Song of Hadrian's Wall - Epic Roman Music
Music and vocals by Farya Faraji. Please keep in mind that this isn’t reconstructed Roman music, it’s entirely modern music using modern compositional techniques with an Ancient Roman theme. The instruments used are all ancient Romans ones from Antiquity: the aulos, lyre and pan flute. The pronunciation I used is the historical pronunciation of Latin as it was in Antiquity, which we call the Classical Pronunciation. The lyrics are from the RMRS repertoire of marching songs; the RMRS are a reenactment group specialising in Ancient Roman military reconstructions and drills. I wanted the song to turn the lyrics into a story of Roman watchmen reminding themselves why their difficult duty was worth it: it begins as a lament of their condition, but as the melody rises, the watchmen remember why their suffering is—for the good of the Empire. I wanted the lyrics to almost work like the Night’s Watch vow in the Song of Ice and Fire/Game of Thrones universe for those who know what I’m talking about, the parralel being obvious since Hadrian’s Wall inspired the latter.
This is my first song in which I took account of Latin’s vowel length and stress accent, two fundamental factors of the language. Latin had short vowels and longer vowels, as well as a different stressed syllable depending on each word. My previous songs completely disregarded these elements, but I wanted to start incorporating them into my songs, and this is my first attempt.
Since we have little information about Roman music, I decided to base the language to song transposition on Ancient Greek musical rules, which we have much more information about. For the stress accent, ancient Greek practice demanded that the stressed syllable be sung as the highest note within the word—other syllables were to be sung either with a lower pitched note, or at least the same note as the stressed syllable’s. For short vs long vowel distinction, which Greek also had back then, there were two options: either long vowels were held as a longer note, or they were sung with melismas, in other words, more than one note by syllable. Both could also be used, but I only used the latter option. It was impossible to construct a melody with the kind of rythm I wanted by making all short vowels short notes and long vowels longer notes, therefore long vowels are demarcated from the shorter ones through the use of melismas—the long vowels are sung with more than one note on them. The only exception to the transposition of Latin speech is on the last word, Britanniae, the last "ae" being a diphthong in Classical Latin, but I broke down the diphthong into its constituent sub-vowels "a" and "e" (not a and i as most English speaking Latin learners mistakenly believe), in order to support the melody's ending and make it more dramatic. Latin poets would break down diphthongs into separate vowels, as all languages do sometimes when singing.
Lyrics in Latin:
Semper hic ventī dēserta gelidīs perflant imbribus,
Sordet iam pēdiculōsa tunica, madidus nāsus est,
Saevē me umectat tempestās grandinibus cotīdiē,
Cur? Quod est mēum tuērī līmitēs Britanniae!
English translation:
Here the winds blow over the wasteland with chill showers,
Already my tunic is filthy with lice, my nose is running.
The savage storm soaks me with hail stones daily,
Why? Because it’s my duty to protect the borders of Britain!
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