Bishop Hill workshop Aug. 2 on psalmodikon and Swedish-American music -- ** UPDATED w/ Plan B ** -- cf. what I planned, what we did

LATER (October 2014) -- The text below is the news release and flier I sent out promoting the workshop. As you can see, I had planned to show dulcimer players how to play the tablature that pastors used to teach harmony singing to rural congregations both in Sweden and the United States. But when the workshop began, I learned that no one in the audience played the dulcimer. So I thought a minute, and went to a Plan B. Link here for a writeup of what we actually did in the workshop and here for tablature and sheet music of some of the songs that Swedish-American immigrants knew and loved. I am now putting together another workshop, titled "Pastor Esbjorn's Singing School," for the 155th anniversary of the founding of the old Swedish-American Augustana Lutheran Synod at Jenny Lind Chapel in Andover. The Rev. Lars Paul Esbjorn, of Andover, was one of the synod's founders.

Ever wonder what the psalmodikons in the museums at Jenny Lind Chapel and Bishop Hill sounded like? How they were played? What were some of the songs the pioneer immigrants brought over from 19th-century Sweden? Want to sing them or play them on a dulcimer – or another modern musical instrument?

The Bishop Hill Heritage Association will sponsor a workshop Saturday, Aug. 2 (re-scheduled from May 10), on how Swedish immigrants learned to play hymns on the psalmodikon. The workshop will be at 2 p.m. in the Dairy Building, 410 N. Erickson St., Bishop Hill. It is free and open to the public.

* * *

Pete Ellertsen, a retired teacher and amateur musician of Springfield, will demonstrate how Swedish-American pastors of the 1840s and ’50s used the psalmodikon (pronounced “sal-MOW-di-kon”) to teach harmony singing from the Svenska Psalmbok of 1819 in rural congregations where everyone might not read music. The instruments, which looked like a modern dulcimer, were inexpensive and easy to play. Ellertsen, who plays the mountain dulcimer, has a replica of the psalmodikon in Bishop Hill’s Steeple Building museum.

Workshop participants will learn how to read psalmodikon tablature, known as “siffor-noter” (number notes) and convert it to sheet music; and how to sing simple melodies and play them on the mountain dulcimer or another musical instrument. All skill levels and all instruments are welcome. This workshop is partially funded by the Illinois Arts Council.

2 p.m., Saturday, Aug. 2, Dairy Building, Bishop Hill

---

Links to tab and sheet music …

• "Children of the Heavenly Father" (my article w/ tab) http://dulcimersessions.com/?p=297
• Wikipedia page on "Gubben Noak" http://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gubben_Noak
• Project Runeberg text of Bellman's "Gubben Noak" http://runeberg.org/fredsang/135.html
• "Bjørnen Sover" dulcimer tab http://www.everythingdulcimer.com/tab/BjrnenSover.pdf
• Bishop Hill Calendar of Events (scroll to Aug. 2) http://bishophillheritage.org/news-events/calendar/

Permalinks re: Bishop Hill and Andover …

• http://hogfiddle.blogspot.com/2012/09/psalmodikon-in-steeple-building-at.html

• http://hogfiddle.blogspot.com/2013/08/peter-hedlund-psalmodikon-bishop-hill.html

  http://hogfiddle.blogspot.com/2013/09/lars-esbjorns-psalmodikon-at-jenny-lind.html

• http://hogfiddle.blogspot.com/2013/12/1819-swedish-psalmbook-reprint.html

Misc quotes on history, Clayville, "Prairie Dreams"

Since historical reconstruction is a rational process, only justified and indeed possible if it involves the human reason, what we call history is the mess we call life reduced to some order, pattern and possibly purpose. -- G. R. Elton

See more quotes at: http://hnn.us/article/1328#sthash.9JweKlhW.dpuf

"A Memoir of Professor Sir Geoffrey Elton." Jeremy Bennett. http://www.clarealumni.com/s/845/1col.aspx?sid=845&gid=1&pgid=857

---

Rachel Otwell. "The Past Comes Alive With Clayville Theater" WUIS-FM, University of Illinois Springfield. Aug. 31, 2012. [audio w/ stills] https://wuisnews.wordpress.com/2012/08/31/the-past-comes-alive-with-clayville-theater/

Nondescript dulcimer at 0:35 to 1:32, player quoted at 0:50.

Penny Zimmerman Wills. "Our History: Clayville to revive play about its founding" June 7, 2014. State Journal-Register http://www.sj-r.com/article/20140607/News/140609598

Olle i Skratthult -- miscellaneous links

Very informative tribute page by Carl at Catfish's Closet http://www.catfish1952.com/Olle.html with links to sound files, other pages. Pix, including this playbill …

For more on the play and mp3 files, see below.

---

Internet Archive has mp3 files at https://archive.org/details/HjalmarPetersonPt.03_936 … w/ following notes

SONGS RELATING TO HJALMAR PETERSON
Tracks 01-25: various artists
Tracks 01-06: Värmlänningarna
Tracks 07-11: F. A. Dahlgren
Tracks 12-13: Olle's Swedish Potpourri
Tracks 14-26: Songs from the Swedish Potpourri
Tracks 27-27: Carl Michael Bellman

NOTES -- Selections 01-06 are from F. A. Dahlgren's musical drama "Värmlänningarna" (The People of Värmland), which Peterson's company frequently performed. Selections 07-11 are also by Dahlgren, who contributed seven songs to Peterson's first songbook, published in 1908. Selections 12-24 were recorded by Hjalmar Peterson as part of the "Swedish Potpourri" that he released in 1916 with piano accompaniment and in 1917 with orchestral backing. Selection 25 was sung by members of Peterson's company.

Swedish-American audiences were mainly interested in theatrical productions dealing with Swedish country life such as the popular musical "Värmlänningarna" (The People of Värmland). The libretto for "Värmlänningarna" was written by F. A. Dahlgren. The music was written by Andreas Randel or adapted from traditional sources. This six-act melodrama, written in 1846 and set in the province of Värmland, was a love story about a young peasant couple who, with considerable difficulty, overcome hostile parents and local convention. Audiences identified closely with the hero and heroine, seeing in the plot the sorts of difficulties familiar in their own lives.

Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fredrik_August_Dahlgren says: "Dahlgren is best remembered for writing two Swedish folk songs. He and Anders Fryxell wrote the lyrics to Ack Värmeland, du sköna (O Värmland, you lovely). He was the sole author of Å jänta å ja' (And the girl and I).[1] Dahlgren also wrote the musical drama "Värmlänningarna" (The People of Värmland), a popular work for over one hundred fifty years." Fredrik August Dahlgren … was a member of the Swedish Academy (1871 - 1895), graduate of Uppsala University.

---

WorldCat http://www.worldcat.org/title/olle-i-skratthult-singssjunger-nikolina-flickan-pa-bellmansro/oclc/44214166

Olle i Skratthult sings/sjunger "Nikolina" & "Flickan på Bellmansro"

Author: Olle, i Skratthult; Olle i Skratthult Project.
Publisher: Minneapolis : Olle i Skratthult Project, 1976.
Edition/Format: Music : 45 rpm : Swedish
Database: WorldCat
Summary: Swedish language comic songs performed by Hjalmar Peterson (who performed under the name of Olle i Skratthult), remastered from 78 rpm recordings made in the 1920s.

Minnesota Historical Society Library St. Paul, MN 55102

Bellmansro was a tavern or restaurant on Djurgården island in Stockholm, located next to a bust of Carl Michael Bellman. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bellmansro">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bellmansro

---

Excerpt from Anne-Charlotte Harvey. "Performing Ethnicity: The Role of Swedish Theatre in the Twin Cities" -- essay in Swedes in the Twin Cities : Immigrant Life and Minnesota's Urban Frontier, ed. Philip J. Anderson and Dag Blanck. St. Paul: Minnesota Historical Society Press, 2001.

---

Cf. "Toby," a red-headed American rustic in vaudeville and tent shows, with a long set of antecedents on the British stage, pp. 129-44 in William L. Slout, Theatre in a Tent Wildside Press LLC, 2008 - 232 pages http://books.google.com/books?id=P1CYZkW9UFIC&dq=toby+rustic+comedian&source=gbs_navlinks_s

"Cultural Hybridity Reconsidered: Religious Visual Culture and the Dutch Republic" by Els Stronks, Utrecht University

http://www.journalofdutchliterature.org/cgi/t/text/get-pdf5c13.pdf?c=jdl;idno=0302a01

Cultural Hybridity Reconsidered: Religious Visual Culture and the Dutch Republic

Els Stronks, Utrecht University. Journal of Dutch Literature 3.2 (2012).

In the last decades, historians such as Willem Frijhoff, Peter Burke and Benjamin Kaplan have focused on interconfessional encounters in friendships, marriage and trade in the Dutch Republic. They have argued that these encounters were stimulated by the freedom that emerged because the principle of freedom of con- science – understood as freedom of thought – emerged as a positive ideology during the Dutch Revolt. An extraordinary equilibrium was established because Calvinism was the dominant religion but never became the (official) state reli- [5 els stronks] gion.1 This resulted in a relatively tolerant society that even served as a refuge to migrants from surrounding countries. Newly developed and shared cultural practices have been highlighted as a form of accommodation of these interconfessional encounters. The absence of a domi- nant religion generated the sort of climate in which different confessional tradi- tions appeared to intermingle and influence each other with little friction, provid- ing an ideal setting for the integration of Catholic and Protestant religious subcultures and practices. The cultural responses to the word-image controversy between Protestants and Catholics in particular have proven to offer a key oppor- tunity to explore when, why and to what extent people were willing to reconcile theological differences to combine elements from their own religious cultural practices with those of another, to create new practices.(4-5)

The concept of ‘cultural hybridity’ was introduced by Homi Bhabha to focus the attention on the cross-fertilisation of distinct cultural practices. In Bhabha’s view, the mutual intermingling of cultures results in the development of something new (a ‘third space’) out of the existing subcultures and in the sharing of values, conventions and norms.11 Ever since Bhabha introduced the concept in postcolo- nial theory, it has been widely used. In his Cultural Hybridity, Burke inventoried the four strategies found in approaches toward the mutual intermingling of cultures, being rejection and segregation (leading to conflicts and stagnation) versus adap- tation and acceptance (leading to reconciliation and progress). Burke also signals the tendency to see cultural hybridity as a progressive force – he even admits to cultural hybridity reconsidered 7 els stronks having such a preference himself, even though he acknowledges that progressive- ness is not inherent to Bhabha’s original notion of cultural hybridity.12 This tendency is indeed found in many studies based on the conceptual frame- work of cultural hybridity, even if it is frequently seriously discussed. (6-7)

Misc. links re: Augustana synod, Augie -- including a bio of Anna Hoppe and a TOC for Hemlandssånger ** UPDATED x1 ** reference to Peter Johnson of 1925 hymnal committee

Hemlandssånger: Utgifna af Augustana-Synoden. Rock Island: Lutheran Augustana Book Concern, [1891]. Wikipedia has TOC, w/ this intro:

Hemlandssånger är en kyrkosångbok utgiven av Augustanasynoden i USA med första upplagan 1891. Den innehåller sånger med svensk text och musik och var avsedd för svenska invandrare som ofta samlades i olika samfund till gudstjänster på svenska. Utgivare var Lutheran Augustan Book Concern, Rock Island, Illinois.

http://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hemlandssånger_1892

---

Bio of Anna Hoppe, 1889-1941, at http://www.hymnary.org/person/Hoppe_AB w/ list of hymns and MIDI files.

Leaving school after eighth grade, Hoppe worked as a stenographer in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. She began writing patriotic verses in early childhood; by age 25 she was writing spiritual poetry. Some of her poems appeared in the Northwestern Lutheran, a periodical of the Wisconsin Evangelical Lutheran Synod, of which she was a member. These came to the attention of Dr. Adolf Hult of Augustana Seminary, Rock Island, Illinois, who influenced her to write her Songs for the Church Year (1928). Several hymnals included her work, which was usually set to traditional chorale melodies, although she also made a number of translations. Hoppe said of her work:

"Many of my hymns have been written on my way to and from church and to and from work. I utilize my lunch hours for typing the hymns and keeping up correspondence…still I find a minute here and there in which to jot down some verse."

--www.hymntime.com/tch/

A blog at http://wordwisehymns.com/2010/08/02/today-in-1941-anna-hoppe-died/ by Robert Cottrill has more, re: her Christmas carol "Precious Child, So Sweetly Sleeping" and a translation from Gerhardt.

And http://www.projectwittenberg.org/etext/hymnals/tlh/weepest.txt has text of "O'er Jerusalem Thou Weepest" in the 1941 Lutheran Hymnal (Concordia), No. 301. Mel.: Freu dich sehr, Genevan Psalter, 1551.

---

Peter Johnson: b. 1870. Sweden. Member of Augustana Synod. (1925 hymnal, p. 886)

"A Brief History of First Lutheran Church." FirstLutheran Church -- Love Grows Here. St. Paul, Minnesota, 2007. http://www.lovegrowshere.net/whoweare/historyofflc.html

Located on the EastSide of St. Paul, MN in the Historic Swede Hollow Neighborhood

Musically rich years at First Church were memorable under the direction of Peter Johnson and Gerhard Alexis and later Robert Pearson. Peter Johnson and Gerhard Alexis were on the hymnal committee and had composed original tunes for several hymns.

Johnson is credited with helping edit The Junior Hymnal, Containing Sunday School and Luther League Liturgy and Hymns for the SUnday School and other grthatings: Authorized by the Evangelical Lutheran Augustana Synod. Rock Island: Augustana Book Concern, 1928. -- "The editors are also indebted to Professor Peter Johnson of St. Paul Minn., for assistance in the editing and proofreading of the music."

290. Arr. hymn by Ernest Ryden to melody from J.L.F. Mendelssohn-Bartholdy, " On Wings of Song"

---

Catalogue of Augustana College and Theological Seminary, 1891-92. Rock Island: Lutheran Augustana Book Concern, 1891. p. 24 [also p. 45 below right]. http://www.mocavo.com/Augustana-College-Catalogue-Volume-1891-01/989978

---

History of the Swedes of Illinois, Volumes 1-3 edited by Martin J. Engberg -- Google eBooks

---

The Swedish Element in Illinois: Survey of the Past Seven Decades : with Life Sketches of Men of Today (Google eBook) Ernst Wilhelm Olson Swedish-American Biographical Association, 1917 - Illinois - 703 pages

page 184 at right

page 189 below omitted text in last sentence reads "…the last decade, though the great bulk of the output is still Swedish."

"A Brief History of First Lutheran Church." FirstLutheran Church -- Love Grows Here. St. Paul, Minnesota, 2007. http://www.lovegrowshere.net/whoweare/historyofflc.html

Clayville jam postponed -- and a couple of video clips that show different artists filling in the notes and swinging (syncopating) the melody of "Shortnin' Bread"

Last night I heard back from Clayville, and we're able to postpone our first-of-the-month Clayville Pioneer Academy of Music jam session, originally scheduled this week, till Saturday, June 14, from 10 a.m. till noon. in the barn at Clayville Historic Site, Ill. 125 at Pleasant Plains. We polled the group Tuesday night in Springfield, and that's the best time for the most people.

After Tuesday's session, I got on YouTube and found some arrangements of "Shortnin' Bread" that I think will give us some ideas on how to "swing" the tune -- in other words, to syncopate it so we're not just plodding along in quarter notes. Here they are:

History of "Shortnin' Bread" - 4 versions (Paul Chaplain +)

Posted by YouTube user GeoSilverAway, who has a lengthy explanation:

Originated in the Old South USA. First generally popularized by Lawrence Tibbett in the early 20th century. Then sung by Nelson Eddy in 1937/38. In 1938 it was a big charted hit for The Andrews Sisters. Then done by many others like Fats Waller (1941) and Paul Robeson.

In the 1950s, rock and roll singers started picking it up - The Collins Kids, Tony Crombie ... The reason it attracts so much attention now is the hard rock recording by Paul Chaplain and his Emeralds in 1960. It wasn't a big hit but has now rightfully become a legend. The Bellnotes also released a rock version that year. Meanwhile back in England it achieved better hit status sung by the vocal trio The Viscounts. (They can be seen on YouTube singing Let's Twist Again) I have also found a definitive rock instrumental recording by The Fabulous Playboys, who appear to be a US surf group.

Selections in the video:

1. Andrews Sisters
2. The Viscounts, UK #16
3. Paul Chaplain and his Emeralds. US Billboard #82 and Cashbox #55.
4. The Fabulous Playboys instrumental

"If some of the words aren't clear," adds GeoSilverAway, "it involves the 'lid' on the skillet, and one of the children is 'most dead, meaning almost."

A really cool North Carolina string band jamming at a festival

Says YouTube user Dean Barber, "Asheville, N.C.-based Chicken Train was performing at Clifftop 2012 last week over a box of their CDs. Sales were brisk because their music making was topnotch. That's John Hermann on banjo and John Engle on fiddle. Meredith McIntosh is on guitar. Not sure who was on bass, but she was solid. ..."

Song history

Like everyone else, I thought "Shortnin' Bread" was from the old blackface minstrel shows. But it wasn't. Instead, it was written around 1900 by popular Indiana newspaper poet James Whitcomb Riley, who was considered an unofficial poet laureate in the late 1800s but is now known for regional poems like "When the Frost in on the Punkin" (pumpkin). Wikipedia notes that "Shortnin' Bread" has been covered by artists ranging from the Beach Boys to Mississippi John Hurt and Donald Duck (in a 1948 animated cartoon).

Dulcimer tab

• http://www.prairiedulcimerclub.org/tunes/ShortninBread.pdf Prairie Dulcimer Club

• http://www.everythingdulcimer.com/tab/shortnindul.pdf EverythingDulcimer.com

Both have been posted to the internet, so we're free to make copies for personal use. The Prairie Dulcimer Club's version is written pretty much in quarter notes, while the version on Everything Dulcimer tries to show a little bit of the syncopation by writing the same phrases in quarter notes and eighth notes. Whichever one you follow, you'll want to "swing" it a little by accenting the first and third beats, so it sounds almost like it's in 2/4 time, and put in some extra strums of your own as you get more comfortable with the tune.

Clayville and Prairieland Strings tune for June -- "Cumberland Mountain Deer Chase"

Editor's note -- Pictures at left and below show members of the Prairieland Strings/Clayville Pioneer Academy of Music playing in front of the Broadwell Tavern May 18 at Clayville's spring festival. Courtesy of Fred Crawford.

We're back to holding our "first Tuesday" and "third Thursday" meetings of the Prairieland Strings at Atonement Lutheran Church -- thanks to all for putting up with the inconvenience while I was recuperating from pneumonia last month.

Our new tune for June is "Cumberland Mountain Deer Chase."

Our schedule for June is as follows:

• Prairieland, "first Tuesday": 7 to 9 p.m. Tuesday, June 3, at Atonement Lutheran Church, 2800 West Jefferson, Springfield.

• Clayville Academy jam session: 10 a.m. to noon, June 7, in the barn at Clayville Historic Site, Ill. 125 at Pleasant Plains.

• Prairieland, "third Thursday": 7 to 9 p.m., June 19, at Atonement.

"Cumberland Mountain Deer Chase" -- also known as "Cumberland Mountain Deer Race" and/or "Cumberland Mountain Bear Chase" -- is a lively up-tempo tune that sounds like it might be an old, old fiddle tune. But it isn't. It's a novelty song that Uncle Dave Macon, one of the first stars of the Grand Ole Opry, made popular in the 1930s and 40s. Folk singer and banjo virtuoso Pete Seeger covered it in several albums later, and it has gone back into oral tradition as a high-octane banjo tune.

According to the Country Music Hall of Fame, Macon, of Murfreesboro, Tenn., got his start in life "as a farmer and teamster (hauling goods with a mule and cart)," and broke into show biz in vaudeville and medicine shows. He started cutting records in the 1920s, and joined the Opry almost as soon as it went on the air in 1926. He was a fine musician, but he's best known today for novelty numbers.

Wayne Erbsen of Native Ground Music in Asheville, N.C., has lyrics for "Cumberland Mountain Deer Chase" in his instruction book Clawhammer Banjo for the Complete Ignoramus, and he's posted lyrics to his website at http://nativeground.com/cumberland-mountain-deer-chase/.

Away, away we’re bound for the mountain
Bound for the mountain, bound for the mountain
Over the mountain, the hills and the fountain
Away to the chase away.

Rover, Rover, see him, see him
Rover, Rover, catch him, catch him
Over the mountain, the hills and the fountain
Away to the chase away.

Now we’re getting right for the race
The hounds and the horses all in the pace
Over the mountain, the hills and the fountain
Away to the chase away.

All night long till the break of dawn
Merrily the chase goes on
Over the mountain, the hills and the fountain
Away to the chase away.

Uncle Dave Macon sang the parts about the hounds really fast, then slowed down for a verse about the deer -- who's panting and getting winded by this time -- and picked up again as he returned to the hounds and horses. (It isn't in Erbsen's version.) As you listen to him in the YouTube clip below, see if you're not reminded of "English Country Garden," an English morris dance tune collected by Cecil Sharp and arranged for piano in 1918 by Percy Grainger.

More on Liebster Jesu … variant in 1819 Swedish psalmbook

D R A F T

Mystery solved! (I think …)

The song referred to in the pioneer reminiscence I referenced in a post on Sept. 7 is Hit O Jesu …" and not the baptismal hymn we sing to the melody LEIBSTER JESU

The reminiscence, in The Augustana Synod: a brief review of its history, 1860-1910 (Rock Island: Augustana Book Concern, 1910): 25-27:

The people were beside themselves with joy (i. e. over the visit of a minister). Services were announced for the following day (a Saturday) in the school-house, and all who could crawl or walk assembled. Many of them had lived there five and six years and during all that time had never heard a sermon. When they began the service by singing psalm 328 : 'Blessed Jesus, at Thy Word we are gathered all to hear Thee' (Hit, o Jcsu, samloms vi att ditt helga ord fa bora) [26] the singing was smothered by sobs and only after some minutes were they able to continue.

Cite and context, including another congregation where "the service was carried out by one of the members. When they were through and on the way home, he called out: 'Hold on, boys; I forgot to read the benediction,' to which they shouted back : 'Save it till next time!'" on Hogfiddle Sept. 7, 2013

http://hogfiddle.blogspot.com/2013/09/pioneer-swedish-american-church.html

In September I didn't make the distinction between two similar chorales, and wasn't able to get them straightened out in my mind till now. They are:

• "Blessed Jesus, at Thy word." Text: Tobias Clausnitzer; trans. Catherine Winkworth. A gathering hymn. Hymnary.org lists in 119 hymnals. http://www.hymnary.org/text/blessed_jesus_at_thy_word.
• "Blessed Jesus, here we stand." Baptismal hymn by Benjamin Schmolck, trans. Winkworth. 50 hymnals. http://www.hymnary.org/text/blessed_jesus_here_we_stand.

Both hymns, the first words of which are practically identical, most commonly use Ahle's tune LIEBSTER JESU. But Clausnitzer's gathering hymn was also set to a minor-key variant by Carl Wolfgang Briegel (1687) and got into the 1819 psalmbook with that tune.

I am not going to try to straighten out the Sept. 7 post -- the information I got from the sources I consulted at that time was correct as far as it went -- but I will repost this disclaimer there in order to (hopefully) minimize confusion.

Clausnitzer's gathering hymn is printed in my reprint of Johan Henrik Thomander's Svenska Psalm-Boken Af År 1819 with Carl Wolfgang Briegel's melody in E minor, No. 328. This is the hymn the pioneers were so glad to hear when a pastor came through.

I wasn't able to find Schmolck's baptismal hymn. But apparently the 1819 psalmbook used a baptismal text by Franzén, Du som var den minstes vän (No. 341), translates roughly, "You who are the friend of the least [of these]" … sung to melody of No. 126, which is variant of LIEBSTER JESU in in G major.

The 1901 Augustana hymnal and service book has "Blessed Jesus at Thy word" [Catherine Winkworth's translation] to the melodies by Carl Wolfgang Breigel , 1687 (first tune, identified as Liebser Jesu, in D minor), and Johann Rudolph Ahle, 1664 (second tune, identified as Liebster Jesu, wir sind hier, in G major), at No. 151.

The 1925 hymnal offers more choices:

• No. 225. Blessed Jesus, here we stand. Schmolk's baptismal hymn. Ahle's melody.
• No. 302. Blessed Jesus at Thy word. Clauswitzer's gathering hymn. Briegels' 1687 melody in D minor.
• No. 357. Now our worship sweet is over. Text (see below) by Hartmann Schenk. Ahle

* * *

From Swedish Wikipedia pages:

Du som var den minstes vän är en doppsalm med fem verser av Frans Michael Franzén, som bygger på texter i Nya Testamentet, framför allt evangeliet om Jesus och barnen. Diktad 1814. | Den sjungs till en koral komponerad av Johann Rudolf Ahle 1664. Samma melodi används till Benjamin Schmolcks psalmtext Jesu, du, som i din famn.

• 1819 års psalmbok som nr 341 under rubriken "Kristligt sinne och förhållande. För föräldrar." [But in the Koralbok, No. 341 refers to No. 126 for the melodi.]

http://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/Du_som_var_den_minstes_vän

* * *

LBW has No. 187 as baptismal hymn, with Schmolk's words, and 248 as gathering hymn w/ Clausnitzer's.

Bkurbs on all three in the 1925 hymnal from Hymnary.org (w/ help from a Lutheran website for the third, which is pretty obscure).

"Blessed Jesus, at Thy word." Text: Tobias Clausnitzer; trans. Catherine Winkworth. A gathering hymn. Hymnary.org lists in 119 hymnals.

Blessed Jesus, at Thy word
Author: Tobias Clausnitzer; Translator: Catherine Winkworth
Tune: LIEBSTER JESU
Published in 119 hymnals

1 Blessed Jesus, at your word
we are gathered all to hear you.
Let our hearts and souls be stirred
now to seek and love and fear you.
By your gospel pure and holy,
teach us, Lord, to love you solely.

http://www.hymnary.org/text/blessed_jesus_at_thy_word.

"Blessed Jesus, here we stand." Baptismal hymn by Benjamin Schmolck, trans. Winkworth. 50 hymnals.

Blessed Jesus, here we stand.
Translator: Catherine Winkworth; Author: Benjamin Schmolck (1704)
Tune: LIEBSTER JESU
Published in 50 hymnals

Dearest Jesus, we are here,
gladly your command obeying.
With this child we now draw near
in response to your own saying
that to you it shall be given
as a child and heir of heaven.

http://www.hymnary.org/text/blessed_jesus_here_we_stand.

Now our worship sweet is over. Apparently a sending hymn, 17th-century German --

"Now our worship sweet is over."
Author: M. Hartmann Schenk
Published in 11 hymnals: American Lutheran Hymnal #d354 -- Evangelical Lutheran Hymn Book with Tunes #d297 -- Evangelical Lutheran Hymnal #9 Image -- Evangelical Lutheran Hymnbook (Lutheran Conference of Missouri and Other States) #d227 -- Evangelical Lutheran Hymnbook (Lutheran Conference of Missouri and Other States) #d247 -- Hymnal: for churches and Sunday-schools of the Augustana Synod #164 Image Songs of Praise #d208 -- Songs of Praise for Sunday Schools, Church Societies and the Home #d213 -- The Hymnal and Order of Service #d358 -- The Hymnal and Order of Service #d359 -- The Lutheran Hymnary Junior ... of the Norwegian Evangelical Lutheran Synod, the Evangelical Lutheran Synod and the United Norwegian Lutheran Church of America #d187

http://www.hymnary.org/text/now_our_worship_sweet_is_oer

The Free Lutheran Chorale-Book at http://www.lutheranchoralebook.com/now-our-worship-sweet-is-oer/ has the words:

1. Now our worship sweet is o’er—
Singing, praying, teaching, hearing;
Let us gladly God adore
For His gracious strength and cheering.
Praise our God, who now would save us,
For the rich repast He gave us.

Hartmann Schenk, 1634-1681, was a 17th-century German hymn writer and pastor. Biography, in German, at http://de.wikisource.org/wiki/ADB:Schenk,_Hartmann.

This quote from Hymnary.org, copied and pasted from my Sept. 7 post, spells out the relationship:

LlEBSTER JESU is a rather serene German chorale that is ideally sung in three long lines and in parts with light organ accompaniment. In rounded bar form (AABA') LIEBSTER JESU (also called DESSAU and NURENBERG) was originally one of Johann R. Able's “sacred arias,” first published with Franz J. Burmeister's Advent hymn text “Ja, er ist's, das Heil der Welt" in the Mühlhausen, Germany, Neue geistliche auf die Sonntage . . . Andachten (1664). The tune was later modified and published in the Darmstadt, Germany, Das grosse Cantional (1687) as a setting for a baptism hymn by Benjamin Schmolck that had the same first line as Clausnitzer's text: "Liebster Jesu, wir sind hier." Because several sources say that LIEBSTER JESU was first associated with Clausnitzer's hymn in the 1671 Altdoifer Gesangbuch, it seems probable that the tune name derives from that hymn text.

http://www.hymnary.org/hymn/PsH/280

Otto Malmberg -- & mp3 files of Swedish hummel player in 1980s

Otto Malmberg, of Småland, is considered the last traditional Swedish hummel player. He performed at the Skansen outdoor museum in Stockholm in 1908 and 1917, where sound recordings were made and an iconic picture was taken.

---

Photo at left shows German luthier Wilfried Ulrich playing a hummel with picture of Malmberg in the background during Ulrich's 2011 hummel exhibition at Cloppenburg Museum in Lower Saxony.

---

Brief notice below of Malmberg's 1917 recordings for Skansen in Fataburen magazine available in the Runeberg digital text collection.

Fataburen / Redogörelse för Nordiska museets utveckling och förvaltning år 1917 / 22 http://runeberg.org/fataburen/1917r/0022.html

Detta är Projekt Runebergs digitala faksimilutgåva av Fataburen, en kulturhistorisk tidskrift eller årsbok som utges av Nordiska museet i Stockholm sedan 1906.

---

"Anders Eklund spelar hummel." Södermanlands Spelmansförbunds samlingar. http://www.samlingarna.sormlandsspel.se/?page_id=1184

Eklund was a folk musician, was recorded playing the hummel on Swedish radio in the 1980s: "… 1984 sände SR ett program om hummeln. Magnus Gustavsson och Anders samtalar och Anders spelar låtar på sin hummel. | Dottern Clara Frohm har försett arkivet med en inspelning av radioprogrammet." 20-minute mp3 file w/ interview in Swedish and several tunes. Has nice polska from Småland at 22:55. Also, this info on Malmberg:

Hummel – den äldre folkliga cittran – har få nutida utövare.
Traditionen levde längst i Småland och Otto Malmberg från Ljungby brukar anges som den siste traditionsbäraren. Han spelade på Skansen i 1900-talets begynnelse och var kanske inte var den siste traditionsbäraren, men han var den tidigaste som dokumenterades med en ljudinspelning (Yngve Laurells fonografinspelning).

Links to articles by Anders Eklund(h), "Hummeln – ett bortglömt folkinstrument" in Sörmlandslåten nr 1 1983; and Gösta Klemmings i Sörmlandslåten nr 2 1983.

---

Polonäs ur en notbok från Sexdrega. Published on Jan 27, 2013. Anders Eklundh (1947-2007) spelar på hummel. / Anders Eklundh plays on a "hummel" a melody from a notebook from Sexdrega, Sweden. From the LP "Gammelharpa, säckpipa,hummel", 1986. [Uploaded by YouTube user silverbasharpa -- directory w/ several Swedish folk tunes at https://www.youtube.com/user/silverbasharpa/videos.

Pope Francis in Bethlehem ** UPDATED x1 ** footage in Manger Square and Basilica of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem

Some fascinating unedited video available of Pope Francis' visit today to Bethlehem …

Welcome Ceremony for the Pope in the State of Palestine. Official Vatican live feed video of the entire ceremony in Manger Square: "Streamed live on May 25, 2014, Pilgrimage to the Holy Land. Pope Francis is greeted by Mr Mahmud Abbas, President of the State of Palestine, at the welcome ceremony upon his arrival in the Country and meets the Palestinian highest personalities." (1:20:26)

Voiceover sounds like it's in Arabic. I'll try to find a description in English of the festivities, which include a mixture of traditional and what sounds like Christian contemporary with an Middle Eastern lilt to it.

Holy Mass celebrated by the Pope in Bethlehem and Regina Coeli. Vatican feed. "Streamed live on May 25, 2014. Pilgrimage to the Holy Land. Pope Francis presides over the Holy Mass in the Manger Square in Bethlehem followed by the Regina Coeli Prayer. Groups of faithfull from Gaza and Galilee and migrants from Asia attend the celebration." Christmas carol "Angels we have heard on high" (to give it its English words) at 18:09 as mass begins. (2:02:31-28:38:00)

The live blog on the Times of Israel website has detailed coverage, from an Israeli perspective, with embeds of official Vatican video, including the welcoming ceremonies above and live feeds of:

• The mass in Manger Square; and
• A meeting outside the Church of the Nativity with youth from Dheisheh and other refugee camps.

Times of Israel blog is headlined:

Pope ends first day of visit with message of unity, brotherhood

Netanyahu commits to protecting ‘status quo’ at holy sites; Peres, Abbas agree to meet in Vatican; pontiff calls Israeli-Palestinian conflict ‘increasingly unacceptable’

Available at http://www.timesofisrael.com/pope-francis-to-touch-down-in-bethlehem-sunday-morning/#ixzz32l4CvZJw The live blog has other sidelights of the pope's visit to Bethlehem, his departure for Israel and arrival at Ben Gurion airport, for an official welcome to Israel and a helicopter ride with Netanyahu and other Israeli officials to Jerusalem.

Al Jazeera's English-language website has coverage from Arab perspective:

• POPE'S HOLY LAND VISIT CASTS LIGHT ON PLIGHT OF PALESTINIAN CHRISTIANS -- a pre-story at http://america.aljazeera.com/articles/2014/5/24/pope-palestinianchristians.html
• POPE FRANCIS INVITES ISRAELI, PALESTINIAN LEADERS TO VATICAN -- roundup at http://america.aljazeera.com/articles/2014/5/25/pope-francis-wallpalestine.html

Video of the pope's entire trip to the Holy Land is available on the Vatican's YouTube channel at https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC7E-LYc1wivk33iyt5bR5zQ.

---

Pope Francis in Israel - The First Day. Video from live feed produced by the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Service in Basilica of the Holy Sepulchre begins at 4:16.

Live Broadcast [above] from Pope's visit: http://on.fb.me/1jRqEHp

The first day of Pope Francis' visit to Israel began with an official ceremony upon his arrival at Ben Gurion International Airport. The Pope was greeted by President Shimon Peres, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and ministers of the Israeli government.

The Pope then flew by helicopter to Jerusalem's Mount Scopus, where he was welcomed by Jerusalem Mayor, Nir Barkat.

Following his arrival in Jerusalem, Pope Francis and Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew met at the Church of the Holy Sepulcher to commemorate a meeting of their revered predecessors, Pope Paul VI and Ecumenical Patriarch Athenagoras, which took place 50 years ago in the Holy Land. The meeting of Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew and Pope Francis in Jerusalem is a strong symbolic confirmation of the commitment and determination to continue the path which the two great Church leaders inaugurated half a century ago.

* * *

Ecumenical event on the anniversary of the meeting between Paul VI and Athenagoras. Orthodox religious ceremony begins at 1:05:00; Latin rite choir and recessional from 1:50:00. Streamed live on May 25, 2014. Pilgrimage to the Holy Land. Pope Francis and the Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople Bartholomew meet in the Basilica of the Holy Sepulchre to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the meeting in Jerusalem between Pope Paul VI and Patriarch Athenagoras. (2:17:42)

* * *

Lots of highlights on Times of Israel live blog at http://www.timesofisrael.com/pope-heads-to-temple-mount-western-wall-on-last-day-of-trip/. Head and subhead sum it up, again from an Israeli perspective:

Pray for us, Netanyahu asks Francis as papal visit ends

Pope flies back to Rome; PM defends security barrier to pontiff; Francis at Yad Vashem calls Holocaust greatest evil in history; makes unscheduled stop at memorial to terror victims

"Fill-A Me Up" by Pepper Choplin

A cool anthem we started practicing tonight for Pentecost at Atonement ...

As performed with baritone solo by the Motet Singers of Louisville, Ky.

Arrangement from the Netherlands (?) with hand drums backing choir and tenor solo

Sheet music at http://www.jwpepper.com/Fill-A-Me-Up/8060245.item#.U31xe82mebM". Pepper Choplin served 22 years as music minister at Greystone Baptist Church in Raleigh, N.C. He has a B.M. from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, and an M.M. in composition from Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary. Bio at http://www.pepperchoplin.com/.

Latin American baroque, world music, etc.

While the word isn't mentioned in the YouTube notes, you can hear what creolization sounds like in this choral piece by 17th- and early 18th-century Latin American composer Juan de Araujo … it's on the cusp of Spanish renaissance and baroque, but performed with a distinct Latino beat …

Los Coflades de la estleya, by Juan de Araujo.
Crescendo [an early music group in New England] presented in concert in April 2011 works of the Spanish and Latin American Renaissance. This work, by Juan de Araujo (1646 - 1712), the concluding number on the program, is considerably later than most of the music on the program, and reflects the fusion of Spanish renaissance music with the music of the indigenous peoples of Latin America. Salome Sandoval, also playing the vihuela, Jordan Rose Lee, and Diana Brewer are the soprano soloists. [Blurb: Crescendo "brings rarely heard choral and instrumental music, sacred and secular, performed by professionals and talented amateurs, to the communities of northwestern Connecticut, from western Massachusetts, and from eastern New York State."

---

Excerpt from Simon Broughton. "Baroque: The Latin American Way." Sinfini Music. 15 March 2013. http://sinfinimusic.com/uk/features/series/classical-connections/latin-american-baroque.

At first the music was dominated by the sacred, polyphonic music of the leading composers from Spain, like Tomás Luis de Victoria (1548-1611) who never visited Latin America. Hernando Franco (1532-85), born in Spain, was probably the first notable composer to move to the New World where he became chapel master in Santiago de Guatamala, and, in 1575, in Mexico City. Juan Gutiérrez de Padilla (1590-1644), also born in Spain, became chapel master in Puebla in 1629. The polyphonic music is gorgeously beautiful, but at first belongs very much to the European tradition. Things start to get interesting when the Latin and indigenous music starts to mix.

Colonisation was underway all over Latin America, with the Jesuits leading the missions into the areas that are now Peru, Bolivia, Paraguay and Brazil. In the mid-16th century, a Jesuit missionary wrote to his superiors in Europe that with just one orchestra he would be able to convert the whole continent to Catholicism. Sacred music starts to be sung in languages like Quechua (the language of the Incas in Peru) and Nahuatl (the language of the Aztecs in Mexico), local dance rhythms start to be heard and the harp takes over from the organ as an instrument of ecclesiastical music.

A new musical identity

You can hear these changes in the music of Juan de Araujo (1646-1712), born in Spain, but who grew up in Lima, Peru and also worked in La Planta (now Sucre), Bolivia. His ‘Los coflades de la estleya’ is fast, rhythmic and clearly related to what would become Afro-Cuban rumba. This piece is a villancico, which exists in both sacred and secular forms, but was often accompanied by local instruments such as rattles and drums.

This Sinfini feature story is a pretty good portal to the whole genre, BTW, with several YouTube clips embedded. The piece titled "Florilegium and Arakaendar Bolivia Choir recording Bolivian Baroque [Vol. 3]" highlights contrasting Spanish and indigenous pronunciations of the word "virgin" in a bouncy little song dedicated to the Virgin Mary. Links to background on period Bolivian music.

---

Interview with Broughton on Brian Q. Silver's blog World Music From The Voice of America at http://www.voaworldmusic.com/2010/10/interview-with-simon-broughton-editor.html. Broughton, who is an editor of the Rough Guide to World Music and Songlines magazine in London, draws a useful distinction between world music and "'ethnographic music' -- that is, music in the purely traditional styles of the countries of origin, without undue influence from "world music" and its tendencies toward blending and integration." French are big on ethnographic music.

---

Music and Urban Society in Colonial Latin America. Ed. Geoffrey Baker and Tess Knighton. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011.

Amazon blurb: "The fields of colonial history and urban music history are growing areas of interest within musicology. This collection of essays proposes a new view of the history of music in colonial Latin America, and will be of interest to social and cultural historians as well as musicologists. Geoffrey Baker is a Senior Lecturer in the music department, Royal Holloway, University of London. … Tess Knighton is a Fellow of Clare College, Cambridge, and is Editor of the Boydell Press's Studies in Medieval and Renaissance Music series. …"

Comparative lit scholar from Mauritius on creolization, Germanic languages, St. Augustine & other things that matter

Christopher J. Lee. "Creole: The Original Language" [interview with Françoise Lionnet]. Mail & Guardian Online. 4 Oct. 2013. http://mg.co.za/article/2013-10-04-00-in-celebration-of-creolisation

"Françoise Lionnet is a professor of comparative literature and director of the African Studies Centre at the University of California in Los Angeles. Originally from Mauritius … a Mellon distinguished visiting scholar at Wits University, where she has delivered a series of lectures summarising her work. * * * Christopher J Lee is a lecturer at the Centre for Indian Studies in Africa and in the department of international relations at the University of the Witwatersrand." * * * Mail & Guardian is an online newspaper in South Africa.

Some excerpts:

One of your most recent books is entitled The Creolisation of Theory. What draws you to creolisation as a concept?

The concept of creolisation first emerged in the field of linguistics to describe the creation of new contact languages under colonisation and slavery. It was initially limited to the study of "dialects" and "patois", which were believed to be bastardised forms of communication developed by slaves and indentured servants using the European languages of their masters in the New World. Today, linguists agree that creolisation is a universal phenomenon.

All English and Germanic languages began as creolised languages that continue to absorb new idioms. Globalisation is accelerating this process in new and unforeseen ways. In Africa, Afrikaans and Swahili can be considered "creoles". Swahili is the lingua franca of the Indian Ocean coastline, from Somalia to Mozambique and the Seychelles. It is a language of hybrid cultures, has a 100-year-old poetic tradition, and draws its linguistic resources from other languages.

* * *

Being from Mauritius, how has this background informed your scholarship?

The languages, literatures and oral cultures of my native island have always been a major interest of mine. I was trained in comparative literature and in my first book I wrote about the genre of autobiography, starting with St Augustine of Hippo and ending with contemporary Caribbean, African-American and Mauritian writers.

Augustine was North African and raised under Roman rule. His relationship to Latin, in which he wrote, was similar to that of many other native writers who had to become literate in a colonial language, but retained strong links to their mother tongue. Such issues resonate with me as a multilingual Mauritian.

This question is linked to the fundamental linguistic rights of populations whose forms of oral expression are integral to their identities. These local cultures are not passive recipients of global influences. Rather, they are actively reworking influences from Europe, Asia, Africa and the Americas, producing their own creolised mixes in the process, just as during the colonial era.

The problem, of course, is that "global" languages such as English, French or Hindi can easily displace smaller ones. So, there has to be a political will to support local languages, to encourage local forms of expression, from music to poetry and the visual arts. Kreol is now taught as a required subject in all the public schools in Mauritius. This is an important step toward the democratisation of education.

"Creolization" in Oxford Dictionary of Psychology ** UPDATED x2 ** w/ links on Latin American choral music -- and book review on Alaska creole (kreol) history

http://www.oxfordreference.com/view/10.1093/oi/authority.20110803095647278

The process whereby a pidgin language becomes a creole language. decreolization n. A process whereby speakers of a creole language, co-existing in a community with a standard language that is associated with higher status, prestige, and wealth, come under social pressure to alter their speech in the direction of the standard. hypercreolization n. A reaction by creole speakers against the standard language of a community, motivated by a desire to protect and maintain their ethnic identity, involving the deliberate adoption and emphasis of distinctive features of the creole. See also Black English Vernacular.

---

http://www.latinamericanchoralmusic.org/links/

---

"Music in the Vice-Royalties of New Spain and Peru." Lynn Gumert. http://www.lynngumert.com/latin-american-colonial-period-music.html".

Gumert is Artistic Director, Zorzal Music Ensemble, Hightstown, N.J.

The vast Spanish territory in the new world was divided into two viceroyalties: New Spain, which stretched from the northern limits of the California territory to Costa Rica and from the Mississippi River to the Pacific Ocean; and the Viceroyalty of Peru, which originally included almost the entire continent of South America. The Viceroys’ palaces in Mexico City and Lima were seats of civil authority as well as cultural centers, like European courts. Cathedrals and convents in these cities, as well as in Puebla, Cuzco, and Guatemala City, served as centers for musical instruction and performance in religious services. Although its actions were set against this backdrop of enslavement and abuse, the Catholic Church as an institution was dedicated to saving souls by converting as many non-Europeans as possible to Christianity; at the same time, many individual clergy made an effort to preserve native languages and artifacts. Indeed, one method the Spanish used to assimilate other ethnic groups was by incorporating their rituals into Christian festivals such as Corpus Christi and Christmas.

The most common musical form for both sacred and secular vocal music continued to be the villancico, which kept its lively rhythmic character into the seventeenth century, often expanding to include 5 or 6 voices and a new basso continuo line, a bass line with chord realization symbols beneath, used to guide performers in improvising harmonies. By late in the period many pieces used double or even triple choruses along with small orchestras. Spanish-New World composers integrated indigenous languages, Afro-Spanish dialects, and characteristic rhythmic elements into religious music, while also employing folk rhythms from various regions of Spain. These multicultural mixtures of European melodies and harmonic structure with New World rhythms and melodies are the roots of Latin American traditional music.

From "about" page: "Zorzal (Spanish for wood thrush) is a vocal and instrumental ensemble dedicated to the performance of Spanish and Latin American music from the 12th century to the present. We focus on works that reflect how musical elements from Spain are influenced by and influence other musical cultures, including those from African, Native American, Sephardic, Arabic and other European sources. We ourselves are a crossroads, bringing together a variety of musical backgrounds, education, and experience. Some of us are educators; several of us have extensive experience performing folk music, both American and Latin American. Our interpretations are based on ethnomusicological and musicological research, as well as on knowledge of classical and jazz composition. Our performance practice is at a crossroads between folk vernaculars and classical training, and our mission is at the crossroads of education and pure performance. As Artistic Director of Zorzal Music Ensemble, I research and arrange the music we perform, and also compose new works for the ensemble."

---

The Choral Music of Latin America: A Guide to Compositions and Research by Suzanne Spicer Tiemstra Google books

---

Review of Gwenn A. Miller’s Kodiak Kreol: Communities of Empire in Early Russian America by Emily Clark, blogger and grad student at Florida State (? verify school): "Miller’s book offers a colonial narrative far from the cities of Boston, New York, or Charleston that is both similar and different from the stereotypical westward European expansion model. For those of us interested in syncretism, cultural mixing, hybridity, colonial intersections, creolization, or whatever you want to call it, Kodiak Kreol provides another vantage point from which to theorize." http://usreligion.blogspot.com/2011/02/creolization-and-kreolization.html

Emily Clark. "Creolization and Kreolozation." Religion in American History. Feb. 18, 2011.

Music for Clayville Spring Festival ** UPDATED x2 **

Blast email sent to the Clayville and Prairieland dulcimer club lists … updated with: (1) new link to dulcimer tablature for John Stinson's No. 2 on the Bellingham (Wash.) Dulcimer Club's website at http://bellingham-dulcimer-club.blogspot.com/p/music.html (scroll down to "John Stinson #2" to open PDF file); and (2) some more thoughts on making a tune your own at a festival. ...

Hi everybody --

Here are links to some tunes we decided we'd like to play at the Clayville Spring Festival, plus a couple of others I think we'll enjoy. I'm home from St. John's now, but I had a nasty little infection in one of my lungs and I'm "homebound" getting supplemental oxygen. Which means we'll be able to have the Prairieland Strings at my house, but I won't be able to make Saturday's Clayville Pioneer Academy of Arts jam in the barn at Clayville. Don't know yet about the festival May 17-18.

I'll post the Prairieland Strings schedule below, along with directions to my house. And I'll copy this message and some tips on jam sessions, festivals, etc., with working links to my blog at:

In the meantime, here are the links to the music:

-- Soldier's Joy http://www.oldtimeozarks.com/Music_Roots.html (tab for dulcimer and other instruments in directory)

-- Go Tell Aunt Rhody http://oldgleaner.com/images/music/AuntRhody_D.jpg

-- Gray Cat on a Tennessee Farm http://rlwalker.gulfweb.net/dogwood/dogwood.html (scroll down right-hand column)

-- Five Pounds of Possum http://rlwalker.gulfweb.net/dogwood/dogwood.html (scroll down left-hand column)

-- Shall We Gather at the River http://www.everythingdulcimer.com/tab/Shall-We-Gather-at-The-River.pdf

-- John Stinson's No. 2 http://bellingham-dulcimer-club.blogspot.com/p/music.html (scroll down to "John Stinson #2" to open PDF file)

TIPS ON PLAYING AT A FESTIVAL

If you haven't played for the public before, don't be intimidated. At a festival, our main goal is to enjoy playing together and demonstrate how much fun it is to make your own music by, well, making our own music! IT IS NOT A CONCERT PERFORMANCE. Most festival-goers will hear us because our music is part of the ambiance of the festival, and some of them may stop and watch us for a minute or two, maybe ask a couple of questions. But they'll move on after three to five minutes.

Here are a couple of tips I posted to the blog before last year's spring festival:

• It isn't a concert performance. We'll have a card table set up (or an instrument case) with a flier about the Clayville beginners' jams, and festival-goers will typically come up and listen for a minute or two. If they like what they're hearing, they'll stop and chat us up for a minute or two. I like to tell them how easy it is to get started playing the dulcimer, and how much fun it is.
• Bring chairs.
• Festivals are the very best way for newbies to get experience playing music in public. Most of the festival-goers aren't paying a bit of attention to you, but they like hearing music off in the distance. So we can recycle the same tunes through the day. I know people who have survived entire festivals playing "Bile 'Em Cabbage Down" and "Go Tell Aunt Rhody."
• Bring chairs.
• Since it's a festival, there will be distractions. […] But since it's a festival, you should feel free to get up and walk around.

There's more, including some jam session tips on learning tunes as you hear them "on the fly" from the Small Circle Tune-Learning Session in the Denver area at:

http://hogfiddle.blogspot.com/2013/05/prairieland-strings-getting-ready-for.html

Wouldn't hurt to bring chairs to our Prairieland Strings sessions at my house, either, come to think of it!

UPDATE: Additional email sent at 2:30 p.m. Friday, May 2 …

Just a quick note to confirm what you're probably already guessing -- I'm not going to be able to make it out to Clayville in the morning.

But the Clayville Pioneer Academy of Music jam session will go on fine without me! 10 a.m. to noon in the barn at Clayville, off Ill. 125 at Pleasant Plains. One suggestion, though -- as you play the songs, play each of them through five to 10 times and change 'em up a little each time. Play up an octave, down an octave, improvise some harmonies …

(If you play up two notes above the melody, or two notes below, you've got a "third" interval, and it'll probably sound pretty cool. If it doesn't, try something else! We're jamming, not conducting a Bach cantata.)

But you know to do that without my telling you!

We'll meet from 7 to 9 p.m. Tuesday at my home, 2125 S. Lincoln Ave., in Springfield. We're three blocks west of MacArthur between Cherry and Outer Park (the same block as the construction site for the new Hy-Vee store). Hope to see you then!

Norwegians off Broadway

Look for this recently closed off-Broadway play to spin off a road show in the Midwest. It's not exactly "Church Basement Ladies," but it's bound to be a crowd-pleaser from Chicago to Minneapolis, the Dakotas and points in between.

"The Norwegians" has distinct echoes of "Fargo" (but without quite as much of those irritating ya-sure-you-betcha accents) with a pinch of Ole and Lena, a dash of Garrison Kiellor's news from Lake Wobegon and a great big dollop of the "Lillyhammer" series now in its second season on Norwegian television (NRK) thrown in. I saw it a couple of weeks ago, in what struck me as the kind of off-Broadway venue I've always read about but never experienced before -- up two flights of rickety stairs on West 78th Street in Manhattan.

Promo on the play's website at http://www.norwegians.us/main.htm:

"The Norwegians" by C. Denby Swanson is a strong, bitter comedy about women scorned in Minnesota and the really, really nice gangsters--Norwegian hit men--they hire to whack their ex-boyfriends. Olive is a transplant from Texas and Betty is a transplant from Kentucky, but neither of them was prepared for the Norwegian men they would fall in love with there: the practical, warm, thoughtful, destructive, evil, jilting kind. If you're a hit man in Minnesota, 83% of your clients want to take out their ex (Oofda!). Olive has referred Betty to Gus and Tor, a partnership in the whacking business. What Tor doesn't know is that Gus has been sleeping with the clients. What Olive doesn't know is that Gus is Betty's own ex, and she has already put out a hit on him with a Swiss firm. Can Betty call off the job in time to let Gus do his? Should she?

The play is the first outright comedy by C. Denby Swanson, a Texas native. In it, she applies film noir and mob movie genres to life in Minnesota, whose winters she endured for a few years. …

The play's website links to a New York Times review, "Hit Men and Hurt Lovers Meet Minnesota Nice," by Anita Gates that ran March 19, 2013. She concludes:

Who knows whether Ms. Swanson is an original theatrical voice? There is every chance that she wrote “The Norwegians” after falling asleep during a late-night rerun of “Fargo.” But this profane, playfully dark comedy is often hysterical. True, it’s a low-budget production up a steep flight of stairs, but you don’t find 90 minutes of good-hearted laughter at Off Off Broadway prices every day.

There was a carrying-coals-to-Newcastle quality about going to New York City to hear jokes about Norwegians and "Minnesota nice," but the audience was clearly enjoying it. And, after all, once upon a time Brooklyn had more Norwegians than Bergen and almost as many as Oslo. My cousins from Long Island and I may not have been the only Norwegian-Americans in the crowd, and the humor and acting were as universal as, well, disenchanted ex-lovers and nice guys in the wrong line of work.

Jonathan Slaff & Associates public relations firm has this at http://www.jsnyc.com/season/norwegians.htm:

Both audiences and critics have found the play hilarious, but some of its "legs" may be due to it riding a wave of Norwegian entertainment. "What does the Fox Say" by the Norwegian group Ylvis, is about to pass "Gangnam Style" as the most-watched video of all time. "Lilyhammer," the Norwegian-American television series starring Steven Van Zandt about a New York gangster trying to start a new life in Norway, is a solid hit that is now in its second season.

Adds Slaff & Associates: "The production, which began Off-off Broadway last season, has had over 160 performances so far. It played Off-off Broadway from March 8 to April 14, 2013 and re-opened October 3, 2014 on an Off-Broadway contract. The Off-Broadway run was suspended November 24, 2013 to accommodate a pre-existing commitment for the theater space. Encouraged by solid audience demand, The Drilling Company resumed the Off-Broadway production January 9, 2014 as an open-ended run." The show closed Sunday, April 27.

"The World in Creolization" by Ulf Hannerz / new link to "Global Sounds and Local Brews" by Paul Rutten

"The World in Creolization" Africa / Volume 57 / Issue 04 / October 1987, pp 546-559 / Ulf Hannerz

From the time when I first became entangled with the Third World, in the late 1950s and early 1960s, I have been fascinated by those contemporary ways of life and thought which keep growing out of the interplay between imported and indigenous cultures. They are the cultures on display in market places, shanty towns, beer halls, night clubs, missionary book stores, railway waiting rooms, boarding schools, newspapers and television stations. Nigeria, the country I have been most closely in touch with in an on-and-off way for some time, because of its large size, perhaps, offers particular scope for such cultural development, with several very large cities and hundreds if not thousands of small and middle-size towns. It has a lively if rather erratic press, a popular music scene dominated at different times by such genres as highlife, juju and Afro-beat, about as many universities as breweries (approximately one to every state in the federal republic), dozens of authors published at home and abroad, schoolhouses in just about every village, and an enormous fleet of interurban taxicabs which with great speed can convey you practically from anywhere to anywhere, at some risk to your life.

Opening paragraph in Cambridge Journals Online http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayAbstract?fromPage=online&aid=7905202.

---

"Global sounds and local brews: Musical developments and music industry in Europe" by Paul Rutten. Soundscapes — Journal on Media Culture 2 (July 1999). http://www.icce.rug.nl/~soundscapes/DATABASES/MIE/Part2_chapter01.shtml. This essay originally appeared in: Rutten, Paul (ed.), Music, culture and society in Europe. Part II of: European Music Office, Music in Europe. Brussels, 1996, 64-76.

… Moreover European metropolises have developed into melting pots of musical styles, providing ground to many multi-cultural music scenes to develop. For immigrants from many parts of the world, music has become a major focus in developing their identity in a strange world. This coming together of musical streams has led to processes of cross-fertilization which has produced and promoted numerous interesting forms. In a similar way as for instance Irish immigrants and Afro-Americans have left their mark on today's American music, immigrants from the Caribbean and the West Indies have left their traces in British music and immigrants from former French colonies determine the face and the sound of French rap.

Soundscapes is an independent media studies journal in the Netherlands. Their non-mission statement, or "colophon" (cf. the colophon at the end of a book) reads:

No mission statement? Soundscapes is an online journal on the history and social significance of media culture. That's all. No, this journal has no mission statement, nor does it have a corporate identity. It is non-profit and educational. In short, it's just an academic journal that likes to talk back to the load of fleeting media messages that are overflowing all of us on a daily base. What are these things doing to us and what are we doing with them ourselves? It is this question that, one way or another, all of our essays try to address by informing their readers about radio programs, television series, popular music, styles of presentation and representation, and all that's related to the sounds and images of media culture. If you also like to talk back to the media with comments or contributions of your own, please mail them to the editors.

http://www.icce.rug.nl/~soundscapes/HEADER/colophon.shtml ICCE (Department of Educational Technology) at the University of Groningen

Augustana Luther League, "Youth's Favorite Songs" -- bio of Claus August Wendell (co-editor of "Junior Hymnal")

Youth's Favorite Songs. OCLC WorldCat has Minneapolis, Minn. : Augustana Luther League, [19--?] at http://www.worldcat.org/title/youths-favorite-songs/oclc/221428849 … but 1962 on page showing all editions at http://www.worldcat.org/title/youths-favorite-songs/oclc/221428849/editions?referer=di&editionsView=true

Discussed in Preaching from Home: The Stories of Seven Lutheran Women Hymn Writers by Gracia Grindal

Also The Junior Hymnal Rock Island: Augustana Book Concern, 1928.

Augustana Synod Luther League Lets Remember filmstrip. A film strip looking back at the Augustana Luther League conventions in 1951 in Colorado Springs, in 1953 in Boston, and in 1955 in Calgary.

Hymnary.org has a hardbound edn. dated 1955 at http://www.hymnary.org/hymnal/YFS1955 w/ hymns apparently in alphabetical order.

---

Wendell wrote verses 3 and 4 of the Paul Gerhardt chorale "The Restless Day Now Closeth," No. 650 in 1926 Augustana Hymnal. B.A. Born 1866 in Västergotland, B.A. 1893, M.A. 1897 from Augie. Ordained 1905. Pastor of Grace Lutheran in Minneapolis, 1914-1947. Co-editor of Junior Hymnal 1928.

Bio in Gustav Lawrence Bongfelt papers, 1936-1949. Swenson Center, Augustana College, Rock Island. http://www.augustana.edu/general-information/swenson-center-/archives/finding-aids/gustav-lawrence-bongfelt-papers. Bongfelt was his biographer.

Creolization, hybridity, cross-pollination, crossover and/or all of above: "Give Me Your Hand" / "Tabhair Dom do Lámh" / "Da Mihi Manum" / "Gje Meg Handa Di" ** UPDATED x1 ** w/ dulcimer tab

D R A F T

Stumbled across this while I was looking for examples of folk hymnody … And it struck me, partly because I like the song, and partly because I'm not entirely comfortable with what I'm researching about creolization in immigrant communities in the upper Midwest and Chicago. I like James Leary's idea that creolization isn't limited to "tropical climes where European traders, soldiers, missionaries, and colonizers encountered African, Arab, and East and American Indian peoples" in the Caribbean but also occurs in "polkabilly" dance music of the upper Midwest, where "musical interactions have long been distinguished by egalitarianism, by freewheeling accommodation and blending across complex boundaries. Here reside North Coast creoles." (Click here for more.) But at least in the Illinois music I'm studying, the interactions have been complex.

Here reside Prairie State Creoles? Well, yes, maybe, but …

Postmodernist students of cultural globalization find creolization a useful concept, but they also talk about "hybridity" (click here and here). "Crossover" fits, too. Doesn't sound all postmodernist and academic, either, but it applies to everything from Dolly Parton and Taylor Swift to http://www.classical-crossover.co.uk. Anyway, the influences and correspondences I'm looking for are subtle and complex, and I don't have a good word for them.

Cross-pollination? Plays off the same metaphor as hybrid musical genres. Might work. And we have a lot of hybrid corn growing in Illinois. Closer. Getting warmer. But not there yet.

Some clips from YouTube, which is what got me started.

Planxty in HD - Tabhair Dom do Lámh (1973 RTE). The legendary Planxty in concert at the national stadium in 1973, with "Give me your hand", is Tabhair Dom do Lámh. And Three Drunken Maidens. Banna ceoil traidisiúnta Éireannach é Planxty a bhunaigh Christy Moore, Andy Irvine, Donal Lunny agus Liam Ó Floinn i mBaile Átha Cliath sna seachtóidí.

Ensemble Passacaglia. Written in 1603 by Rory O'Cathan (Ruairi 'Dall' O'Cathain) a blind Irish harper, as a response to an apology by Lady Eglington of Ayrshire. "Ensemble Passacaglia [of Massachusetts] was formed in 2001 when Lisa Esperson, Tom Hanna and I became intrigued with the striking combination of winds, plucked strings and percussion. A mutual affinity for medieval and renaissance music brought us together as accompanists for the vocal ensemble the Solstice Singers, and soon thereafter we started performing as a trio. We began incorporating music from the Middle East into our concerts, finding richness in the cross-cultural influences suggested by the intricate rhythms and melodies. In 2007 Molly Johnston joined us, adding the warm and resonant sound of viola da gamba to the mix. http://www.solsticesingers.org/passabt.htm

Sondre Bratland and Annbjørg Lien. Traditional Irish tune with Norwegian lyrics ("Give Me Your Hand"). Annbjørg Lien plays the Swedish instrument nyckelharpa (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nyckelharpa). From a TV documetary on Sondre Bratland, 2005. So how, as Elizabeth Barrett Browning never would have thought to ask, do I creolize thee? Let's count the ways. We've got a song composed in Gaelic by an Irish harper for a Scottish patron popularized by an Irish traditional band translated from English into Norwegian and sung by a Norwegian vocalist backed by a Swedish instrument.

Kurt Nilsen og Helene Bøksle /m KORK - Gje meg handa di, ven. Minnekonsert fra Oslo domkirke lørdag 30. juli 2011. (KORK is the orchestra for Norwegian radio -- it's an acronym with the "K" from "Kringkasting," which means broadcasting, and "-ORK" from the Norwegian word for orchestra.)

Dulcimer tablature by Judith Giddings, a retired special ed professor who finger-picks MD arrangements of Carolan and other harp music.

• Dulcimer tab at http://pineyridge-music.com/judith-giddings/ -- 2 pages for MD tuned to DAD -- on Giddings' page on the Piny Ridge Music Artist Recognition Site.
• And a 3-page version @ http://www.everythingdulcimer.com/tab/GiveMeYourHand.pdf (Scroll down to "Give Me Your Hand.") Also in DAD.

Swoops, slurs and melisma -- especially in ballads and folk hymnody

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Melisma

Melisma (Greek: μέλισμα, melisma, song, air, melody; from μέλος, melos, song, melody), plural melismata, in music, is the singing of a single syllable of text while moving between several different notes in succession. Music sung in this style is referred to as melismatic, as opposed to syllabic, in which each syllable of text is matched to a single note.

Some sound clips follow, in no particular developmental order.

• AFRICAN-AMERICAN
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PRS2grauL4I Kim Chandler, http://www.kimchandler.com, creator of the Funky n Fun http://www.funkynfun.com vocal training series, reveals the meaning, origins and relevance of "melismatic" singing.
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h3RPE54-K-o Bruce A. Henry sings and explains melisma to Robbinsdale Middle School Students.
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GkbeNVVu7q4 "Angels In Heaven Done Signed My Name," sung by the St. James Missionary Baptist Church congregation; led by Kay Flemings. Shot by Alan Lomax, Worth Long, and John Bishop, Canton, Mississippi, August 1978.
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1CPJwt14d5E&list=PL7E44622E11A03C54 Belton Sutherland sings a brief holler at Clyde "Judas" Maxwell's farm in Madison County, Mississippi. Shot by Alan Lomax, John Bishop, and Worth Long, September 3, 1978.
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ccn6_60NhJI&list=PL7E44622E11A03C54 Belton Sutherland (vocal and guitar) performs an improvised blues on Clyde Maxwell's porch. Shot by Alan Lomax, John Bishop, and Worth Long at Maxwell's farm near Canton, Mississippi,
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NhF2Vl8Vts0 "Come Out the Wildnerness," performed by Boyd Rivers and his wife Ruth May. Preceded by introduction of themselves and their music. Shot by Alan Lomax, John Bishop, and Worth Long, August 30, 1978, at the Rivers' home in Canton, Mississippi. (Song begins at 2:05)
• APPALACHIA -- REFORMED PSALMODY
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oGQ5iCKdTeI Ralph Stanley - Angel Band. Roanoke Rapids Theatre, Roanoke Rapids, N.C., 5-30-08 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k3MzZgPBL3Q Gaelic psalms at Back Free Church, Isle Of Lewis- 20/21/oct/2003.
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vrDLj_dmugE The lined-out singing of "I'm Going Home" at the Thornton Old Regular Baptist church in Mayking, Kentucky. Shot by Alan Lomax and crew, July 24, 1983.
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e4aULiwXAdo Coal miner, union activist, and singer Nimrod Workman sings "Gabriel's Trumpet," also known as "I Want To Go Where Things Are Beautiful." Shot by Alan Lomax and crew at Nimrod and Molly Workman's home in Mascot, Tennessee, July 26, 1983.
• NORWAY
• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FNzSCnT1WiU Sondre Bratland & Kirsten Bråten Berg - Stev. From a Norwegian TV show. A "stev" is a very old four-line folk song. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DedJ1PSiqYY Sondre Bratland & Nils Petter Molvær - Se, vi går opp til Jerusalem. Norwegian psalm ("Behold, we walk up to Jerusalem") to a traditional tune. Trumpet: Nils Petter Molvær. From a TV documetary on Sondre Bratland, 2005.
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x8q1jAkIX1I Bukkene Bruse - Eit barn er født i Betlehem. Moen Bergset (vocal, hardingfele / Hardanger fiddle, fiddle/violin), Annbjørg Lien (hardingfele / Hardanger fiddle, nyckelharpa), Steinar Ofsdal (flutes), and Bjørn Ole Rasch (keyboards). Recorded in Hakadal church, north of Oslo.
• IRELAND -- SEAN NOS
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3JEiuM_eHuw LCaoineadh na dTrí Muire - Iarla Ó Lionáird - Caoineadh na dTrí Mhuire. (The Lament of the Three Marys) From the Highland Sessions.
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Ojy1W6r8L0 My Dashing Darling (Mo Ghile Mear) - Mary Black, iarla O Lionaird, Mary Ann Kennedy, Karen Matheson, Karan Casey, Allan MacDonald
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ouf2brXEsiM Liam Ó Maonlaí performs Lakes of Pontchartrain at the second week of the Ruby Sessions 10 Year Anniversary Sessions. He pauses in the middle as there is someone behind the curtain talking on a phone and then gets caught out when his own rings during the performance. The Ruby Sessions is an acoustic club held weekly every Tuesday night in the intimate setting of Doyle's (across from the gates of Trinity college) of College Street,