[Fwd: Re: Vivat! Trimaris queries]

[Heather Rose Jones]

On Sat, 2 Mar 1996, Dave & Laura McKinstry wrote:

> Apparently, according to this message, the "Vivat! Trimaris" tape and 
book are only 
 > for sale within the kingdom of Trimaris, and only at certain events.  
I think this is 
 > a sad thing.  I personally would like any ballad I write to go as far 
across the 
> Knowne World as possible.

Well, as the proprietor of a mail-order business, I can well understand 
how someone might not want to deal with that level of things. On the 
other hand, if the material is truly of general interest, connecting up 
with some other merchant who would be interested in being a distributor 
might be in order. But again, this is a step up in complication from 
simply selling items at events you were going to anyway.

 > How do the rest of you feel about this, by the way?  How many of us 
write as well as sing?

I write my own material as well as performing both it and other material.

>  Why do you write songs/poetry? 

I'd have to answer this in a non-SCA context. Originally, I wrote songs 
to get stuff out of my head that might drive me crazy otherwise. Now I 
write songs to create something beautiful and to communicate with other 
people. To a certain extent, I also write songs as a professional, 
money-making endeavor -- although that is never the primary purpose of 
any work.

> How far do you want your works to spread? 

The works I'm proudest of, I'd like to see known in every corner of the 
world. Those that I'd just as soon forget about, I'd rather never made it 
beyond the light of the fire I sang them at. (To my very mixed feelings, 
I've had both things happen to songs in both categories.)

> And 
> those of you who just perform, how many of you are strict 
authenticists, how many 
> filkers, how many choose to relate songs of the Knowne World?

I'll answer this as both a writer and performer. I write and perform in a 
number of different contexts. (Right now, that should probably be in the 
past tense, since I'm not doing much of either while I'm in grad school.) 
I write things that are authentic to the point of not only being in medieval 
Welsh meters, but are actually in Medieval Welsh. I also write songs 
about the biotech industry. And I write stuff that falls over the whole 
range between the two both stylistically and content-wise. The 
hyper-authentic stuff pretty much only gets performed at SCA events. The 
modern-content stuff pretty much only gets performed at sf conventions. 
But where the line gets drawn in between is highly situational. The more 
"authentic" material I have available, the closer the line gets drawn to 
that end at SCA events. But I would say that _all_ of the material I 
consider SCA-appropriate are "songs of the Known World". Whether 
something is taken straight from historic themes or is inspired by 
(carefully abstracted) SCA events and people, I'm performing it to say 
something to the SCA. For me personally, I always like to make a song 
less specific and more generally applicable than the original 
inspiration. For SCA-inspired songs, that very often means taking an 
inspiration that contains blatantly non-medieval material and turning it 
into a song that has abstracted the _idea_ but shed the intrusive 
trappings. That way it speaks to more people in more different 
situations. But I think I'm wandering far away from the question that was 
asked.

Tangwystyl verch Morgant Glasvryn