Raise Your Banner Music & Lyrics
Lyrics: Katie Blanchard
Music: Rachel Brune
In honor of the then-incoming Sultan Dietrich and Sultana Una of Atlantia, we wrote this song for the Spring 2018 Coronation with the intention of singing it in the Performing Arts Competition. We practiced it quite a bit, but didn’t get as much time to put it together as I would have like, and ended up in a situation where we had two false starts before bowing out. Oh well.
There is no particular period form we used to write the song, although I tried once again to fit it into a modal pattern with varying success. The lyrics were very loosely based on the themes of encouraging those who fought to do so with honor. While I didn’t find many extant examples of songs that fit our SCA construct of fighting to earn a throne, there are examples of songs that encouraged men to take up arms in one Crusade or the other, or songs by minstrels praising those who fought in tournaments or jousts(1). This song could be said to be inspired by such.
Also, we might have biffed it at the actual competition, but later that week, we made it all the way through and didn’t sound half bad. Of course…
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(1) Tournaments and Jousts: Training for War in Medieval Times, by Andrea Hopkins.
Teresa of Attilium 