Dec 11, 2018
Well that was fun
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Well that was fun
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.)
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
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
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.
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
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
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