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album

Limited Time Sale for the CD!

Hi everyone! I wanted to share something with you. It is coming up on 11 months that I have been an independent musician with my own self-released album. It has been an exciting time. And I am offering a limited-time special deal for those of you who want a copy of my CD, but have held off on buying one. (You have your reasons, I understand.)

From now until May 21, I have cut the price of an online CD order for Hidden Gold nearly in HALF. From $15, to $8.50 plus shipping. (In the US that means you can get this gorgeous CD delivered to your door for a grand total of $12.80.)

Continue reading “Limited Time Sale for the CD!”
Categories
bardic SCA

What’s Coming in May

A couple of notes for May:

  1. We will be hosting the next EK Southern Region bardic circle at our home on Sunday, May 15, from 2 to 7 pm. To get our street address, either email me at ericnjb at gmail dot com, or go to the Facebook event page and check off that you’re interested or planning to go. (I’ll send a group private message with the details a few days before the circle.)
  2. We’ll be at the Wars of the Roses (Concordia) Memorial Day weekend. I’ll be teaching a new class on how Elizabethan written works reflected attitudes about women (inspired by my reflections from back in March), and [see below] performing in the Roses bardic competition (the theme is “bawdy”–I’m working on a piece).

Hope to bump into some of you at one or both of these events.

[UPDATE: Preparing the class above is taking longer than I’d hoped, so I’m withdrawing it from Roses. I do still plan on teaching it at Pennsic.]

Categories
mp3 recording

Wille Vilse (Call Me Will – Swedish version)

Another update I failed to mention. To my surprise and delight, I get to check two items off my artist bucket list that weren’t really on my radar:

  1. Have my work recorded by another performer.
  2. Have my work translated into another language.

I recently became friends with Swedish LARPer Solvej von Malmborg, who had been seeking music appropriate for LARP events. I pointed her toward my music, and “Call Me Will” in particular, as possibly the sort of thing that might go over well.

I was flattered when she asked permission to attempt a Swedish translation. You can see the results here. You can also listen to Solvej’s beautiful rendering of the piece, which sounds impressively sexy in her language:

[UPDATE] Here is the literal translation back from the Swedish given to me by Solvej, demonstrating the challenge it presented. A lot of the original couldn’t translate directly.

Continue reading “Wille Vilse (Call Me Will – Swedish version)”
Categories
bardic concert Pennsic period studies teaching

Updates for April

Last month was a whirl of activity (and posts), so I thought I’d quiet things down for a while. There are some things worth updating you about:

  • I am developing a couple of new classes to teach this summer. The first one is based on my research into the way men wrote about women in the Elizabethan period. I will be teaching it at the Wars of the Roses and Pennsic.
  • The second is called “The New Bard’s Road Map”, and I’ll be teaching it at Pennsic.
  • I am learning four new Elizabethan lute pieces, and hope to have one of them ready by Roses, and most of the others by Pennsic.
  • I have signed up for an hour-long concert at Pennsic, which will hopefully be at a new night and time. I am in touch with a few cool friends I hope to have performing with me, because it’s so much more fun that way. More details as we get closer.
  • Master Arden was kind enough to provide me with pretty much all the sheet music he wrote for Hidden Gold in its recorded and live-performed incarnations, and I have added these instrumental arrangements to my bardic work page as well as the individual song pages. (Note that, even if his arrangements don’t have it noted, I do have copyrights registered for all the songs.)

There are other developments, but it’s too soon to share them just yet. Stay tuned.

Categories
bardic period studies poetry SCA

Reflection: Women, Power, and Period

I have learned that, in posting my poetry exercises, some readers took my response to the “Women in Power” topic as an indication of my personal attitudes about women in authority. I’m deeply saddened to hear that, and hope they accept my apologies for any offense. I have updated the post to better explain my intention, which was to write the piece from an Elizabethan perspective.

Of course, I fell far short in that. For any skill I may possess, I don’t imagine I could, in the space of one hastily-written sonnet, capture the complex feelings Elizabethans–men in particular–held about women in power. They lived, of course, at a time when women were expected to be subservient–everywhere except on the throne.

Continue reading “Reflection: Women, Power, and Period”
Categories
bardic poetry video

Bardic Prep Poetry

As I mentioned in my long post on last week’s EK Bardic Championships, my preparations for the final round included doing some timed sonnet-writing trials to make sure I was ready to write a poem on a theme in under 30 minutes. This is the poem I wrote in the final round of the competition, on the theme of “valor”:

Who showeth valor? He who sallies forth
With sword aloft, astride so bold in might,
And by his forceful prowess shows his worth
Thus riding home victorious in the fight?

Or is he still more valorous instead
Who in the desp’rate minute of the strife,
Seeing the cause is hopeless, unafraid,
Retilts the game by giving up his life?

And yet another valor have I seen
When one you love whose suff’ring brings you fear,
And you must still protect them, although keen
The pain, you do not hide or disappear.

In each of these is valor, you must heed.
You may decide of which we most have need.

Here are the practice poems I wrote in response to topics I solicited from friends, each of them in 25 minutes or less. 

Continue reading “Bardic Prep Poetry”
Categories
bardic Competition SCA songwriting video

Post-Game Analysis: EK Bardic Champions

Win or lose, they’ll remember this day…
(from “We Are the East”)

I promised I would do a deep dive (translation: long read) on my experiences preparing for, during, and after this year’s kingdom bardic championships, and this would be it. Of course, this would probably be a little more exciting if this were a breakdown of how I became a Royal Bard of the East…but as Zsof, Jess, and I all spent the last six months reminding me, I can’t control outcomes. So for that post I’ll refer you to Aethelflied’s fantastic recounting of the story behind her being selected as King’s Bard. (Mistress Alys’s blog has documentation for her round one piece, which was her first step to being selected as Queen’s Bard.)

Continue reading “Post-Game Analysis: EK Bardic Champions”
Categories
SCA teaching video

Video: Apprentice Ceremony

The long post will be out later today [EDIT: here]. In the meantime…here’s video from Saturday morning’s apprenticing ceremony. (And if you’ve never heard Mistress Zsof doing her full Hungarian persona, it’s worth checking out.)

Categories
bardic SCA

Inspiration from EK Bardic Champions

So before I do the deep dive for Saturday’s competition, I want to take a moment to reflect on the inspirations I found there. Some people I want to recognize:

  • HRM Caoilfhionn, who started off the day of performances by sharing an original song she had written. Others had heard it before; I hadn’t had the opportunity. It was magnificent work, and she sang it beautifully. There was something incredible about seeing that we were performing for a fellow practitioner of our art, and I am hopeful that she will consider exploring it further when this reign ends. The other thing Caoilfhionn always brings to any event is the way that she models gratitude.
  • Aethelflied Brewbane, who stopped flying under the radar…and just flew.
  • Martyn de Halliwell, who always reminds me how much fun it is to perform, and lets his audience in on it.
  • Lilie Dubh, who came prepared to exhibit for round one only, but was invited back to compete in round two. And who pulled out a piece she knew and did it. (Our bards, they rock. They rock so hard.)
  • Mistress Alys Mackintosh, who, when their Majesties explained that my new award was totally off the cuff so they didn’t have a brooch or a scroll on hand, said (standing behind them in her new Queen’s Bard regalia), “But we do have words!”, and proceeded to spin off an extemporaneous oral scroll text for me that would do any herald proud. (Wonder where she learned that…) A bard should always have words.
  • My wife Jessa, who has supported me through my exhaustive prep process (more on that soon), and who showed up this weekend exhausted and sick…and still never stopped smiling at me, giving me a gentle touch on the shoulder, and telling me “You got this.” As long as I got her, she’s right.
  • My son Spencer, also not feeling 100% but game to be there for Daddy’s thing, and able as always to just find his friends and have a good time, and tell me he believed in me. Little did he know he would get his moment too. We couldn’t see his face as he was getting his Tyger’s cub, but her Majesty (just managing to hold it together) kept mirroring back his expressions of mixed shock and delight for us. The boy isn’t hard to read. And he’s amazing.
  • Master Magnus Hvalmagi, who I was able to briefly talk to during his vigil, who has always modeled for me making excellence in this Society look effortless and joyous. I was glad my praise touched him, and his words of wisdom got me right back. So glad to be in this with you, bro.
  • Mistress Zsof, who’s been there for me this whole time, and modeled what it was to be on for her new apprentice when required: during our apprentice ceremony, and speaking for the Laurel at both elevations (having stepped in to read another Laurel’s words for Magnus’s at the last minute). I kept wanting to catch someone’s eye and whisper: “That’s my Laurel.” (Okay, I might have done that once.)
  • Finally, our friend Erin (Sváva Ansvarsdotter), who finally brought herself, her daughter Bera, and her significant other and his boy, to an SCA thing as she’d long been promising to do. The big show made for quite the first event to take on, especially with a toddler. Apparently, she’s thinking of going skald. (Yessss! Once you go bard, you never go back.)

You guys are shining examples of why I come to these things.

Categories
bardic SCA

First thoughts on EK Bardic Champions

As they say on Food Network, some days you just get outcooked. However, I am as happy as I could possibly be having left without a champion’s baldric. I faced the East’s very best, made it to the finals for the first time, and gave the best performances I had in me. In the end, there were honors enough to go around. I am Zsof’s apprentice, my son is now a Tyger’s cub, and my new anthem for the East Kingdom was a smashing success. (So much so that their Majesties pulled the rug out from under everyone and surprised me with an impromptu award of the Silver Brooch! Definitely feeling the love.)

Don’t get me wrong. I really wanted to win…and I’m delighted for the two that did. Lady Aethelflied Brewbane, the new King’s Bard, and Mistress Alys Mackintosh, Queen’s Bard, truly brought it. The best of a day of inspired performances all around.

Seeing Magnus and Suba get their well-deserved elevations was icing on the cake.

I love the hell out of this kingdom. I’m glad I got the chance today to tell it how I feel.

After we get home, I plan to post a pretty detailed post-game analysis, laying out the day, how I prepped for it, and possibly video. (While I may not have won, I have the satisfaction of having gotten thisclose, so sharing my process could be of value. Besides, my Laurel told me I have to.)