Aurora Band first meeting

[kareina]

The choir that lord_kjar and I sing, Studentenkör Aurora (Student Choir Aurora), has been talking about getting some of us together to do instrumental stuff for a while, and tonight it finally happened. Five of us gathered in our living room to play, and it was fun.

Keep in mind that I did not learn to play any instrument growing up. I decided in the early 1980's that I wanted a Hammer Dulcimer when Tania Opland returned in Alaska to play at the Renaissance Fair there, and I fell in love with the sound of the instrument, the fact that if one does not know what one is doing and strikes the strings randomly it will make pleasing sounds, and the fact that the strings are in order, so that if only looks at the dots on some sheet music and sees the pattern they make one need only repeat the exact same spatial pattern on the instrument to achieve the tune. This is in direct contrast to instruments like the violin, which my sister tried to learn as a child--on that instrument one can make some very unpleasant noises if one doesn't know what one is doing, and it is necessary to remember weird placement of one's fingers on a string to achieve notes, and while those placements make sense in terms of the laws of physics, they do not easily correlate with the dots on the page.

Sadly I couldn't afford to buy one until just a few years ago, and while I was putting forth effort to learn to play it when it first arrived, more recently life has been more busy than usual; the last time I played it at all was December, and the last time I tuned it was eight months ago.

Therefore, since the plan was to do instrumental stuff this evening I made time to turn the dulcimer (most strings had relaxed enough to show on the tuner as the next letter down from what it should be) and then check to see if I can remember how to play any of the few tunes I had learned. It turns out I can still play the second song I learned to sing in Swedish.

Therefore, when we gathered this evening and the guy organizing things asked "Is there any song one of you want to do?", I promptly mentioned that one. It turns out that not only do I recall which strings I need to hit, in what order, and in what rhythm, I can also do so accurately enough to play with other humans, and it is fun! I hadn't really gotten to play music with others before. Well, I did once play with mushroom_maiden back in Tasmania--she knew enough about chords that she was able to say "here, hit these two strings at the same time, then these two, then these two. Repeat that, in this rhythm, over and over. Then she played a melody on the guitar, and the two instruments sounded great together. But since then there has only been one or two short attempts to play with lord_kjar, until tonight. However, tonight was so much fun I would like to do it again.

We had fun playing with arrangements for Ridom, and finally settled on this pattern, which I am recording here so that I don't forget, so that the next time we meet and they say "what did we do?", I can look it up if I need to:

Ridom, Ridom

Intro: first lord_kjar on violin (or nyckleharpa he did both over the course of the evening) playing a slow, spooky, short, and largely improvised variant of the tune for the verse, which then segues into just the keyboard playing the very end of the chorus.

First verse: keyboard, dulcimer and violin with one female voice singing (into the microphone), slightly faster tempo than the intro, but still slow and appropriate to the mood of the setting sun.

Interlude: add guitar to the rest of the instruments, all voices singing "Ooooo" for one half of a verse (but only the one voice has a microphone).

Second verse: only the male voices sing, drop dulcimer out, replace with drum, faster tempo than first verse; dark sounds appropriate to the mountain king rising up from his lair.

Third verse, dulcimer returns to join the other instruments, all five voices singing, tempo achieving the urgency appropriate to a flight for dear life to escape the elf queen.

Conclusion: only the guitar and keyboard (no voices) do a softer variant on the chorus to end.
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We also played one of our choir songs, Hårgalåten. This is one I haven’t previously tried playing the melody for, so instead they gave me some chords for it.

The tune from the first page of sheet music uses the chords:

F minor (notes F, G# C)
E minor (notes E, G, B)

However, on a dulcimer one can only hit two strings at a time—it is possible to play more notes in a chord by hitting the first two at once and then the following string(s) in quick succession, but in order to keep the correct dance rhythm of the tune we decided I would only strike two of the strings at once and forget the third one, so I played F-C and E-B (except looking it up now I see that I should have been playing E-B, but at the time I was playing either the E-C or the E-Bflat (I don’t recall which), but I recall that I moved only to the next string, and in that corner of the instrument the only B is flat, so I should have used the B on the other side of the bridge. Oops.)

I don’t recall what chords went with page two of the sheet music, but I think I was hitting the G#-C and the Bflat-D#, which may or may not be what I should have been doing, and I think we need to work this out again…