John Chambers wrote: > Karl Dallas writes: >| Next week . . . the Horst Wessel song and other anthems of the >| Holocaust. > The silver lining in such things can be the body of good music that is > sometimes the only way to deal with it. Maybe someone has the abcs ...
I played this tune at the session in Musselburgh on Monday: X:1 T:Palestine Song M:C L:1/8 Q:1/4=80 K:E Dorian B|E2 E2 G2 G2 |E2 E/F/G/F/ E2 ED |\ F2 A2 B2 B/A/G |F2 (3E/D/E/ F/G/F HE2:| B|B2 d2 d2 BA |B2 dc B3 z |\ B2 dc B2 B/A/G/F/|G2 A/G/F/E/ D3 z | E2 B2 B2 AG |FG/F/ (3E/D/E/ F/G/F HE2|] Then I explained what it was about. It's the tune for a song by the German minnesinger Walther von der Vogelweide, written about 1200; the words begin in a tone of mystical exaltation, a pilgrim talking about his joy in setting foot in the land the Saviour walked on. That's the bit that early music groups frequently perform. It ends with a call to all-out slaughter of the Saracens. It was a rallying cry for what became the Fourth Crusade. That crusade was bankrolled by the Venetians. Once the Crusaders got to Venice (having killed an indeterminate number of Jews along the way) it was payback time. The Venetians got them first to conquer a Christian city in Hungary they'd had their eyes on, and then went for the big one: the capture of Constantinople and the ransacking of its wealth for the Venetian treasury (the Lions of St Mark, still in Venice, were a small part of the booty), with a regime change installing a Venetian client as ruler of the Byzantine empire. The pillage was so thorough that Byzantium never recovered; 250 years later the Turks walked into a ghost town. The Crusaders never got to Palestine, but the Venetians got what they wanted. (There are probably better ways to notate that: I'm reconstructing what I've heard various early music groups do with it). ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- Jack Campin: 11 Third Street, Newtongrange, Midlothian EH22 4PU; 0131 6604760 <http://www.purr.demon.co.uk/jack> * food intolerance data & recipes, Mac logic fonts, Scots traditional music files, and my CD-ROM "Embro, Embro". To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
