Marcy Prochaska: Hammered Dulcimer

For want of a nail, the shoe was lost,
For want of the shoe, the horse was lost,
For want of the horse, the rider was lost,
For want of the rider, the battle was lost,
For want of the battle, the kingdom was lost,
And all for the want of a horseshoe nail!

We have recorded everything except one piece, an original tune called “Cherry on Top,” composed by our guitarist on the day his daughter was born.

It’s something he’s often noodled around on during down time; the more we heard it the more we liked it, and decided we should work up a trio version “sometime.” Now that everything else is done, “sometime” has arrived.

I’m not that great at improvising on something like this by ear, so my first task was to try to transcribe it.

I pieced something together by listening first to the bass notes, then to the highest pitches, then to whatever I could pick out in the middle. Sometimes I could catch the rhythm but not the notes, and sometimes vice versa. Most frustrating, there seemed to be odd moments where there was an extra beat or a missing one.

Nevertheless, with transcription in hand I wrote out some tentative dulcimer and fiddle parts and sent PDFs and MIDI files to the guys.

When we tried it last night, we figured out what was going on with those frustrating rhythmic oddities; many of the notes that I thought were falling on the downbeat actually occurred an eighth note before the downbeat.

Wow.

Even watching Craig tap his foot didn’t help me catch the right rhythm — once you’ve got an idea of a tune in your head, it’s hard to shift the feel of it by something so small as an eighth note (or a horseshoe nail).

Today, with the help of a new recording with a metronome, the freeware Audacity which lets one slow down a tune without changing its pitch, and a drumbeat ‘metronome’ to my NoteWorthy Composer file, I straightened out my transcription — and now I can feel the tune the right way, and those rhythmic anomalies have disappeared.

Woo-hoo!

Otherwise, last night’s session included recording additional tracks for Hills of Lorne and for Irksome Girl / Midnight Maze, after a late start — soon after we arrived one of Craig’s kids got hurt and it understandably took them a while to determine it was not a broken arm; good thing it’s not!

For Hills of Lorne, we added mandolin picking the melody, mandolin playing some long tremolo notes, fiddle playing a sustained harmony part, and recorder playing the same part. I wanted to play the part on the whistle instead, but I’m still new at the whistle so it didn’t sound as good, plus my whistle is a cheapie with the mouthpiece glued on, so it’s not tunable.

I’m not sure if we’ll use all four additional tracks or not. That will require a lot of listening to a lot of combinations.

For Irksome, I just added some dulcimer bass notes.

There’s plenty of work yet to be done: get some photos taken, do the graphic design (with the new old Photoshop, version 6.0, that I just won on Ebay), write the liner notes, and record Cherry on Top — but it feels good to be almost done with this CD.

Last night The Hanshaw Trio got together for another recording and practice session. It’s been raining here for weeks, but by the end of our session there was snow on our cars.

The first snow came in October two years ago, too, and I ended up writing a tune called “October Snow” in response — thinking about the childlike excitement for the first snow, mixed with the dread of long months of darkness and cold. I don’t play the tune exactly like I first wrote it down, but the MIDI at least gives an idea of it.

Anyway, unaware of the coming white stuff, we began our session by revisiting Irksome Girl / Midnight Maze, a pair of original jigs. I wasn’t happy with our previous arrangement of this medley, so I’d made some changes.

First of all, we now start with a guitar intro, then dulcimer playing the A part twice, then fiddle playing the A part twice, then both of us playing the B part. Before, we’d also tried doing four A parts the third time through the tune, but I think it makes for a better transition to Midnight Maze if we just do the A part twice.

I had also been trying to play bass notes along with the melody. It’s hard to do that both accurately and expressively, and the bass notes tended to be too loud. So this time I left them out, and perhaps I’ll add them back in later by recording them on a separate track. That way I can also control their volume better relative to the melody.

For Midnight Maze, I ended up writing new fiddle parts to add syncopation and interest, and also to hopefully avoid the awkward bowing and fingering the melody involved. Jerry hasn’t had time to learn these parts yet, so he’ll add them in later, too.

I have three full takes and two partials (just Irksome Girl) to listen to; I hope they’re good enough to use this time — we’re all a little anxious to finish this project.

After recording, we started reviewing Christmas repertoire. Last year we developed trio arrangements of nine pieces from What Child Is This?. Two of them, Fallen and Easter Thursday, we play all year. Last night reviewed the others: The Lord at first did Adam make, Come Thou Long-Expected Jesus / Planxty Irwin, O Come O Come Emmanuel, He Shall Feed His Flock, Three Ships Medley, Noel Nouvelet / Wexford Carol, and Hewlett / Silent Night.

Yesterday I worked up a new arrangement of the Irksome Girl / Midnight Maze medley.

Jerry had told me that the melody of Midnight Maze, particularly in the B part, involved some very awkward bowing and fingering, and I also thought it might be more interesting to make his part different from mine — in keeping with the theme of the dream world and its weird juxtapositions.

I didn’t want to take the time to really write the guitar part — who wants to notate strumming!? — so I only roughed it in for Irksome Girl in order to provide the intro and a sense of the chord structure and syncopation. The guitar will also play during Midnight Maze, I just didn’t bother writing it out.

Keep in mind that MIDI is a digital format — these sounds are just attempting to resemble a guitar, dulcimer, and fiddle.

Irksome Girl / Midnight Maze MIDI

Last night we worked on Irksome Girl / Midnight Maze, two original jigs.

The title Irksome Girl comes from one of those band name generator websites. We decided it didn’t work for us as a band name — it doesn’t exactly fit our “kind of Celtic” style. But it does fit for a description of our band’s sole female.

Guess who’s the most picky, the most demanding, the most likely to be in a foul mood, the most sensitive, the most whiny, most likely to send too many, too-long emails? Fortunately we all (seem to) tolerate my rough edges and still manage to get along quite well and enjoy one another.

Anyway, since we weren’t going to use the title for a band name, I figured I’d at least use it for a tune title.

Irksome Girl is in Am for the A part. There’s some walking bass stuff, but essentially the A part centers on that Am chord. In the B part, the key changes to A mixolydian, and the chord progression rocks back and forth between A and G or Em.

We start with four A parts, first just dulcimer and guitar, then adding in the fiddle. The third time through, we do a sort of re-intro, with fiddle and guitar doing two A parts and then me building in a rhythmic bass thing for two more A parts, leading nicely into the B part.

Midnight Maze might be the first tune I wrote here in Ithaca. There was a community-wide reading of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein going on, which I thought was a cool thing to do. The introduction to the book talks about its origins in a contest, and how Mary’s idea came to her in a dream.

I think dreams are fascinating, with their weird yet familiar landscapes, people, and events, juxtaposed and jumbled together. Midnight Maze nods to Mary Shelley and to the world of dreams.

It’s in Bm, and I tried to write a melody full of jumps and turns and shifts. We start with a single guitar chord and a long low B fiddle drone while dulcimer plays melody, then the guitar returns in the second A part and the fiddle joins the melody in the B part. Second time through I drop an octave, and the last time we repeat the second-to-last phrase to make a kind of tag ending.

It’s a difficult medley, especially for me. Playing the bare melodies is a bit awkward, and I’m also trying to throw in some walking bass notes in Irksome. We also had to decide between guitar strumming all the time, or fingerpicking some parts and strumming others. We like the fingerpicking, but there’s not enough time to grab a pick for strumming, so if he fingerpicks, he’s got to strum without a pick.

I’ve got seven full takes plus two partials; I hope there’s enough good material in them to edit together a good version of the medley. If not, it’s still useful development and practice.

Who am I, to know the Lord our God?
In awe of you I stand in silence.
And yet the Gospel says you sent your son for me
That I might be a child of God.

I believe in the Bible, I believe in your love;
I believe in your steadfastness and sovereignty.
I believe your mercy endures forever,
And I believe your grace is free -

So ‘bold, I approach th’eternal throne,’
Or I would, but I’m not sure where it is.
Through all the clouds, I cannot see you sitting there.

Someday I’ll see your face in heaven,
And then, oh, then, I will know you.
I will tremble, and you -
In spite of it all, you will love me.

I will tremble, fall on my knees -
In spite of it all, you will love me.

© 1996 Marcy Prochaska, all rights reserved.

I am more like Job than Moses.

Moses talked to God, and God talked to Moses. Moses saw God’s “back,” saw his presence in the burning bush, glowed with his glory when he came down from Sinai. Moses saw God do amazing and specific things that he announced ahead of time, things that were of great significance to an entire nation and the world beyond.

Job saw God’s finger in the circumstances in his own individual life. He knew that God is sovereign, that God gives and takes away. He knew that God is righteous and just. But most of his life he lived by faith, without any direct, unambiguous contact or communication with God.

God does appear to Job. He hasn’t appeared to me (yet), but I imagine I’d get some of the same answer. The answer that cuts, that hurts, the hard bright truth that God is God and I am not. But it is also the answer that reassures — that God is in fact God, that he is in fact righteous and just, as Job thought he was, even in these current nasty circumstances. The very fact that God appears and speaks at all is great mercy. And mercy on top of mercy! -God praises Job for his honesty, for speaking the truth as he perceived it — and he corrects his perceptions. Perhaps even the devastations were great mercy, drawing out this deep thirst for the righteous God he’d perhaps only casually talked about and believed in previously. Mercy, for God to so work in our lives that we cannot ignore him any longer.

Someone once told me that even if God spoke to me directly, soon enough I would doubt that experience and think it was a hallucination or a demon. So perhaps it is great mercy that God shows up in my life only as an ambiguous finger, sovereign over circumstances. One of my images for this ambiguous experience is the psychologist behind the one-way mirror. God, like the psychologist, arranges my room and the objects in it, because he cares about me and knows me and is treating me, but I don’t see his face — yet. My job is to trust this faceless doctor, based on what I know is true about him and our relationship.

Paul said he knew Jesus (Philippians 3:8). He met him once in a vision. But in what sense did he know him? Was it the way Job knew God, in the sense of knowing who he is, knowing his character, and having the one grand vision to confirm it all? Or were there more unrecorded conversations, more direct, unambiguous experience, like Moses had, like some evangelicals claim to have? Or when Paul said “the surpassing value of knowing Christ,” did he refer to something not yet consummated, the coming full knowing we’ll have in heaven (1 Corinthians 13:12)?

My old journals are full of the question, what is our relationship with God supposed to be like — more like Job or more like Moses? I didn’t want to settle for a life of “belief only,” if it’s possible to know God more directly and unambiguously. But perhaps not everyone is meant to have that kind of relationship. Most people in the Bible didn’t.

I think I’m a little more at peace with the life of “faith only” now. Not having direct and unambiguous experience of God doesn’t have to imply that he’s not there and that my faith is all hogwash. And yet I hope I never stop thirsting to see him, and I hope that he will so sanctify me that I will be able to see him if he shows himself to me.

By the way, the last line of this song was inspired by one of those Christian party questions — imagining what you will do when you see Jesus in heaven. Run, dance, sing, shout, hug him, what? My immediate answer was that I’d fall to my knees and hide my face. He’d have to come running to me, because I don’t think I’d have the faith to run to him. It’s like seeing someone you admire at a party, and you’re afraid to approach because of all the important people there, in-crowd people, his real friends, and you’re insecure about your own welcome.

Another by the way: read Til We Have Faces by C. S. Lewis. There’s a part in the middle that offers another way to view the active yet unseen God: as Cupid, invisible to Psyche, yet her passionately loving husband.