Gaudete, gaudete!

One thing that Tim brought into our lives was the musician George Winston, who he saw in Maine at some point, and in particular Winston's solo piano albums.

(His other interest is slack-key Hawaiian songs, which don't speak to me at all, but made for an interesting show when I saw him play at the Troy City Music Hall. I was with the talented concert pianist I was dating at the time, and his technique has some obvious quirks that drove her nuts, which I of course exploited to needle her. ANYWAY.)

The album December probably has original compositions on it, I dunno, but my favorite track has always been the souped-up (instrumental) arrangement of "The Holly and the Ivy." I don't actually know the song from anywhere else, but in looking for a good video of it (check out this one!) I came upon the old Latin carol "Gaudete." As you'd expect, the King's Singers do a tight traditional madrigal thing.

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BUT. You can also hear it done by Steeleye Span, one of the stalwarts of the English folk revival! Their approach is much more of a "humans without conservatory training" vibe, just having at it with their daytime accents.

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It doesn't exactly feel secular, what with the "Christus est natus / Ex Maria virgine" refrain, but despite the Latin—which is not rocket science, as Latin goes—their performance is definitely vernacular. The dude in front is wearing a white t-shirt and seems to have mixed feelings about this song interrupting his glass of wine (which he continues holding). It's entirely likely they can make themselves sound like a regular choir, but that territory has been amply covered for centuries. Regardless, clearly Maddy Pryor has found an application of her voice that she's content with.

Steeleye Span is also my favorite version of "The Boar's Head Carol":

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We used to go to the huge Boar's Head Festival at the Neo-Gothic church where I went to nursery school, and it was amazing. If you grabbed some artists and said "Build me a medieval Christmas festival inside a church" you would get that sort of profusion of acrobats, jugglers, minstrels, people on stilts, acrobats on stilts, pageant, and music. Steeleye Span's "rehearse a lot and then get a couple drinks in before the show" approach really honors the material.

"The Boar's Head Carol" also connects with the text of Carl Orff's Carmina Burana, of a similar vintage. It wasn't until an adulthood blessed with Wikipedia that I looked them up and learned that mixed-language texts are called "macaronic." Knowing this has had no apparent impact on my life, except that I know it, and learning is my most fundamental joy.

now with 18 strings!

I bought a guitar! Well, two. Taylor Guitars is having a holiday sale with a steep discount on their very well-done small guitars, the GS Minis, and I kind of wanted one anyway, so I allowed myself to be seduced. The GS Mini is a delightful "sounds good, fun to play, throw in the car, won't be heartbroken if it's stolen" instrument. The bigger guitar, an 814ce, is thoroughly delightful, and wildly different from my old one. I've never had more than one acoustic guitar at once, and now I have three, which is a real treat. I'll try to make some recordings, though I tried today and wasn't satisfied. (I mostly resent the intrusion of electricity into my hobbies, and I'm a perfectionist about my music, so recording is annoying and I don't get better at it.)

My guitar since 2003 has been a very faithful and anonymous 1970s Japanese copy of the classic Martin D-28, a shape Martin invented in 1916 and named after a battleship. Like many pre-amplification instruments, it's designed to stand up to loudmouths like violins or horns, and even in the modern age of microphones, the Dreadnought sound is what you hear in just about every bluegrass, country, and old-time tune, and a whole lot of folk and rock. Gibson, a venerable company with a very different vibe and level of design and quality control, also makes Dreadnoughts, which don't sound like Martin's.

I have a lot of affection for my pseudo-Martin, and we've spent a long time together, but the more I play the Taylor, the closer I get to moving the pseudo-Martin to its next home. That may mean just gifting it on to some kid with no money, because being that it's not actually a Martin, it's worth a fraction as much as  a Martin, no matter how good it is. It's what used guitar ads call a "player's instrument," which I guess is opposed to "collectible": if you only care about making music, sink a little money into this thing which will not appreciate over time, but will help you make music.

And, hey, if the not-Martin and my earlier Yamaha electric both leave the house, there's space for a 12-string, and a short-scale bass...

elk. moose. large...deer. thing.

J ran D&D for us Sunday, and it was awesome. Instead of playing my dynamic duo of Sneaky McStabStab (J created and named him for me eons ago) and the cat-humanoid Fluffy the Disdainful, I am playing my chipper, optimistic, trusting little Gnome Druid, Edda. Druids can cast spells and whatever, but much of their utility on an adventure is an ability to "Wild Shape" into an animal. You keep all your intelligence and abilities, but you stack on the abilities of the animal. The animal takes damage instead of you, so you can be doubling your hit points in a combat.

It's worth going through the Monster Manual to find just the right animal for a situation, and when it came time to fight the Big Bad—some sort of demigod-ish evil tree sorcerer thing—I looked at the map and decided I needed to get there fast, and just be what gaming calls a "tank." Charge in, do a bunch of damage, absorb a bunch of damage.

I turned the page to the Giant Elk.

I have spent basically none of my life learning anything about elk—just a vague understanding of wild-ungulate problems around the world. I had the wrong image of an elk, because the Continental-Germanic word for "moose" (Alces alces, which the Continent has, unlike elk, Cervus canadensis, which it does not) is commonly a variation on "elk" (e.g. Swedish älg). I figured the Europeans who invaded North America said "that's sort of like a moose" and couldn't be fucked to learn anything like the indigenous word for them, wapiti.

But, says Wikipedia, English-speakers didn't really know what moose were:

By the 17th century, Alces alces (called "elk" in Europe) had long been extirpated from the British Isles, and the meaning of the word "elk" to English-speakers became rather vague, acquiring a meaning similar to "large deer".

It occurred to me to look up the French terms, them being the other major invader of North America. They call an elk wapiti. Their word for moose is apparently élan, which also means "momentum, impetus, burst," demonstrating that they were indeed familiar with moose.

Just this once I will cut the colonizers some slack, because if you have a word for "unspecified large deer" available, this is a Very Large Fucking Deer. I had been envisioning the relatively benign and rounded moose antlers, but no, elk antlers will straight-up impale you in a half dozen places.

In D&D, a Giant Elk can move 60' in a combat round, compared to my character's Gnomish 25'. It takes up a 15' square on the map. The horns get there 10' before the rest of it. With a running start, it does extra damage, and can knock the target down on the ground, where they can be conveniently stomped on.

Evil Sorcerer Guy's torso fell off the evil tree onto the ground. Honor's owl-humanoid was able to glide over to my antlers, then get the extra damage attacking from above. Evil Sorcerer Guy exploded, but the Giant Elk form took the damage.

Because Edda can be a Giant Elk for 6 hours at a stretch and only needs an hour to recharge, the fastest and funniest way to get back to town was to have her Giant Elk just...carry everybody. Quickly.

I would be remiss if I did not also suggest reading the verified classic, Dogs In Elk.