say what they like about "Berkeley values", but folks, these too are "Berkeley values" -- you see a problem, you have a solution available, and you say "let's go for it", and an entire hall full of concert-goers take it cheerfully in stride. No doubt there will be various after-the-fact negotiations regarding the hall-rental revenues, but considering all the barriers that could have been thrown up, I was quite impressed at the smoothness of the operation. (It is, of course, possible that the two venues have had some sort of pre-existing relationship regarding emergency space-usage, but I definitely got the impression that this was an on-the-spot solution rather than a pre-existing backup potential.)

Memo to self: If you plan to use the Treo as an alarm clock to get up in time to hit the treadmill before breakfast, remember to turn the ringer back to "audible" after the last session of papers.

Fortunately, I did wake up in time for breakfast on Friday. Friday's sessions were all DISTAFF all the time. (DISTAFF is the organization that sponsors textiles & clothing sessions, including the one my paper was in.) I'm trying to remember specific details at this point. A lovely paper on changes in high fashion reflected in ivory writing tablet cases, combs, and mirror cases. My mind's going blank on the rest of the papers in the other sessions, but I shared the last session with a presentation on hook-and-eye type fasteners in medieval Scandinavia, and one on a set of embroidered Sicilian undergarments. I got several compliments on my paper and did a boisterous show-and-tell session after the papers were over, pulling out my various engineering experiements on the different styles of shepherds' purses and showing how I used them to try to interpret the artistic representations.

Dinner was a great mass of DISTAFF folks going out to a Middle Eastern restaurant, then we adjourned to a room party with much computer geeking, squeeing at books and pictures, and consumption of alcohol. The party lasted long enough for people to wish me happy birthday (and sing various incompatible celebratory songs). As I was wandering back to my own dorm around 1am, I heard the sound of singing wafting out through the night air from one of the conference rooms. Through the window, a circle of people were sitting around a guitarist, energetically (and in many cases, drunkenly) belting out "Yellow Submarine". Now, it's not at all unusual to stumble across people singing or playing music at the Medieval Congress ... medieval music, that is. But this was more along the lines of "ur-filk" -- that stage when people gathered for another purpose are just singing for the sake of singing together and running through whatever repertoire the guitarist and most of the singers have in common. In this case, the source music seemed to consist of the entire Beatles inventory, significant quantities of blues and gospel standards, and a good sprinkling of '60s folk music. I stayed and sang for the better part of an hour before toddling off the rest of the way to bed.