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jenettFor driving up to Duluth and around bits of Lake Superior, I knew I wanted to put together a music mix for driving. (That it's one mix and not, say, three or four, tells you something about my levels of focus.)
I will warn you now: this post is best described as 4000 words of commentary on music and stories in my life, cleverly disguised as a conversation about a mix CD.
That I put together the mix in the first place, however, is a sign that I'm feeling enough like myself to resume the careful dance around music and Tale-the-Harp, and all the other pieces that go into that again, if very slowly and in tiny steps. (I have just done an important step in getting her properly tended and restrung today, go me. Ok. It involved sending an email, but the response is really helpful.)
I was going to say for people who are new to reading me that the music is all tangled and complicated and hard to talk about. But then I went hunting with DW's search function, and realised I'd talked about it. This post is from late 2008, and goes into the background Most of it hasn't changed much. Yet. But part of why I want to take some steps on progress is that one of the people who might be able to give me a hand is going to be out here in June, and it'd be nice to have something to work with.)
But I want to talk about the mix here, not Tale. It includes some stuff I'm going to talk about a lot (the first piece I ever fell in love with in AP Music Theory class my senior year - and not what you'd expect), a digression into Julian of Norwich and T.S. Eliot's "Little Gidding" and my father's gravestone, and a bit about Tristan and Iseult versus the medieval Arthurian mythos, and some other stuff that might get less comment, but point at some interesting sources.
Track 1: "Holy Ground" by Gerry O'Beirne from the album Half Moon Bay
Lyrics over here
This track I learned of the day of my 3rd degree initiation in my religious tradition. You can read the 'for public consumption' bits of that day over here.
Elise chose eight songs, only two of which I knew beforehand: this was one of the new ones, and her notes say: "Gerry O'Beirne, The Holy Ground - leaving home to go out into the world". The song's about a young man someone travelling from Ireland to Mexico for the War of Independence, but it's got a lot of resonance about leaving behind childhood and seeking new roads of all kinds. There's also a lot of resonance for me about family stuff - my parents left the UK to come here, but they grew up changed in ways I can't imagine by World War II (directly) and World War I (by the effect I know it had on their parents and grandparents). What the Americas represents in that setting is ... complicated.
Track 2: "Follow Me Down" by Seanan McGuire on her album Stars Fall Home
Lyrics and you can listen from her albums page.
It's a song of the seasons and cycles of the wheel of the year, and the wheel of lives and loves and potentials. And I love - even while it's pained - her "Monarchs of seasons are nothing but tools" line, because it echoes for me the grace and pain and struggle of one of my favorite books, Lois McMaster Bujold's Curse of Chalion. But if I digress about that, I'll never get this posted.
Track 3: "All Will Be Well" by Meg Barnhouse on her album Mango Thoughts in a Meatloaf Town"
Lyrics and listening link
I learned of this song because of a very painful time in a friend's life, and it's been one of the songs on regular rotation in my "All these things shall pass" personal rotation ever since.
It would be useful to explain two things here: Julian of Norwich is one of the great English mystics, who wrote some fascinating things, had visions, and all the other things that mystics do. (Besides puzzle those who come after them for generations.) This song is a conversation between the singer and Julian about how to address the problem of pain.
The other part is that this particular sentence of Julians: "All will be well" is something that T.S. Eliot bounced off in his poem
Little Gidding(specifically at the very end.) It's also the lines on my father's (and eventually my mother's) gravestone: I still haven't worked up the nerve to ask my mother why that.
And all shall be well and
All manner of thing shall be well
When the tongues of flame are in-folded
Into the crowned knot of fire
And the fire and the rose are one.
Parents are mysterious people. I've long suspected mine are a bit more than most, because the obscuring cloak of Emotions We Do Not Talk About does rather veil things effectively sometimes. And this song's about that too: how do we talk about pain and loss and hard times with the people we learn from? Plus the more obvious bit, of how do we keep going when the going seems impossible?
Track 4: "Traditional Gaelic Melody" by Alasadair Fraser on The Road North
No lyrics.
[puts this track on repeat, because I'm going to be here a while]
Once upon a time, I was in boarding school. I was taking - as one of five classes in my senior year - the Advanced Placement Music Theory Class, which would eventually lead to the AP Music Theory exam. Which is, frankly, one of the most painful APs out there, because of the breadth of skill they ask for - everything from knowledge to transcribing a piece by ear to all sorts of practical theory exercises. Music's an art, so every time you try to turn this into something you can grade, it becomes as much about 'can you match what the exam is looking for' as 'how do you glory in the music'?
Now, Andover had an amazing music program (still does). And that year, we would later find ourselves immersed in singing Bach's St. Matthew Passion (Incidentally, a really fun piece to be doing when you're also doing deep theory, because he gives such gorgeous examples, and since most of my theory class was involved in one way or another, we used it a lot.) But I'm ahead of myself.
We began the year with a little philosophical stuff: the idea that part of the reason we study theory is so that when we see music written down, we can hear it in our heads, and when we hear it, we can see how it would be notated so other people can share it. But then we got into "Here's a note" and "Here's how to read treble clef" and "Here's bass clef" (I had a head start for about 2 weeks, because I'd been reading treble clef since I was 7, bass since I was 10, and tenor for about 3 years at that point.)
And then we moved on to basic scales and chords, dipped a little into modes, and on how you start to look at structuring a piece of music.
But we ... didn't really listen to anything. Not in September. Not in October. But one day of Saturday classes (one of Andover's very traditional but less than brilliant ideas in my book), we walked in one day, first period. Once we were there, our teacher told us to put our books aside and close our eyes.
This is what he played. Not something old, dust motes glittering about the quivering notes, not something of Hildegard's or Dufay's. Not something from the Common Practice Period canon, building the great cathedrals of sound note by carefully placed note until a whole new world soars above you, reaching to heaven or to the great laughter of the nature of the world: neither Bach nor Mozart. Not something edged in dots of shadow and light, the music that imbued the world of the impressionists. Not something pushing the limits of theory or instrumentation, Schoenberg or Stravinsky. Not some great singer, not some prodigy of rapid-fire piano or flute or classic violin. And not some music likely to be quite unknown to us - none of the tonalities from India or China or Africa or even Scandinavia that are rich and wonderful and open all sorts of new doors.
No.
Instead, you have the slow unfolding, a gentle piano tune that flows along, a gentle brook curving around a green hill, flowing beside a dirt path. In this tune are the wildflowers blooming in clumps of blues and pinks. There's the sun above, the path winding up to a bridge and the water flowing under. Somewhere in there, so faintly you can barely hear it at first, the violin comes in, picking up a long note here, an echo of harmony there. It's folk and traditional music, but new-made, it carries no specific history with it, but the beauty of the moment.
And then the song turns, another twist of the path, and the fiddle picks up. It's brighter, stronger. The sun has come from behind a cloud, the twists and the turns of what's going on become more absorbing. There's ornamentation of the music, but it fits so well with what came before that you lean into it, rather than being pushed away by too many notes.
And then another twist, the music growing. The place where .. whenever I'm truly listening to this, the tears come to my eyes. The passion of walking that road, even when you're not sure where you're going, or what you'll find when you get there. The pushing drive to find out, to carry with you all of that song, even the bits that have echoes of pain and loss, because you're leaving what you knew far behind. The fiddle pushing and reaching - and then ending. But it's not a final end. Not the end of the road, nor the end of the life. Just a moment, before you pick up and take a breath, and do it all over again. (Music as reincarnation.)
We listened, all of us, and we were silent in a way that teenagers - especially articulate, verbally agile and curious teenagers - rarely are, long after he turned it off. And in that silence, he began to coax out of us what we heard, why it worked. It's a simple piece, but like all water, it carries secrets and hidden treasures. Roads are water, in their way.
It is - and I do not say this lightly - one of the single best educational moments of my entire life. And that's a life that's included some of the best schools of their type in the US, with teachers brilliant at what they do. Very little has come close to that room, on that gray and dull Saturday morning in November, and this music.
In playing this piece - and in choosing a piece that was simple enough to grasp with a beginner's brain, but that rewards depth and curiousity and exploration - I was hooked. Oddly enough, the CD was not easy to find for several years, but I found out later that at least three other people in the class that day had looked for it - in some cases for a couple of years - until we found it. These days, it's on iTunes. The rest of the CD is lovely - British traditional music newly created, with some brillant fiddle. But this track? I recommend.
(I also promise that most of the rest of this commentary will be shorter.)
Track 5: "Come and be welcome" by Heather Dale from The Green Knight
Lyrics can be downloaded in PDF from this page on her site.
I got a chance to hear her in a house concert last fall. I was beginning to feel iffy enough that I wasn't sure I should go, but I am so glad I did. You can read more about that over here.
I love her music for several reasons, but one of the main one is the sense of welcome that's present in so much of it - of opening doors through the creation, rather than limiting or fencing off. The people in her songs are human - imperfect, frail, sometimes hurtful - but she has a knack for getting at the heart of the idea. And this song is a reminder about music, and joining in with it, and where the stories come from (and what they're for.)
Track 6: "Suvetar" by Gjallahorn on the album Sjofn
This has lyrics, but they're in Finnish: both English and Finnish over here
One of the joys of living in Minnesota is that people keep introducing me to interesting music. Or rather, living in Minnesota makes it easier to be introduced to some of the fabulous Scandinavian folk-derived stuff out there. Ruth MacKenzie, I've talked about before, but this is another.
"Suvetar" is in many ways a hymn to spring, and the Goddess of spring, the rich earth giving way to fertile growth after the long winter. It makes me smile and laugh every time I hear it, which is never a bad thing in this song.
Track 7: "Firebird's Daughter" by S.J. Tucker from Blessings
Lyrics and play link from her albums page over here.
I'm pretty sure I discovered S.J. Tucker when she was having medical problems last year, and people were making fundraiser noises. I'm pretty sure someone would have hit me over the head with her music shortly, though, because .. yeah.
I'm not going into my firebird and phoenix stuff here, because that's tradition-tied and it takes a while, but .. Firebirds are good. Phoenii are good. And yes, plural, in some sense, for me, for reasons that also take a while to go into. But this is another song that never fails to get me singing along, tapping on the steering wheel, or whatever else I can manage.
(I am, incidentally, particularly looking for other firebird/phoenix related songs, if you come across any.)
Track 8: "Tam Lin" by Tricky Pixie on their album Mythcreant
S.J. Tucker is 1/3rd of Tricky Pixie, which is why it's in this order.
Lyrics and a chance to listen on their site over here
Now, my Tam Lin fixation is also something I am not going to go into here because I could write aeons on that. But this has turned into one of my favorite versions of the song. There's something about the repeated refrain (which runs the risk of being "Oh, not this again", as happens in many long ballads). Of the seven versions I have sitting on iTunes, this is interestingly the one that spends the most comparative time on the pregnancy bit (as opposed to what happens after that.) I also really like the conversational aspect. Also the sound effects that come with the transformational bits.
(And before anyone recommends the Tam-Lin.org site or![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
pameladean's book, got those *grin* And then some and over. But you might find the references at the bottom of this retelling for a ritual I did amusing. You might also laugh and/or cry at Seven Things that Never Happened to Tam Lin by tamnonlinear See? I said fixation.)
Track 9: "Tristan and Iseult" by Heather Dale from her May Queen
You can listen on her site but I'll warn you, it's a 10 minute song.
I'm a medievalist by training and by inclination, in many many ways. I've read a huge swath of the medieval Arthurian bits (certainly all of the even-slightly well known ones) at one point or another, thanks to an excellent class on the subject in college. And there's much of grace and glory - along with tragedy - in Arthur.
But I keep coming back to Tristan and Iseult, in a way I have a hard time doing with Arthur and his court. There's so much in this story that's about trying to do the thing that keeps your promises despite a desperate need to do otherwise. (And since it's a magical cup in this story, it really does remove the 'choice' factor in a lot of ways.) It's about how that's honorable - but it's a destructive kind of honorable.
In short, it always makes me come back to those words of another fiction's hero: Miles Vorkosigan in A Civil Campaign (by Lois McMaster Bujold), who says: "In my experience... the trouble with oaths of the form, death before dishonour, is that eventually, given enough time and abrasion, they separate the world into just two sorts of people: the dead, and the foresworn. It's a survivor's problem, this one."
This story, even more than Arthur's, is a reminder to me of the costs of promises. Because Tristan casting aside his harp, "cutting the strings that brought him joy" is the same slow death of Tam Lin's wood and stone, is Miles' reminder that "The one thing you can't trade for your heart's desire is your heart."
It's not that those promises are wrong, necessarily. They aren't always. Keeping your word to your liege is potent. It's that they have consequences, and some of those are death, and some of those are wood and stone, and some of them are your heart. Sometimes, you get saved (as Tam Lin is, as Miles does). Sometimes the ship comes too late, and lies bring stories of the wrong color sail.
(Things I learned from mythology: Just say no to black and white sails message systems. It's as bad an idea as walking in the greenwood if your name is Margaret or Janet. (this last link not essential to anything in this post, but good fun, especially if you know your British traditional folk music.)
Track 9: "Prepare the Way" by Abbi Spinner McBride on Fire of Creation and
Track 10: "Let the Way Be Open" also by Abbi Spinner McBride on Enter the Center
are both tracks from fire circles. I learned the second one at the first Pagan festival I ever went to.
Let the Way: lyrics and a clip
Prepare the Way: chance to listen - can't find lyrics at the moment.
Both draw me in, and twist around in the same ways that The Road North does, and I get to sing with them and make harmony, and dream of a day when my coven circles have enough people to try and do the same. We don't need *many* more, if we get a couple more singers, but two people is an interval, not a chord, no matter how you look at it.
Track 11: "One Voice" by the Wailin' Jennys from 40 Days
Chance to listen and lyrics
This is a song brought to me by work. A couple of years ago - I think in 2006, two students and our chorus director did this song as part of our Thanksgiving assembly (which has turned into a tradition of a talent show highlighting kinds of talents that don't normally get a lot of attention at school - everything from individual music - voice, harp, guitar - to yo-yoing to dancing to videos of sports done outside of school (riding and synchronised skating)
I was entranced the first time I heard it, and over the succeeding years, it's turned into the song I come back to again and again. If there's a soundtrack for my hopes for the coven, this is it. It's also, as you might notice, where I get the phrasings for my journal.
The last few tracks
The last three tracks are, thankfully, much more for fun, and since I've been writing this thing for a couple of hours, I'm going to be brief.
- Jonathan Colton's "Skullcrusher Mountain"
- Cats Laughing's version of "Nottamun Town" - another song I have multiple versions of, but I really like the intro on this in particular.
And in closing:
- Heather Dale's "Brother Stand Beside Me", (from the same album as her earlier one on her, The Green Knight) especially for two lines in the last chorus:
Let a world too tired to sing
Relearn its song
I will warn you now: this post is best described as 4000 words of commentary on music and stories in my life, cleverly disguised as a conversation about a mix CD.
That I put together the mix in the first place, however, is a sign that I'm feeling enough like myself to resume the careful dance around music and Tale-the-Harp, and all the other pieces that go into that again, if very slowly and in tiny steps. (I have just done an important step in getting her properly tended and restrung today, go me. Ok. It involved sending an email, but the response is really helpful.)
I was going to say for people who are new to reading me that the music is all tangled and complicated and hard to talk about. But then I went hunting with DW's search function, and realised I'd talked about it. This post is from late 2008, and goes into the background Most of it hasn't changed much. Yet. But part of why I want to take some steps on progress is that one of the people who might be able to give me a hand is going to be out here in June, and it'd be nice to have something to work with.)
But I want to talk about the mix here, not Tale. It includes some stuff I'm going to talk about a lot (the first piece I ever fell in love with in AP Music Theory class my senior year - and not what you'd expect), a digression into Julian of Norwich and T.S. Eliot's "Little Gidding" and my father's gravestone, and a bit about Tristan and Iseult versus the medieval Arthurian mythos, and some other stuff that might get less comment, but point at some interesting sources.
Track 1: "Holy Ground" by Gerry O'Beirne from the album Half Moon Bay
Lyrics over here
This track I learned of the day of my 3rd degree initiation in my religious tradition. You can read the 'for public consumption' bits of that day over here.
Elise chose eight songs, only two of which I knew beforehand: this was one of the new ones, and her notes say: "Gerry O'Beirne, The Holy Ground - leaving home to go out into the world". The song's about a young man someone travelling from Ireland to Mexico for the War of Independence, but it's got a lot of resonance about leaving behind childhood and seeking new roads of all kinds. There's also a lot of resonance for me about family stuff - my parents left the UK to come here, but they grew up changed in ways I can't imagine by World War II (directly) and World War I (by the effect I know it had on their parents and grandparents). What the Americas represents in that setting is ... complicated.
Track 2: "Follow Me Down" by Seanan McGuire on her album Stars Fall Home
Lyrics and you can listen from her albums page.
It's a song of the seasons and cycles of the wheel of the year, and the wheel of lives and loves and potentials. And I love - even while it's pained - her "Monarchs of seasons are nothing but tools" line, because it echoes for me the grace and pain and struggle of one of my favorite books, Lois McMaster Bujold's Curse of Chalion. But if I digress about that, I'll never get this posted.
Track 3: "All Will Be Well" by Meg Barnhouse on her album Mango Thoughts in a Meatloaf Town"
Lyrics and listening link
I learned of this song because of a very painful time in a friend's life, and it's been one of the songs on regular rotation in my "All these things shall pass" personal rotation ever since.
It would be useful to explain two things here: Julian of Norwich is one of the great English mystics, who wrote some fascinating things, had visions, and all the other things that mystics do. (Besides puzzle those who come after them for generations.) This song is a conversation between the singer and Julian about how to address the problem of pain.
The other part is that this particular sentence of Julians: "All will be well" is something that T.S. Eliot bounced off in his poem
Little Gidding(specifically at the very end.) It's also the lines on my father's (and eventually my mother's) gravestone: I still haven't worked up the nerve to ask my mother why that.
And all shall be well and
All manner of thing shall be well
When the tongues of flame are in-folded
Into the crowned knot of fire
And the fire and the rose are one.
Parents are mysterious people. I've long suspected mine are a bit more than most, because the obscuring cloak of Emotions We Do Not Talk About does rather veil things effectively sometimes. And this song's about that too: how do we talk about pain and loss and hard times with the people we learn from? Plus the more obvious bit, of how do we keep going when the going seems impossible?
Track 4: "Traditional Gaelic Melody" by Alasadair Fraser on The Road North
No lyrics.
[puts this track on repeat, because I'm going to be here a while]
Once upon a time, I was in boarding school. I was taking - as one of five classes in my senior year - the Advanced Placement Music Theory Class, which would eventually lead to the AP Music Theory exam. Which is, frankly, one of the most painful APs out there, because of the breadth of skill they ask for - everything from knowledge to transcribing a piece by ear to all sorts of practical theory exercises. Music's an art, so every time you try to turn this into something you can grade, it becomes as much about 'can you match what the exam is looking for' as 'how do you glory in the music'?
Now, Andover had an amazing music program (still does). And that year, we would later find ourselves immersed in singing Bach's St. Matthew Passion (Incidentally, a really fun piece to be doing when you're also doing deep theory, because he gives such gorgeous examples, and since most of my theory class was involved in one way or another, we used it a lot.) But I'm ahead of myself.
We began the year with a little philosophical stuff: the idea that part of the reason we study theory is so that when we see music written down, we can hear it in our heads, and when we hear it, we can see how it would be notated so other people can share it. But then we got into "Here's a note" and "Here's how to read treble clef" and "Here's bass clef" (I had a head start for about 2 weeks, because I'd been reading treble clef since I was 7, bass since I was 10, and tenor for about 3 years at that point.)
And then we moved on to basic scales and chords, dipped a little into modes, and on how you start to look at structuring a piece of music.
But we ... didn't really listen to anything. Not in September. Not in October. But one day of Saturday classes (one of Andover's very traditional but less than brilliant ideas in my book), we walked in one day, first period. Once we were there, our teacher told us to put our books aside and close our eyes.
This is what he played. Not something old, dust motes glittering about the quivering notes, not something of Hildegard's or Dufay's. Not something from the Common Practice Period canon, building the great cathedrals of sound note by carefully placed note until a whole new world soars above you, reaching to heaven or to the great laughter of the nature of the world: neither Bach nor Mozart. Not something edged in dots of shadow and light, the music that imbued the world of the impressionists. Not something pushing the limits of theory or instrumentation, Schoenberg or Stravinsky. Not some great singer, not some prodigy of rapid-fire piano or flute or classic violin. And not some music likely to be quite unknown to us - none of the tonalities from India or China or Africa or even Scandinavia that are rich and wonderful and open all sorts of new doors.
No.
Instead, you have the slow unfolding, a gentle piano tune that flows along, a gentle brook curving around a green hill, flowing beside a dirt path. In this tune are the wildflowers blooming in clumps of blues and pinks. There's the sun above, the path winding up to a bridge and the water flowing under. Somewhere in there, so faintly you can barely hear it at first, the violin comes in, picking up a long note here, an echo of harmony there. It's folk and traditional music, but new-made, it carries no specific history with it, but the beauty of the moment.
And then the song turns, another twist of the path, and the fiddle picks up. It's brighter, stronger. The sun has come from behind a cloud, the twists and the turns of what's going on become more absorbing. There's ornamentation of the music, but it fits so well with what came before that you lean into it, rather than being pushed away by too many notes.
And then another twist, the music growing. The place where .. whenever I'm truly listening to this, the tears come to my eyes. The passion of walking that road, even when you're not sure where you're going, or what you'll find when you get there. The pushing drive to find out, to carry with you all of that song, even the bits that have echoes of pain and loss, because you're leaving what you knew far behind. The fiddle pushing and reaching - and then ending. But it's not a final end. Not the end of the road, nor the end of the life. Just a moment, before you pick up and take a breath, and do it all over again. (Music as reincarnation.)
We listened, all of us, and we were silent in a way that teenagers - especially articulate, verbally agile and curious teenagers - rarely are, long after he turned it off. And in that silence, he began to coax out of us what we heard, why it worked. It's a simple piece, but like all water, it carries secrets and hidden treasures. Roads are water, in their way.
It is - and I do not say this lightly - one of the single best educational moments of my entire life. And that's a life that's included some of the best schools of their type in the US, with teachers brilliant at what they do. Very little has come close to that room, on that gray and dull Saturday morning in November, and this music.
In playing this piece - and in choosing a piece that was simple enough to grasp with a beginner's brain, but that rewards depth and curiousity and exploration - I was hooked. Oddly enough, the CD was not easy to find for several years, but I found out later that at least three other people in the class that day had looked for it - in some cases for a couple of years - until we found it. These days, it's on iTunes. The rest of the CD is lovely - British traditional music newly created, with some brillant fiddle. But this track? I recommend.
(I also promise that most of the rest of this commentary will be shorter.)
Track 5: "Come and be welcome" by Heather Dale from The Green Knight
Lyrics can be downloaded in PDF from this page on her site.
I got a chance to hear her in a house concert last fall. I was beginning to feel iffy enough that I wasn't sure I should go, but I am so glad I did. You can read more about that over here.
I love her music for several reasons, but one of the main one is the sense of welcome that's present in so much of it - of opening doors through the creation, rather than limiting or fencing off. The people in her songs are human - imperfect, frail, sometimes hurtful - but she has a knack for getting at the heart of the idea. And this song is a reminder about music, and joining in with it, and where the stories come from (and what they're for.)
Track 6: "Suvetar" by Gjallahorn on the album Sjofn
This has lyrics, but they're in Finnish: both English and Finnish over here
One of the joys of living in Minnesota is that people keep introducing me to interesting music. Or rather, living in Minnesota makes it easier to be introduced to some of the fabulous Scandinavian folk-derived stuff out there. Ruth MacKenzie, I've talked about before, but this is another.
"Suvetar" is in many ways a hymn to spring, and the Goddess of spring, the rich earth giving way to fertile growth after the long winter. It makes me smile and laugh every time I hear it, which is never a bad thing in this song.
Track 7: "Firebird's Daughter" by S.J. Tucker from Blessings
Lyrics and play link from her albums page over here.
I'm pretty sure I discovered S.J. Tucker when she was having medical problems last year, and people were making fundraiser noises. I'm pretty sure someone would have hit me over the head with her music shortly, though, because .. yeah.
I'm not going into my firebird and phoenix stuff here, because that's tradition-tied and it takes a while, but .. Firebirds are good. Phoenii are good. And yes, plural, in some sense, for me, for reasons that also take a while to go into. But this is another song that never fails to get me singing along, tapping on the steering wheel, or whatever else I can manage.
(I am, incidentally, particularly looking for other firebird/phoenix related songs, if you come across any.)
Track 8: "Tam Lin" by Tricky Pixie on their album Mythcreant
S.J. Tucker is 1/3rd of Tricky Pixie, which is why it's in this order.
Lyrics and a chance to listen on their site over here
Now, my Tam Lin fixation is also something I am not going to go into here because I could write aeons on that. But this has turned into one of my favorite versions of the song. There's something about the repeated refrain (which runs the risk of being "Oh, not this again", as happens in many long ballads). Of the seven versions I have sitting on iTunes, this is interestingly the one that spends the most comparative time on the pregnancy bit (as opposed to what happens after that.) I also really like the conversational aspect. Also the sound effects that come with the transformational bits.
(And before anyone recommends the Tam-Lin.org site or
pameladean's book, got those *grin* And then some and over. But you might find the references at the bottom of this retelling for a ritual I did amusing. You might also laugh and/or cry at Seven Things that Never Happened to Tam Lin by tamnonlinear See? I said fixation.)Track 9: "Tristan and Iseult" by Heather Dale from her May Queen
You can listen on her site but I'll warn you, it's a 10 minute song.
I'm a medievalist by training and by inclination, in many many ways. I've read a huge swath of the medieval Arthurian bits (certainly all of the even-slightly well known ones) at one point or another, thanks to an excellent class on the subject in college. And there's much of grace and glory - along with tragedy - in Arthur.
But I keep coming back to Tristan and Iseult, in a way I have a hard time doing with Arthur and his court. There's so much in this story that's about trying to do the thing that keeps your promises despite a desperate need to do otherwise. (And since it's a magical cup in this story, it really does remove the 'choice' factor in a lot of ways.) It's about how that's honorable - but it's a destructive kind of honorable.
In short, it always makes me come back to those words of another fiction's hero: Miles Vorkosigan in A Civil Campaign (by Lois McMaster Bujold), who says: "In my experience... the trouble with oaths of the form, death before dishonour, is that eventually, given enough time and abrasion, they separate the world into just two sorts of people: the dead, and the foresworn. It's a survivor's problem, this one."
This story, even more than Arthur's, is a reminder to me of the costs of promises. Because Tristan casting aside his harp, "cutting the strings that brought him joy" is the same slow death of Tam Lin's wood and stone, is Miles' reminder that "The one thing you can't trade for your heart's desire is your heart."
It's not that those promises are wrong, necessarily. They aren't always. Keeping your word to your liege is potent. It's that they have consequences, and some of those are death, and some of those are wood and stone, and some of them are your heart. Sometimes, you get saved (as Tam Lin is, as Miles does). Sometimes the ship comes too late, and lies bring stories of the wrong color sail.
(Things I learned from mythology: Just say no to black and white sails message systems. It's as bad an idea as walking in the greenwood if your name is Margaret or Janet. (this last link not essential to anything in this post, but good fun, especially if you know your British traditional folk music.)
Track 9: "Prepare the Way" by Abbi Spinner McBride on Fire of Creation and
Track 10: "Let the Way Be Open" also by Abbi Spinner McBride on Enter the Center
are both tracks from fire circles. I learned the second one at the first Pagan festival I ever went to.
Let the Way: lyrics and a clip
Prepare the Way: chance to listen - can't find lyrics at the moment.
Both draw me in, and twist around in the same ways that The Road North does, and I get to sing with them and make harmony, and dream of a day when my coven circles have enough people to try and do the same. We don't need *many* more, if we get a couple more singers, but two people is an interval, not a chord, no matter how you look at it.
Track 11: "One Voice" by the Wailin' Jennys from 40 Days
Chance to listen and lyrics
This is a song brought to me by work. A couple of years ago - I think in 2006, two students and our chorus director did this song as part of our Thanksgiving assembly (which has turned into a tradition of a talent show highlighting kinds of talents that don't normally get a lot of attention at school - everything from individual music - voice, harp, guitar - to yo-yoing to dancing to videos of sports done outside of school (riding and synchronised skating)
I was entranced the first time I heard it, and over the succeeding years, it's turned into the song I come back to again and again. If there's a soundtrack for my hopes for the coven, this is it. It's also, as you might notice, where I get the phrasings for my journal.
The last few tracks
The last three tracks are, thankfully, much more for fun, and since I've been writing this thing for a couple of hours, I'm going to be brief.
- Jonathan Colton's "Skullcrusher Mountain"
- Cats Laughing's version of "Nottamun Town" - another song I have multiple versions of, but I really like the intro on this in particular.
And in closing:
- Heather Dale's "Brother Stand Beside Me", (from the same album as her earlier one on her, The Green Knight) especially for two lines in the last chorus:
Let a world too tired to sing
Relearn its song
