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Inchcolm (Salve Splendor)

from Zithers by Andrew Cronshaw

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about

Inchcolm is a small island in the Firth of Forth. On it stands Inchcolm Abbey, an Augustinian priory first used in 1235, sacked by the English during in the following century, ceasing religious use in the 16th century after the Scottish Reformation, but a substantial part of the buildings have survived very well into the present day.
'Salve Splendor' is a piece of Celtic plainchant dedicated, like the Priory, to St. Columba and, it’s thought, written down and sung there in about 1340. It’s one of the handful of manuscripts, discovered in such places as the bindings of other books, collectively known as the Inchcolm Antiphoner.
The music is in plainchant notation, written as black quill-pen marks on four red stave lines, which indicates the notes but doesn’t make clear how long each note should be or what the structure is.
They’re not easy for one such as me unversed in such plainchant notation to read. But fortunately John Purser in his brilliant, encyclopaedic book 'Scotland’s Music' (1992 and 2007) gives transcriptions of some of them in modern notation, with all the notes as quavers. So I’ve taken the notes in the same order without changing them in pitch, and guided a bit by whether the quavers are single or joined together by beams, let them flow in phrases that seem to work, and applied to them what harmonisation I can get out of the zither.
Surprisingly, what I found emerging, particularly in the case of 'Salve Splendor', is a melody that falls into what I think is a rather shapely form and structure, while probably quite a distance from the way the monks of Inchcolm sang it.

credits

from Zithers, released March 11, 2020
Trad. arr. Cronshaw
(74-string fretless zither)

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Andrew Cronshaw London, UK

Andrew Cronshaw is a British multi-instrumentalist and producer, soloist and also leader of the Finnish/Armenian/British band SANS, who also has a long career as a writer on roots musics, particularly those of the Nordic, Baltic, eastern and central European and Iberian regions, for fRoots, The Rough Guide to World Music etc. ... more

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