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Folk Music in the Spaceport Bar

A

AlHazred

SOC-12
Knight
I'm preparing to gear up my Traveller Hero campaign (set in the Classic Traveller Spinward Marches ca. 1104) for another "season" and in my prep work I came across a few notes I took about music.

Obviously, it would be impossible to anticipate what kind of revolutions we might see in the music scene in the next five thousand years. However, I think it will always be constant that somebody takes an instrument with him wherever he goes and plays a few songs for others in whatever social context that exists.

So, in casting about for suitable folk-style background music, I came up against a wall. I was looking for science-fictiony folk (or rather filk) music, but a lot of it is specific to a particular property: Star Trek, Star Wars, etc. The closest I came was a compilation called Carmen Miranda's Ghost, but that one's difficult to find. Also, many of the songs for which I have the lyrics are a little off in either setting detail or hyperspace method.

So, does anybody have anything they can recommend for good "background music" such as might be heard in the spaceport bar?
 
Not heavily into folk music, but from what I do listen too it doesn't seem to focus on the "now" rather it's about back then. So presumably in the future folk music is still gonna be about the harvest, nature, romance, reproduction and fairy tales especially on newly set up colony worlds.

Try some Steeleye Span: Albums: All around my hat or Sails of Silver (might be appropriate as many of the songs deal with nautical sailing:comparisons with spacefaring)!!

Good luck!
 
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You've missed THE classic folk sci-fi song:
Banned From Argo​

I suspect some of the SCA filk could work, too. Esp.:
My Awards Go Jingle Jangle Jingle
Seneschals are Blameless
Edward the Bloody Bastard
Dwarves are Dumb (Change Dwarf to Joe or Sollie.)
The Old Duncow​
 
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Not folk music, but there's an instrumental track that might be appropriate on the Farscape soundtrack album: "Tannot Grooves" actually was used as bar music in "Thank God It's Friday, Again". "Maldis" might also be a possibility.

Other than that, check out some of the ethnic music from around the world ... some from Africa and the Middle East might work AND create an air of the exotic. ("We ain't in Kansas anymore.")
 
Err, what spacer's bar would play Folk Music?

When I think of a bar for people who make their living going from world to world, I think of either some strange futuristic techno-blend, or Jazz fusion, or something else.

Maybe this;
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-1ufAm6POkU

Or this;
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XrgP1u5YWEg

But folk music? To me folk music conjures images of my old babysitters on a summer's day in in the 1970s strumming on guitar in the middle of the park, wearing leather tassled vests, maybe apple caps, flared out bell bottom jeans, and picking daisies while singing about how we shouldn't be in Vietnam, and why we should all just love one another.

Sample; http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AH6pVUyGmOI

Do you really see that playing in a Starport? :huh:
 
Blue Ghost said:
Err, what spacer's bar would play Folk Music?

When I think of a bar for people who make their living going from world to world, I think of either some strange futuristic techno-blend, or Jazz fusion, or something else.
Click to expand...

Have you ever been to an irish pub? When I think of a spacers bar I think of the auld dublin pub in montreal and a man with a guitar playing shanties and other traditional music with a pouges song thrown in every now and then.

Almost any Stan Rogers song would fit right in.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fhop5VuLDIQ

This could easily be about a space ship.

R
 
Rover said:
Have you ever been to an irish pub? When I think of a spacers bar I think of the auld dublin pub in montreal and a man with a guitar playing shanties and other traditional music with a pouges song thrown in every now and then.

Almost any Stan Rogers song would fit right in.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fhop5VuLDIQ

This could easily be about a space ship.

R
Click to expand...
Total agreement.

Also, check out lots of filk. Duane Elms has a few, including "Spacers Home" (about the bars on different worlds that the spacers call home), "Dawson's Christian" (about a ghost starship that saves other ships from pirates), "The Bomber" (about the guy that rains death from above, and never sees the planetside results), and others.
 
Check out the tracks of Golden Hour, by Sevish - this is using different scales entirely, not the conventional 12-TET 2:1 identity.

While many of them definitely don't sound like anything we're used to, they're oddly not discordant, just different.
 
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FreeTrav said:
Check out the tracks of Golden Hour, by Sevish - this is using different scales entirely, not the conventional 12-TET 2:1 identity.

While many of them definitely don't sound like anything we're used to, they're oddly not discordant, just different.
Click to expand...

They're also disturbingly synthetic.

And yes, they ARE discordant in the musical sense, in no small part because that was his goal. They do not fall into the standard resonance sets.

Not that his claims of avoidance of the 2:1 relationship inherent in 12-tone modern modality is absolutely bogus. He's got several 2:1 frequency pairs in the first 30 seconds.
 
aramis said:
They're also disturbingly synthetic.

And yes, they ARE discordant in the musical sense, in no small part because that was his goal. They do not fall into the standard resonance sets.

Not that his claims of avoidance of the 2:1 relationship inherent in 12-tone modern modality is absolutely bogus. He's got several 2:1 frequency pairs in the first 30 seconds.
Click to expand...
I tend to ignore synthetic vs not-synthetic if it's not clear that the artist was specifically looking for a synthetic sound; yes, I know that synthesizer tech is at the level that if you're NOT looking for synthetic, you can get not-synthetic out of a synthesizer, but for experimental free tracks, well... I'll allow my mind to do some level of correction. And 'synthetic' isn't inherently bad, though I admit to having a preference for non-synthetic instruments (including preferring acoustic over electric versions of such instruments as guitar, piano, and violin).

There's a difference between 'discordant' and 'not in the standard resonance sets' - for example, the Bohlen-Pierce scale - which he used in two of the tracks on Golden Hour - most definitely isn't discordant - but if you run through a standard scale starting at 440Hz and run through a B-P scale starting at 440Hz, you won't find a single common note in the two scales until you hit 1320Hz - 3:1 from the base frequency. B-P, like the standard 12-TET 2:1 scale, is 'keyed' on ratios of small whole numbers - it's a 7-limit scale - but it omits even-numbered harmonics (second, fourth, etc.). It actually happens to be a natural scale for a clarinet, which overblows at what conventionally is called the twelfth (and in B-P is the 'tritave', semantically equivalent to the octave, but at 3:1 to the base); a clarinet drilled for B-P needs much less in the way of keys and other chrome gewgaws than one drilled for 12-TET 2:1. B-P is 'less harmonic' than 12-TET 2:1, but it's definitely not discordant.

That said - and I do apologize if anything I discussed above falls into the classification of 'inherently obvious' - there were some tracks that I did find discordant - but they were definitely in the minority. Microtonal music tends to break conventional rules at one level (e.g., what frequency ratio defines the basic interval, or how many steps are there in that basic interval), but most of it tends to follow conventional rules at another level (e.g., small whole number ratios, chords and progressions) - that second level of following convention is ultimately what sets 'music' apart from 'noise', and allows the invention of 'music theory'.
 
FreeTrav said:
I tend to ignore synthetic vs not-synthetic if it's not clear that the artist was specifically looking for a synthetic sound; yes, I know that synthesizer tech is at the level that if you're NOT looking for synthetic, you can get not-synthetic out of a synthesizer, but for experimental free tracks, well... I'll allow my mind to do some level of correction. And 'synthetic' isn't inherently bad, though I admit to having a preference for non-synthetic instruments (including preferring acoustic over electric versions of such instruments as guitar, piano, and violin).

There's a difference between 'discordant' and 'not in the standard resonance sets' - for example, the Bohlen-Pierce scale - which he used in two of the tracks on Golden Hour - most definitely isn't discordant - but if you run through a standard scale starting at 440Hz and run through a B-P scale starting at 440Hz, you won't find a single common note in the two scales until you hit 1320Hz - 3:1 from the base frequency. B-P, like the standard 12-TET 2:1 scale, is 'keyed' on ratios of small whole numbers - it's a 7-limit scale - but it omits even-numbered harmonics (second, fourth, etc.). It actually happens to be a natural scale for a clarinet, which overblows at what conventionally is called the twelfth (and in B-P is the 'tritave', semantically equivalent to the octave, but at 3:1 to the base); a clarinet drilled for B-P needs much less in the way of keys and other chrome gewgaws than one drilled for 12-TET 2:1. B-P is 'less harmonic' than 12-TET 2:1, but it's definitely not discordant.

That said - and I do apologize if anything I discussed above falls into the classification of 'inherently obvious' - there were some tracks that I did find discordant - but they were definitely in the minority. Microtonal music tends to break conventional rules at one level (e.g., what frequency ratio defines the basic interval, or how many steps are there in that basic interval), but most of it tends to follow conventional rules at another level (e.g., small whole number ratios, chords and progressions) - that second level of following convention is ultimately what sets 'music' apart from 'noise', and allows the invention of 'music theory'.
Click to expand...

By synthetic, I was not talking about the instrument used, but the nature of the tonality.

Microtonal non-functional-harmony music avoiding the common intervals of Perfect 4th and Perfect 5th is inherently synthetic.
Even in the "natural"* microtonal systems still make use of the P4 & P5 intervals. They're mathematical resonances. Hence, they have particular gravitas as part of the various tonal systems. (That they are 2/12 of a power of 2 apart from the common root makes for a strong basis for a tonal system.)

And that makes them unsuitable for folk music. They won't "catch on"... unlike the asian scales (which, while considered microtonal, as they use smaller steps, still hit the P4, P5, and Octave relationships.)

* as in, the various asian and aboriginal systems using more than the 12 tones we use.
(My Composition instructor was a notable, tho not famous, 12-tone serialist and atonalist: Geo. Belden. He went over this stuff in excruciating detail.)
 
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Nightwind1 said:
Total agreement.

Also, check out lots of filk. Duane Elms has a few, including "Spacers Home" (about the bars on different worlds that the spacers call home), "Dawson's Christian" (about a ghost starship that saves other ships from pirates), "The Bomber" (about the guy that rains death from above, and never sees the planetside results), and others.
Click to expand...

And also "Late Night at the Draco Tavern", another song about a spaceport bar.

I always thought he should have changed the chorus in the last verse to "one more drink before I hit the FLOOR". :p
 
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