telerib | Dog with a poofy white tail!

It's amazing how "Let me take a quick look at that webpage I found yesterday while I finish this coffee" can turn into a forty-minute digression from work.

My chief research interest (outside of work) right now is Anglo-Saxon performance technique. Because, yes, I'm such a geek. I have a low-fidelity replica of the Sutton Hoo lyre. I have read and re-read the wonderful article on its construction and hypothetical playing technique.

One conundrum: the Priest-Dormans make a good case for a diatonic tuning of the instrument (C-D-E-F-G-A). Benjamin Bagby, who does some kickass performing with a lyre (search for his name under 'Performers' or for 'Beowulf' under 'Title of Clip'), tunes pentatonically (C-D-F-G-A-C).

The pentatonic tuning makes it brain-dead easy to accompany poems. You cannot play a wrong note. Cannot. All the notes go well together. I tried this recently and, while sufficiently nervous that I forgot three lines of poem, didn't fudge the music at all. Brain-dead easy.

But not supported by the textual evidence.

Enter wishful thinking: Hucbald (c. 800, quoted in above article as giving a tuning for 6-string lyres) was a monk writing for other monks, so is there a chance that his prescription for lyre tuning was based on Church music theory, rather than popular practice?

Begin dubious research. The kantele is the national instrument of Finland, it seems, traditionally used to accompany their national epic, the Kalevala. As with most folk traditions, no one thought to record any of this until the 19th century or so, but it seems to have a reasonably ancient pedigree. (Wave your hands in the air and chant three times with me, "Oral tradition." It helps that Karelia is kinda isolated.) Go back far enough, and the Anglo-Saxons and the Finns have some mythology more or less in common... maybe less... but it's what I've got to work with, OK?

Interestingly, many of the "how to play kantele" websites advocate a block-and-strum technique that is very similar to that which the Priest-Dormans recommend for the lyre. The kantele has metal strings, which ring longer, so you can also play melody while the chords ring. I find the use of modern I-IV-V chords suspicious, but... That's a pretty interesting commonality.

And, alas, the kantele is also tuned diatonically. The dubious research supports the better research.

But this does suggest that looking to the kantele community for performance ideas (technique and music both) isn't a completely crackpot idea.

And very interestingly, I ran into a kantele seven or eight years ago, I think, and loved it - but couldn't afford it at the time. And now they pop up on my radar again. This sort of thing suggests to me that I will own a kantele sometime in the next two years. We will have to see.