Marzipan: Stories with Music
Notes on the Music
1. When I Was Ten is a story from Finn's childhood in Denmark. For the music, I used the Danish traditional dance tune, Totur. This tune has a happy, upbeat feel to it. It seemed to have the feel that fit the story, and was easily modified during the story to convey the feelings there.
2. Marzipan is also a story from Finn's childhood which tells of Finn's
experience of Christmas the year he was five (5) years old. The music I used reflects the
two main aspects of Christmas experienced by many people around the world - the traditional and
the commercial. In fact, the Danes seem to recognize clearly enough the commercial side of
the season to put it into another song I found in my research (English translation: From the
top of the tree), where they sing at the very end of the song, "Christmas lasts a long
time, costs a lot of money!" That's pretty clear, I'd say. (Thanks to
Kate Mahaffy in Copenhagen for sending me that song and translating it for me from the Danish.)
So, to start this story off I used the Danish traditional Christmas song, Nu er det Jul
igen (Now It's Yule Again). Later, as the story progresses, I use Jingle
Bells, something they might very well have heard being played on loudspeakers near and in the
stores.
3. Dances from Childhood is the first music-only track on the CD. It is an arrangement of the three (3) tunes, Totur, Nu er det Jul igen, and Jingle Bells, used in the two (2) stories from Finn's childhood. I wanted to have a little fun with these tunes.
4. Recycled Poetry is a whimsical look at Finn's life as a poet, and the
process of writing poetry. This was the first story I heard Finn tell, and it captivated
me. I immediately had musical ideas for it. We worked this story up together in late
2008 and early 2009, and performed it first at Collaborations in Storytelling Poetry and
Music in March 2009, an event involving Chattanooga area storytellers, poets and musicians.
It has, of course, evolved over time, and will likely continue to do so. As with all
these stories, what you hear on this CD is one telling, a snapshot if you will, of
the story. If you hear or have heard us perform any of these stories live,
you will notice that the telling of the stories and the performance of the music that goes with
them are a bit different every time.
The music for this story started out being improvised from the ideas I had at that first
telling of it in my living room. As in any improvised music, as it's repeated, certain
themes take form and are reused again and again, while others seem to continually develop with
each telling of the story. And some are dropped altogether. This makes me think of Johann
Sebastian Bach and the cadenzas in his music. Cadenzas for Bach likely were not originally
written down, but involved an improvisation. Today we have them written down, but it is
more than likely that, when Bach originally performed the pieces and got to the cadenza, he would
tell the harpsichordist, "Hit it, Heinrich," and Hienrich would improvise. After
a while these improvisations would settle into what worked well. Then they would have been
written down to challenge (or plague) those who would come later to play that piece. In
this aspect, as with the improvisations of Bach's music, so with mine. Hopefully, if I
ever write these down, and that's a very big if, they won't plague some poor dulcimer
player in future years.
5. Recycled Music is the second and last music-only piece on the CD. As the
title may have already suggested to you, it is the music from the story Recycled Poetry,
an already improvised set of music upon which I improvise even more. This was a fun track
to record in that I started with several of the themes I used in the story, but then could freely
develop them or improvise on them not being constrained by the flow of the story.