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Comment
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isthmus
nekoi
Registered User
(4/16/01 3:42:35 pm)
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music and fairy tales
Does anyone know of musicians who draws inspiration/writes music related to fairy tales/folklore?
The only person I can think of is Tori Amos...
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NancyMe
Registered User
(4/16/01 5:24:11 pm)
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Music and Fairy Tales
Loreena McKennitt's song The Bonny Swans on
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tlchang
Registered User
(4/17/01 12:37:02 am)
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Re: music and fairy tales
If you get into the Celtic-inspired musical realm, you will find quite a few.
Loreena McKennitt - especially her early stuff, has a number of folk and fairy tale related songs ("The Bonny Swans, Standing Stones, Annachie Gordon, The Lady of Shalott, etc...).
Ceoltori also did a variation on the Bonny Swan story called "The Cruel Sister"
Maire Brennan and Clannad have a few (some are in Gaelic). My two favorite are "The Land of Youth" and "Newgrange".
Mychael Danna does instrumentals inspired by Irish folklore (Dierdre of the Sorrows).
Niamh Parsons and the Loose Connections have done some - "The Briar and the Rose" and "Clohinne Winds" (which is not based on a singe tale - it's a lost-love, ghost story with banshees thrown in :-)
Mary McLaughlin has my current favorite, called "Sealwoman/Yundah" which is a haunting selkie song with a Hebridean chant sung as counterpoint....
Does anyone else have any to add in the Celtic arena?
Tara
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Sharlit
Registered User
(4/17/01 6:53:11 am)
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Re: music and fairy tales
Well,
There have been an absolute boatload of folk artists since the technology
has been available who've been recording traditional folksongs.
"Folklore" very often takes the form of ballads and ditties.
While I am not as fond of "celtic" bands (I think a lot
of what has been listed here is a little more new age than celtic;
but genres are only words, but I have a score of folk fusion artists
to recommend...
Circa 1970, there was an english folk revival: bands like Steeleye
Span, Fairport Convention, Pentangle, Mr. Fox, The Watersons, Ashley
Hutchens & his derivatives & hundreds of others recorded
renditions of a lot of the Child Ballads, as well as "classics"
like John Barleycorn, Gypsy Davy (Black Jack Davey, Raggle-Taggle
Gypsy-O, whatever form you choose. , Cruel Sister or Twa Corbies.
They sort of dissapeared for the eighties and nineties, but there
has been a great revival of the genre, I think, beginning with the
second generations of a lot of those older artists. Eliza Carthy
has become simply magnificent (anyone else see her on her recent
tour?), and covers songs like "The Wild Wood" as well
as classics like "Blind Fiddler", and her own folk-inspired
tunes. The current lineup of the Albion Band does rock-ish versions
of all sorts of things. Lal Waterson & Ollie Knight put out
a couple of albums of Lal's own material just before she passed
on that really do ring of folklore & myth: "Phoebe"
always makes me think of "As You Like It" [shakespeare,
natch], but I suspect she had the greek Phoebe in mind when she
wrote it.
If the genre interests you at all, I recommend several compilations to get the feel for it: New Electric Muse, Troubadors of English Folk & The Road from Here are all excellent.
Oooh, and I recommend Silly Wizard for a more Scotts feel. Queen of Argyle, IMO, is the finest original folksong I've ever heard.
etc,
Charlotte, music addict.
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Gregor9
Registered User
(4/17/01 6:58:49 am)
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Sound & Spirit
If your NPR station carries Ellen Kushner's terrific "Sound and Spirit" show, you'll have many opportunities to discover related music. Ellen, like Peter Schikele and a few others, rips down boundaries and involves you in some remarkable musical associations. Not just another Celtic folk hour...
Greg
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Terri
Registered User
(4/17/01 7:03:34 am)
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Re: music and fairy tales
June Tabor has also recorded a lot of wonderful ballads over the years (in addition to her collaboration with Maddy Prior on "Silly Sisters"), and of course there are those old classics by Steeleye Span ("Below the Salt" etc.), Fairport Convention ("Liege and Leaf"), Pentangle ("Cruel Sister"), and Judy Collins ("Golden Apples of the Moon, Silver Apples of the Sun"). For more recent music, I'm also a fan of Niamh Parsons and Loreena McKennit, and also of English ballad singer Kate Rusby. Eliza Carthy's "Red" and "Rice" CD's are great (she's the young, punky, and enormously talented daughter of Martin Carthy and one of singers from the Waterson family -- what a pedigree!), and Bachue's "A Certain Smile". I haven't liked a lot of Maddy Prior's more recent music, which is a bit too pop oriented for me, but I did like "Ravenchild". It's uneven, but it contains a good cycle of songs based on raven folklore.
"Elemental Grace" by the band Madrigal contains original songs rooted in traditional themes, with folk and jazz influences and lovely vocal harmonies. Their song "Alchemy" is truly magical. "Broceliande" by the band Broceliande is also good -- a mix of trad and Early Music influences.
There's great magical music coming out of Scandinavia these days, available in this country on the Northside label. Annbjorg Lien's "Baba Yaga" is a terrific CD of contemporary music rooted in the trad music of Norway, all wrapped around fairy tale imagery. "Sjofn" from the Finnish/Swedish band Gjallarhorn has magical songs beautiful sung by Jenny Wilhelms. "Mark II" by Danish singer Sorten Muld also has magical songs (in Danish) with titles like "The Man and the Elf Girl". Then there are all the musicians updating Sami "yoik" songs, which are traditional chants with a shamanic history. Wimme is probably the best known of the modern yoik singers, but I'm partial to the Girls of Angeli. Ruth MacKenzie's "Kalevala: Dream of the Salmon Maiden" is a very cool Cd of music inspired by the magical tales of Finland's national epic. And "Wizard Women of the North" is a good introduction to this kind of music, put out by Northside. (If you order any of these through the Endicott Studio bookstore, by the way, a portion of your money goes to 2 charities for children in crisis.)
There's also a lot of Native American music rooted in myth and legend, such as the many Cds of flute music by Tucson's own R. Carlos Nakai. He combines Native American music with Tibetan music in his 2 collaborations with Nawang Khechog: In a Distant Place and, ummm, sorry, can't remember the name of the other one. "Crossroads" by Robert Tree Cody and Xavier Quijas Yxoyoytl is also good, mixing indigenous music from the American plains and Mexico.
In folk-rock, Mike Scott often uses magical imagery in the songs he's recorded with The Waterboys, and also solo. He's got a version of Yeat's fairy poem The Stolen Child on "Fisherman's Blues" by the Waterboys, and many references to myth and legend on other CDs. He seems to be well-read in this field.
Also, a song of his about mermaids was recorded by one of my absolutely all-time favorite musicians, Irish singer/songwriter Luka Bloom, on Bloom's CD "Turf".
I'm looking for some good CDs of modern music from the Portugese "fado" tradition. Does anyone here have any recommendations? The Portugese band Madreus are terrific, and I'd like to find more music of this sort.
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Sharlit
Registered User
(4/17/01 7:06:39 am)
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Re: music and fairy tales
Ooh, speaking of Scandinavian music,
I cannot recommend Garamana enough. I have no idea what they are
saying, but it has a feel like nothing else.
etc,
charlotte
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Terri
Registered User
(4/17/01 7:07:34 am)
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Re: music and fairy tales
Charlotte, Greg and I seem to have posted all at the same time. Sorry for repeating some of the info Charlotte and Greg have already given!
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Gregor9
Registered User
(4/17/01 7:26:28 am)
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No duplication
Terri,
I don't think we repeated.
I've been scratching my head, trying to think of other music to mention. Like you, I'm very much enamored of Madredeus, but don't know of other music in the tradition.
The Scandinavian thread reminded me of some music Jan Garbarek has done with a vocalist named Mari Boine that's somewhere between jazz and gloriously strange folk (such as the cut "Evening Land" off his "Visible World" CD).
I've been listening to Jocelyn Pook lately. Her music isn't folk, or classifiable in any relevant sense. She works with pieces of medieval, of folk, of liturgical music and fashions something wholly unique out of it.
I would like to lay hands on the Garamana music--which I haven't heard and can't seem to locate (is that the right spelling? They don't come up as such where I'm looking).
Greg
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Gregor9
Registered User
(4/17/01 7:47:37 am)
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Never mind
Sorry, Charlotte, and all--I just figured it out. It's Garmarna.
Greg
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Terri
Registered User
(4/17/01 7:49:54 am)
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Re: No duplication
It should be Garmarna. They're terrific. I haven't heard of Jocelyn Pook -- I'm going to have to track that down!
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Gregor9
Registered User
(4/17/01 7:58:27 am)
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Pook
Terri,
She recently released a CD on Peter Gabriel's Realworld label. The first I heard of her was on the soundtrack to Kubrick's "Eyes Wide Shut," which used a piece of hers that ran a piece of sung Mass backwards, creating a really disturbing atmosphere. That comes from another CD called "Flood." There are things about her that remind me of Jane Siberry, but not in the sense of lyrics, as most of it is vocalise. She makes a sort of strange companion musically to Lisa Gerrard, another favorite of mine.
Greg
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isthmus
nekoi
Registered User
(4/17/01 8:03:22 am)
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thanks
Oh wow, thank you for all the suggestions.
Will definetly check these out this summer.
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Sharlit
Registered User
(4/17/01 9:22:24 am)
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Gar - [insert spelling here]
Oi!
Well, a search for "Garamana" yielded little, so I suspect
I spelled it wrong! The albums I have of them are taped by a friend-
I've never actually seen it spelled, so I was being vaguely phoenetic.
"Garmarna", however, brought up www.cal-mum.org/high/busi...rmarna.htm
, which seems about right.
Ooh, this is even better:
www.cabal.se/massproduktion/garmarna/
Off to order some albums,
charlotte
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janeyolen
Unregistered User
(4/17/01 10:42:58 am)
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Minneapolis folk rock
Rock and reel may have been invented in England, but it found a happy home in Minneapolis. Think Boiled in Lead (and the short lived Cats Laughing) which Emma Bull put into her novel War for the Oaks.
Though of course I may be a bit prejudiced. My son is the guitarist and lead singer for Lead.
Jane
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Kate
Unregistered User
(4/17/01 11:56:43 am)
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Music
A couple of Liz Phair's songs refer to fairy tales--I'll dig up the titles eventually--as do several of REM's ("Seven Chinese Brothers" comes to mind, and "Nightswimming"). Anne Sexton's band, Her Kind, did a couple from Transformations, her poetry collection of revisited fairy tales. There's also the opera, adapted from that same volume.
Incidentally, has anyone seen the "aerial fairy tale" by a trapeze artist whose name escapes me this moment? I am wondering what the score was for it. It was blurbed in The New Yorker recently.
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CoryEllen
Registered User
(4/17/01 12:16:27 pm)
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Re: Pook
I think Jocelyn Pook was reviewed recently on NPR - if she's the one I'm thinking of, her music includes a lot of backwards singing and it is really, really spiffy.
C-E
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Kate
Unregistered User
(4/17/01 12:39:49 pm)
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Pook
Yes, I think that is Pook also.
Very cool.
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DonnaQ
Registered User
(4/17/01 11:49:36 pm)
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Back in the Celtic Realm
I've mentioned -Clandestine- before, (at least on the other board), but it looks like it might be appropriate to bring them up again here.
The band includes an award winning piper, a fiddler with a mean fey streak, and two women who sing like angels. ~(Cory-Ellen - you will LOVE the harmonies!)~ Emily is also the most impressive bodhran player that I've ever heard - truly awesome!
Their material includes arrangements of traditonal material, as well as original songs. "The Haunting" includes a version of <The Cruel Sister> as well as a tune <Dunlavy's Castle> the girls wrote when they decided they wanted to compose a fairy tale of their own. "To Anybody at All" features < Babylon > a song comprised of various fairy tale verses gathered from the net and put together. Their work ranges from jigs and reels to soul-stealing, sweetly melodic pieces. You can check them out at io.com/clandestine
Happy listening!
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DonnaQ
Registered User
(4/18/01 12:22:16 am)
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PS
For anyone close to the Philadelphia area -> Clandestine will be playing in the Wednesday night music series held in the Great Hall at the art musuem on May 16th. (Start time 6:00)
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Richard
Unregistered User
(4/18/01 7:04:02 am)
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Music
I don't have anything to add here, but I'm taking notes like mad. I'm familiar with most of the artists but there are many mentioned here I'd never heard of before. More to explore!
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