My Personal Bardic Challenge for 2007

Recent Progress

Eleven Years a Member, Ten Years a Performer

I've been in the SCA a while now. I'm not an "old timer" by "old timer" standards, but I'm certainly no longer a newcomer. My interests have narrowed from their initial wide-ranging enthusiasm into more defined channels.

When I started performing, I gravitated to the "traditional" repertoire that I most commonly heard, and which got the best audience response. I learned a half-dozen ballads, a score or more of Irish songs, a handful of love songs and two handfuls of bawdy verses. I could sing in the car for an hour without stopping, and not run through my entire repetoire.

A year after my bardic debut, I got my harp. I tended to pick out similar songs to perform on it - usually the slower Irish and Scottish airs. I made great progress in a year, but very little thereafter.

Four or five years ago, I started to get a hankering for more actual medieval music. I was buying CDs of it, and was appreciating that it was different from the traditional pieces I usually did. Two or three years ago, I discovered the joys of instrumental improvisation on a Saxon lyre. And a year ago, I got a wire-strung harp from Ardival Harps and took lessons, marking my first major technical improvements as a player in a decade. I had decided that I liked Anglo-Saxon verse, was studying hypothetical Anglo-Saxon performance, and also really enjoyed trouvere music and the Spanish Cantigas de Santa Maria of the 13th century.

Bard or Musician?

The generic name for "entertainer" in the SCA is "bard." There is a strong sense, in the bardic community, that the first duty of the entertainer is to give the audience what it wants. And that seems to be a music that is eerily reminiscent of the SCA itself - modern music dressed up in medieval clothes.

There's another community, the "early music" crowd. Many of them are dance musicians, because that's one of the few acceptable outlets for period intrumental music. Otherwise, you find yourself waiting for Knowne World Choir at Pennsic or some other niche performance opportunity at a huge event.

The perception, which I have heard often, is that "nobody wants to hear medieval music." It's the stewed spinach of the feast: good for you but kind of yucky. Bards, who want to entertain, don't see a demand for it in their audiences. They might admire the early music folks for their scholarship, but typically believe that they aren't really good entertainers - can't "hold a crowd." The early musicians want to add more authenticity to events, but barriers - language especially - keeps their repertoire from being accessible to most of the populace.

Embrace the Power of "And"

Surely, out of the corpus of period music, there are some pieces which can be made to appeal to the general SCA populace? Perhaps they will need to be presented in translation, or adapted in some way, but that's no more or less than what's done in other arts and sciences.

My New Year's resolution for 2007 is to shape one such piece every month this year. I am tracking my efforts here, and will document the research, the performance decisions, and the audience reception, once the piece is performed.