The Society of Strange and Ancient Instruments

A couple of weeks ago it was the Brighton Early Music Festival. Most years I go to at least a couple of their events, but this year it was online on Youtube. I was especially struck by the Society of Strange and Ancient Instruments‘ talk interspersed with performances on the Trumpet Marine, which is neither a trumpet nor marine. It is a large single-string instrument played with a bow, but instead of the player pressing strings against a fingerboard to change their length and hence change the pitch to anything within its range, they gently touch the string at one of the harmonic nodes, changing the pitch to one of the overtones of the string’s natural pitch. Unfortunately it’s too late for you to watch the whole thing but there is a short clip on BREMF’s Youtube channel that you can see below.

Playing only the harmonics means that not all the notes of the chromatic scale used in the modern west are available, and that some of the available notes are slightly out-of-tune compared to the equal temperament we are used to. The notes available are exactly those available on a natural trumpet without any valves. And the instrument has a timbre somewhere in between that of the violin family and the trumpet family, with some degree of control for the player. This is achieved by having an asymmetric bridge, with one foot held firmly to the body and the other somewhat free to move, where it knocks on the body producing harsher trumpet tones.

Some instruments have sympathetic strings inside the instrument which can be set vibrating along with the main string, and one of the Society’s modern instruments has, experimentally, two main strings – you can see this instrument on the right in the video.

The Society has several recordings available to purchase – none yet featuring the trumpet marine, sadly, but I wait with baited breath for an announcement on their mailing list – which you can preview on Bandcamp with CDs of some of them available on their web site. My copy of “Nine Daies Wonder” arrived in the post this afternoon and is an excellent listen.

Deep Night, Dark Night

The Globe theatre is closed at the moment, but this time of year is Ghost Stories Time, and that sort of story-telling is ideally suited to one man shows, and to the more personal setting of a screen, late in the evening, in bed, instead of a crowded theatre from which you will venture out into the bright lights and bustle of normal life. They have put together a one hour show of three stories, to which you should buy access here.

First, “The Tell-Tale Heart” is a straight telling of Edgar Allan Poe’s work. It serves as a decent introduction to the night, only mildly horrific, and obviously fictitious right from the start. Sami Ibrahim’s “50 Berkeley Square” frames the ghost story in terms of unreliable narrators with incomplete information, making it entirely plausible. It does a fine job of building the suspense up to the big reveal at the end, and is, appropriately for a story about a haunted attic, filmed in the attic high up above the Globe’s main stage, somewhere that the guide (if you go on the theatre tour, which I also recommend) will try to convince you is home to spirits of theatrical superstition.

Finally, Abi Zakarian’s “I Am Karyan Ophidian” is not so much a ghost story as a monster tale, and while the point is made early on about the -ian ending meaning “this is an Armenian name” in what I assume is an attempt at deflection I’m afraid that the name “Ophidian” makes things a bit too obvious. Nevertheless, it works well, and the point that there is depravity in all of us (at least all of us who are interesting) is well made.

The programme has been available online for a couple of days, and will be until the end of Saturday. I recommend it to you all.