Tant yn Telyn

I'm a Boston musician - lever harp and fiddle. I play mostly Scottish-style tunes, and this blog chronicles a year spent creating one new music thing a week. Since that project is now complete, new things will appear here less frequently.

[elizabethtimmerman]

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So, you might know I’m a nerd and a gamer. One of my favorite games has been, and continues to be, Guild Wars 2. About fifteen months ago, GW2 had a storyline that involved the main player-hub city being destroyed by a minion of an evil dragon, and one of the consequences was massive NPC death, which was done absolutely beautifully. This is relevant because one of the surviving NPCs had a conversation option that read, “Someone sings in the camp at night. Apparently it’s a norn mourning ballad. Saddest thing I ever heard.” (Really, all of the NPC conversation options were absolutely heartrending.)

My main character is a norn guardian, and I really love all of the norn lore - they’re hardy Viking-types who live in the frozen mountains, follow a spirituality that includes totem animals, and whose purpose in life is generally to do impressive deeds and leave behind legends of their doings. Naturally, I found myself needing to write a norn mourning ballad, inspired by Scarlet’s destruction of Lion’s Arch in 1327 AE.

I tried to write lyrics to this, but I don’t have a lot of practice making singable lyrics, so you’re welcome to write your own. The lyrics I came up with are below the cut, for the curious. (Also, please forgive the recording quality - something funky was going on with my mic, and I may go back and re-record this when I figure out how to fix it.)

Verse:

The first snow falls soft upon far-away hills, Your pyre burns brightly against the grey chill. The wind gently sighs, and gives me one last kiss, And carries your spirit away to the Mists. The flames now are fading, and with them my heart, For I have lost my beloved. 

Chorus:

The hand that holds mine is gone now, Only the wind remains. The sword next to mine is gone now, Battle has lost its thrill. The flame at my hearth is gone now, Sorrow is all I have left.

[elizabethtimmerman]

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This has been one of my favourite Scottish songs since I learned it at harp camp back in 2007. It's got a lovely melody, and I love to sing it (though I do really need to go take some voice lessons, ha), and I've been meaning to write a harp accompaniment to it for at least four years now. I thought it would make a fitting end to this thing-a-week project, so here it is.

For Ashley, with love.

Download link: http://elizabethtimmerman.bandcamp.com/track/i-aince-loved-a-lass

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As we move into late fall, the winds grow stronger and blow the dying leaves off the trees, and I recall the legends of the Wild Hunt. This tune references one of those legends - that of the ancient Briton king Herla, who attended a dwarven king's wedding for three days, only to discover that three centuries had passed upon his return, and who must remain on his horse until the dog that rides with him jumps down.

Download link: http://elizabethtimmerman.bandcamp.com/track/herlas-ride

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The last few weeks of tunes (including this one) have been written without any sort of idea or inspiration to start with - that is, just throwing some notes together and seeing what seems to fit together or flow from whatever starting point I happened to stumble on. I don't really like this method of composition, for a number of reasons. First of all, I don't feel like my output is nearly as good as when I start with an idea of what I want to make, what feeling I want to evoke or what scene I want to paint. Second of all, it's harder for me to stay on track with the tune when I don't have an outline to work within. Third (and most shallow), as I've mentioned before, naming them is much harder!

I'm curious if you all have noticed as much of a difference between the preconceived-idea tunes and the "noodling" tunes as I have. I know it's the general tendency of artists to see their work as worse than their audience sees it, and I know I've heard writers talk about how after the fact, they can rarely tell the difference between the passages that were hard to write and the ones that were easy.

Download link: http://elizabethtimmerman.bandcamp.com/track/cats-paw

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I intended to try to make something bouncy and dance-tune-y this week, but that sort of went out the window in my noodling around.

I haven't had a lot of motivation this week, so the left hand on this is really sparse - like one or two of the other tunes I've done in this project, I'll likely go back and change it at the end of Thing-a-Week, between working on longer things.

[elizabethtimmerman]

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I envy composers who work in specific formats, because then they can just title their compositions thing like "Canon in D" or "Sonata in G Minor" or whatever. This whole "folk music" thing means coming up with interesting and/or evocative and/or obscure things to call my tunes, when half the time they're all just the result of noodling around on the harp.

This tune is another one that's almost entirely come out of just noodling around on the harp. It has a feel of waves to it, and reminds me of spring nights sitting out on the beach watching the moon on the waves with one of my oldest friends. She's getting married tomorrow, so I thought I'd make this one for her. 

Download link: http://elizabethtimmerman.bandcamp.com/track/assateague-sky

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Metallica cover week! This is just the intro and twice through the verse+chorus; I think if I'd done this over two weeks instead of one, I'd have gotten the guitar solo down as well, but as it was I was having fits over the fact that nothing I made sounded right (or even as good as this awesome pedal harp version).

I'm thinking maybe at some point after thing-a-week is done, I'll cover an Abney Park song or two, because why not?

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This was one of those weeks where I started with a concept and decided I wanted to work in a particular mode to represent it...and then plain hated everything I made on that concept in that mode. So I scrapped it, and noodled for a bit in a major key, and came out with something completely different, yet still sort of keeping with the theme I'd had in mind.

In this case, it was the thought of doing something loosely centered on the ideal of Aphrodite, often called the Cyprian. This tune sounds, to me, less like an exalted paean to Aphrodite and more like a 19th-century Cyprian dancing about.

I'm not sure I'm happy with the left hand arrangement, but this is the first tune I've written that I might stick into my fiddle busking repertoire. Progress!

Download link: http://elizabethtimmerman.bandcamp.com/track/fair-cyprian

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They say a woman's weapon is poison (or temptation, depending who you ask), but I don't think we need to limit ourselves.

I've been reading a lot of the old Sword & Sorceress anthologies, edited by Marion Zimmer Bradley, lately. Two of my favourite characters first appeared in S&S III, back in the 80s, and I was thinking last week how I'd like to write something inspired by them - those characters specifically, as well as the broader fantasy subgenre of female-centric sword and sorcery.

This track went somewhat wide of the mark, at least regarding the specific characters I had in mind, but it still puts me in mind of a swordswoman and a sorceress, travelling on a quest (or perhaps a mercenary job) late at night. I think I may have been subconsciously influenced by Helium Volla on this one, as well, now that I listen to it again.

Download link: http://elizabethtimmerman.bandcamp.com/track/womans-weapon

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You know how you get songs stuck in your head? Sometimes I get words or phrases stuck in my head - the title of this tune was one of those. It's a Welsh word meaning "lessons", and I saw it earlier this week, and it kind of stuck. I've been learning all sorts of life lessons this week, so it seemed a bit appropriate.

This tune came from some noodling around with a rhythm I've played with before (it's in the bass of Arkose Cliffs, from a few months ago), but I hadn't yet done anything where it's in the melody.

Download link: http://elizabethtimmerman.bandcamp.com/track/gwersi

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I was in the Seattle area last weekend, playing the harp for a friend's wedding. Travelling across the country reminded me how fun it can be to just get up and go, to just do something spontaneously that's so far outside of what you'd normally do. For a couple of days when I returned, I had (metaphorically) itchy feet - wanting to get up and go have adventures again. This tune came out of that desire.

Download link: http://elizabethtimmerman.bandcamp.com/track/wanderlust

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It's pretty rare these days for me to actually use the first motif that I noodle around with in my thing-a-week tune. This is one of those rare times when everything just seemed to work and click together.

I named this tune "Midnight Market" because I started working on it after spending four hours busking at the SOWA Open Market in the South End, and because it (the tune, not SOWA) makes me think of the sort of otherworldly night-time markets you find in Neil Gaiman's books.

Download link: http://elizabethtimmerman.bandcamp.com/track/midnight-market

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I decided, this week, to try starting with an exercise from Deborah Friou's fantastic Harp Exercises for Agility and Speed, and see if I could make a halfway-decent tune out of it.

I then realized that if I didn't have a theme or a style in mind, I'd never get anywhere. Since I'd just finished re-reading Georgette Heyer's The Grand Sophy (which is a delightful romp through Regency London), and I'm not quite arrogant enough to think I could make a tune capturing the title character, I decided to work with the mental image of one of the secondary characters. Miss Cecilia Rivenhall is sprightly, beautiful, and a bit flighty, yet generally full of good sense. I think this isn't a bad tribute.

Download link: http://elizabethtimmerman.bandcamp.com/track/miss-cecilia

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This week, I decided to play around with arpeggios a little bit, and see if I could make something interesting out of a very basic scale. What I ended up with sounded a lot like bells to me, and this wee tune is the result.

By the way, if you have any thoughts as to things you'd like to hear me work on, feel free to drop me a note to that effect.

Download link: http://elizabethtimmerman.bandcamp.com/track/the-forest-church

[elizabethtimmerman]

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This is a well-known O'Carolan tune. Sometimes spelled "Sheebeg Sheemore", as it's pronounced, it refers to two hills, a larger and a smaller, that were the site of a legendary faerie battle. I've heard it played faster, but usually it's done slowly, as a lament.

I...may have chosen to do this one this week because I couldn't remember it well enough to jam with other musicians last weekend.

Download link: http://elizabethtimmerman.bandcamp.com/track/si-bheag-si-mhor

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I was having a hard time coming up with the beginnings of a tune this week, so I turned to my book of favourite poems. I've always loved Alfred, Lord Tennyson's work, including his poem The Kraken. This tune is in homage to that poem, an attempt to capture the same sorts of images that Tennyson's words do.

Download link: http://elizabethtimmerman.bandcamp.com/track/the-kraken-sleepeth

[elizabethtimmerman]

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Castle Island, in South Boston, is a popular place for people to fly kites in the summer. This tune reminds me quite a bit of kites dancing in the breeze on a sunny summer afternoon; hence the name. I originally wanted to write a tune around the idea of sunflowers, since I saw some gorgeous ones at a farmer's market this week, but this tune doesn't quite fit that image for me.

Download link: http://elizabethtimmerman.bandcamp.com/track/castle-island