Bestie's 100 Day A&S Challenge

Still a bit depressed, compounded by a shitty day at work, so I can't bring myself to pick up my lute tonight.

Luckily, Alexander Adams has just released a new album, and since he's one of my main inspirations, I can listen to that and let the bardic gears at the back of my head spin a little bit.  That counts, because I say so.

I definitely miss his voice, before he transitioned, but nowadays he seems to be moving more towards instrumental items.  He also has a nice habit of re-imagining some of his older works with his new voice and more instruments.  I especially enjoyed Brannigan's Special Ale, which I already performed once at an SCA event and will definitely need to keep working on.  The new version has an instrumental flourish which I'd quite like to learn on lute.

No Pathfinder tonight since the internet's being unreliable, so it looks like I'm done for the day.

Autumn Gathering just finished, and while I wasn't there, I heard enough.  Our incoming B&B spoke to the populace, and there's no way in hell that they'll be addressing the issues that have led to me leaving.  Quite the opposite, in fact - they'll be encouraging them.

But I can still do A&S and improve myself, and hang out with Dragons Bay and hopefully plan a few bardic events over the coming year.

To that end, and as promised, my ten minutes today was all about lute practice.  Twa Corbies, in particular, although I could count the time tuning that damn instrument as my ten minutes.

Twa Corbies has a very strong chordal focus as well as a melody which sticks mostly to the tonic notes of each chord, so it's relatively easy to combine the chords with the melody and play two at the same time.  It'll take me a while to master it, and then I'll use it as my warm-up.  It's not suitable for performance - louder chords and singing will always trump softer chords and lute melody - but it's a damn good exercise for my fingers and it makes me feel as though I'm accomplishing something.

I also spent a bit of time working on the single-line lute melodies prevalent in Lord of the Rings Online, which Roobi was playing on the couch at the same time.  I can't play them in the same key until I get a replacement string, but I can at least duplicate the melody.  It was fun.

Things to do:  Contact Alana to see if I can organise a replacement lute string, and then start spending money on myself for a change.  I need a new lute, with machine heads if possible.  Maybe contact Anika as well and see how her songbook is going.

Sigh.  Have fun at Festival, everyone.  I'll be back when it coincides with the school holidays again.

Still alive, still doing my thing.

Nowadays I'm mostly inactive in the SCA, for personal reasons that mostly only exist in my head.  Arguably, though, that's the only place where personal reasons matter, so unless I can overcome them or the source of them goes away - both unlikely - I'm out.  For the moment.

Eh, whatever.  That just means I don't need to think so much any more, and can just focus on what I like doing.  Bring on the music!

The initial challenge here was 10 minutes a day, 100 days in a row.  I didn't come anywhere near 100 days before I stopped, but I still feel like I did pretty well.  I looked into a new language, learned some new songs, wrote a handful, practiced my instrument, and did a whole lot of singing.  Way more important than any arbitrary day number challenge.

So this isn't really an attempt to maintain 100 days of A&S.  Unless music at work or D&D at home counts towards ten minutes, which they arguably could, I doubt I'll have the spoons to get there.  This is just a log, I guess.  Let's do some more stuff and keep track of it here, style of thing.  No challenge, no demand.

Probably I'll forget by tomorrow.  But anyway, for today, and right here and now, I'm back.

Today on the way home from a supply run to Autumn Gathering, I pondered the connotations of the word 'gypsy', based on several of my more favourite SCA songs and their frequent usage of the word.  As I've been learning, it's a degrading pejorative and one I'd like to avoid using.  We live and learn, hopefully.

My work today was searching for other words to use in its place, with the same number of syllables and the same stress pattern, so that the words could be substituted in music.  There's plenty of that stuff going on already, with similar problematic words, so I thought I could contribute in a small way.  

There are abundant articles that have already addressed this issue, including one good read from a tumblr themed around the intersections of race and pop culture, and I've now learned a few different terms.  Romani I knew, Domari I didn't.  There are also some really interesting names based on different wandering tribes from different parts of the world, such as 'Banjara' from north-west India and Afghanistan, that have made me hope that one day I'll have the energy required to research this further and write some songs.

Mostly, and unlike the word I'm seeking to replace, they have more than two syllables though, and are therefore useless.  I refuse to butcher a song by sticking a syllable where no syllable should fit, like those music hacks that write jingles for company TV ads (EOFYS, anyone?).

Then I saw 'Nomad'.  And I'm like... how... did it take so long for me to think of that?

The dictionary definition of 'Nomad' is

'A member of a people or tribe that has no permanent abode but moves about from place to place, usually seasonally and often following a traditional route or circuit according to the state of the pasturage or food supply.'



No negative connotations, no regional exclusivity.  It fits the songs, and while it's not quite as punchy, that's probably just because I've been singing the other word for about fifteen years now.  Two syllables, stress on the first syllable, it's almost perfect.  The only problem is that the last syllable has a strong consonant ending (-d) as opposed to the open vowel sound (-ee) of the original, and so it's a bit more clunky to move to the next word.  But if the choice is between singing 'Whistlin' Nomad Rover' or 'Raggle Taggle Nomad-o' and between being a twat, I'll go with the former.

If I'm really lucky, maybe at some future event I'll piss off a traditionalist.

One could say, at some point over the past few weeks, I stopped doing my allotted ten minutes per day.  That would be a valid argument.  Illness happened, hospital happened, and the challenge lost its importance to me.

But finding the exact day when that happened is a lot harder, and depends completely on your opinion as to what constitutes A&S work.  I've joked before about the gears in my brain continuously cranking out music, which is true.  I remix and compose works on the fly, the same way normal people tap their fingers.  99% of it gets confined to the Recycle Bin of my Brain, but occasionally the other end of it will push out a theme, or a filk, or a story, or an idea, or even a full song.  Closer analysis will reveal it's usually made up of bits and pieces from the aforementioned Bin.

Should I argue that I haven't been working during that time?  I have been.  Music's been happening, and more filks are being processed and more musical concepts are clicking in my head.  But, for the past few weeks, I have had no goal and nothing to show for it, and nothing to report about.  More than one day has gone by when I haven't had ten minutes of deliberate music work, though I've had a few hours of background music work.

So I'm stopping the challenge here, not because I haven't been doing A&S work, but because it's too hard to define.  Music is too vague, and permeates my brain to the point where I'm not even aware that I'm doing it half the time.

So let's keep this blog going, as a storing point for music ideas and songs as they happen.  Celtic stuff, too, if I keep looking into it.  Tonight I'll hop back onto MuseScore, see if I can suss out how to save songs into graphic form, and keep doing some long-overdue updates to the eBook of Boom.

My challenge is over, but my music isn't.

One, two, three, four...