I regularly fall into musical obsessions that often seem to me to make no sense at all. Frequently they are pieces of music (any genre is fair game) that I know to be musically inferior, lacking in depth or artistic statement. Always they are fairly simple pieces, often with a repetitive bass line, often with weird shifts between minor and major modes: Erik Satie�s �Gymnop�die I� and the first movement of Philip Glass� Glassworks have been targets. Most other pieces I�m too embarrassed of to mention. And yet, they strike a chord (no pun intended), profoundly temporal, in such a way that I feel I must listen to (or, as with the Satie and Glass examples above, play) the pieces over and over again until have figured out what is causing the reaction or until the obsession literally plays itself out. In college such obsessions were probably one of the reasons why my roommate experiences were largely unsuccessful.

My current such obsession is with a piece called �Through the Glass Window� off a Christmas album entitled Mistletoe and Wine by the Mediaeval Baebes. Someone who knew I like early music but who didn�t know much about early music himself gave this to me. The album is not altogether unpleasant. The repertoire is right up my alley, but the arrangements are New Agey, the songs are overproduced and the vocal quality is mediocre to poor. This is clearly an album aimed not at early music aficionados but at people who are accustomed to listening to Rock and New Age music. As such, it might not be such a bad introduction to the repertoire. The music is engaging and the singers are foxy.

�Through the Glass Window� draws its text from the second and third stanzas of an anonymous poem from the English Renaissance (and I apologize for a second entry featuring arcane lyrics today) entitled �The Maidens Came� (there are about a million spellings for almost all the words in this poem, should you wish to try to track it down somewhere):

The maidens came when I was in my mother�s bower.
I had all that I wolde.
The baily berith the bell away,
The lilly, the rose,
The rose I lay,

The silver is whit, red is the golde,
The robes thay lay in fold;
The baily berith the bell away,
The lilly, the rose,
The rose I lay;

And through the glass window shines the sone.
How should I love, and I so young?
The baily berith the bell away,
The lilly, the rose,
The rose I lay.

This text has been set a number of times. The most famous setting is the Ricercar I (second movement) of Stravinsky�s Cantata (whose spellings I used above), an unusual piece written immediately following his completion of the opera The Rake�s Progress. I was first introduced to the text in an English Lit survey in High School. The text is all highly symbolic and sexual, however I no longer remember all the details of the coding for the flowers and colors, etc. Think deflowering of virgins. The Mediaeval Baebes version, however, uses a small fraction of the text, rendering it so elliptical as to be meaningless:

Through the glass window shines the sun
And I so young
The silver is white, The red is gold.
The robes they lay in fold, they lay in fold.

In addition there is some incomprehensible background text that may simply be vocalization but which sounds enough like �Ashes, ashes, all fall down� for me to hear it that way.

The meaninglessness reduces the text to its rhythm. I know nothing of the origins of the setting, and I can�t seem to locate the CD booklet for assistance. I suspect it is a modern setting in a pseudo-Renaissance style. It reminds me a bit of Peter Schickele�s arrangements for Joan Baez�s 1966 Noel album. The tune has only three notes, although the instrumentals (highly processed recorders, harpsichord and percussion). Overall the piece is evocative in a film-score kind of way. As with any of these kinds of pieces, I am at a loss to define its allure through analysis, as is my wont. And yet I know it will be haunting me today, perhaps tomorrow. Like a perpetual soundtrack, a secret controller of my actions and emotions that I find it incapable of explaining to anyone.

[This is my second entry today; for more obscure Renaissance poetry, click back one.]

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