Caltrops - No Stairway to Heaven





	[quote name="kyrie derbingle"]I think this was my favorite quarantine find so far. There are some well done covers of modern songs done in Renaissance and earlier "styles," but like you noted, they're usually just straight up note-for-note, substituting archaic instruments for the usual guitar/bass/keyboard/drums, with <i>maybe</i> a nod towards linguistic changes. [youtube id ="ugqQlB5fpuc"] Like any music dork could tell you, though, music followed very different rules in the pre-common practice era. So while listening to Hanson's "MMMBop" played on bodhran & hammered dulcimer is different, it's not much more interesting than just playing the original recording. The translation work this guy did adds a whole new dimension to the music, and my linguist wife geeked out over the same thing you observed--she could make sense of the Old French, while anyone who read Chaucer in high school knows that even Middle English is practically indecipherable. For my part, I like picking apart the musical aspects of these videos. The majority of what we listen to today is built on Ionian and Aeolian modes, while a lot of medieval music used Dorian, Phrygian, Lydian, and Mixolydian modes. Which, in brief, means it'll sound right to your ear 75% of the time with absolutely <i>wrong</i> notes cropping up during that other 25%, and everything seems to be predominantly written in a minor key. Combine that with structure that doesn't regularly follow the 4 bar phrase and cadences that often eschew the tonic, and you get what most people think of as those quaint little songs, performed by a half-elf bard at The Adventurer's Inn, that seem to meander around melodically and end on a random note. [youtube id="g-RDN8n3ZK0"] [youtube id="jyVX9IIO568"] You'll still hear LOTS of current music that makes use of modes--especially Dorian and Lydian--in things like movie scores or jazz, but other current conventions like the way we do cadences make it sound comfortable on the ear. Plus, in Lydian mode, the fourth note in the scale often gets flatted due to...tetrachordal reasons I think? Long time since that particular college theory class. Anyway, the upshot is you end up with what's effectively a major scale at times, which kind of explains why medieval and Renaissance folks never bothered much with using Ionian. Add to all of that the fact that the western world was largely illiterate during that time, so learning an instrument was kinda like an institutionalized version of the emo kid who sits in his room all day with a cheap guitar and a Pink Floyd album trying to work out where his fingers are supposed to go to recreate that sound <i>right there.</i> Also, the rules for music notation hadn't yet been standardized or codified; sometimes the music was more of a crib sheet or a rough sketch of what general direction the melody should take without much in the way of indicating rhythm, kinda sorta like a modern chord chart, or some of the notation you'd find in Indian music. <img src="https://media2.wnyc.org/i/800/500/l/80/1/Neume2.jpg"> The modern notation system as we'd recognize it came into being around the 16th or 17th century. That led to all kinds of improvement in performance consistency, and you could play a song you'd never heard before, written by a man you'd never met who lived in a nation across the known world. It was a big deal at the time. Baroque music in its original format looks very much like what we play today; if you can play piano well enough, you can pick up and play an original Bach manuscript. Of course, they still had other music in play that we don't make much use of today, so a modern song played by the rules of Bach's world still sounds a little odd. [youtube id="Ey5GItze-BY"] [youtube id="mbDjE_G383k"] Anyway, sorry for the full-on dissertation, but the internal logic of music really fascinates me. I'll just be off now to wipe the flecks of spittle from my screen.[/quote]