Mojo, The Bard, & Me

What harmony is this? My good friends, hark!

-Alonso

 

The Tempest                      Act III, scene iii  Line 17

The Tempest. A fabulous work. One of Shakespeare’s last plays and also one of the few (only?) plays that he actually created the story for himself. We think. But we don’t really know that for sure, because we just know so darn little about this guy and how he went about creating his works. Also it’s the play I know probably best of all Will’s works.

So our speaker today is King Alonso. He’s leading a small band of men around an island that they’re sort of shipwrecked on in search of his son. They’ve stopped to rest when suddenly they hear ‘Solemn and strange music.’ Now I could go into more context, but I’d rather spend some time talking/thinking about the music here. Music is a major theme in this particular play. In fact, there’s a whole masque that gets performed at one point in the play. A masque was (as I understand it, and you can correct me if you know better) sort of a musical dance spectacle done with people all dressed up in costumes. Apparently masques were performed in and of themselves, but in this play one is performed as part of the play. A little bit of a performance within a performance, not unlike the play within a play that we came upon yesterday in Hamlet. Random, eh?

So it kind of brings up the question of what kind of music they had when putting on a production like this in 1600. I’m pretty sure there wasn’t an orchestra pit, or anything near a full orchestra. Still, they must have had something to make some kind of music. We’re really going to have to get some kind of expert to start reading this thing so they can comment and maybe answer some of these questions. If you’re reading this and you know any experts you might want to try to get them involved. Okay? Meantime I’m guessing that whoever was playing the spirit Ariel (a character in the play I haven’t yet discussed) was probably providing some sort of music. So we’ll go with that for now.

Tomorrow back to Hamlet, Act One. This random stuff really bounces us around, doesn’t it?