Music session - 26th September 2017
Present:
Sympkyn of the Moor, hammered dulcimer
Katherine of Glastonbury, harp
Elyna Delynor, bray harp, alto rebec
Katherina Weyssin, treble viol da gamba
Tunes played:
To start with we had a revisit of the Montarde Bransle CAKE!!! That's right, to celebrate the birthday of the lovely Katherine of Glastonbury, we helped her celebrate by consuming lots of the fantastically chocolatey birthday cake that she baked for us :)
Happy Birthday Katherine and thank you again!
After de-chocolating our faces, we went on to have several plays through of the Montarde Bransle, this time I think we defaulted to four dancers but I'm going to introduce a dice-roll element for future sessions!
We had a play with the bass line/supporting chord structure and tweaked it slightly to make it sound more interesting. The piece is sounding more practiced and still needs polishing up, but so far so good.
Then we played Charlotte Bransle, which is still very new. This too starts the melody on G with B flattened. It's worth mentioning that, unlike some interpretations of this tune, we are choosing to play it with the E in the melody natural, not flattened. The dulcimer and the harps would have to de-tune a string to make the E flattened, and we note that both options are historically valid, therefore we have opted for what is sensible for our instruments.
We looped around this one a fair bit as it is new to us and is a bit more complex than some, although already starting to sound pretty nice... it's a pretty tune.
Then we decided to add yet another new bransle, albeit a very short one... Triory Bransle... not a long melody and not really that fast from memory... we should have done this one yonks ago. Hopefully it being short means that it will be a good future candidate for improvisation sessions.
**Reminder**
Future music sessions will take place on TUESDAYS rather than Mondays. NEW VENUE! (email me on music@ildhafn.lochac.sca.org for address), same time (7.30pm - 9.30pm).
Newcomers are very welcome :)
Regards,
Elyna Delynor