Dragonwriter (21 page)

But while the harpers perform songs about personal experiences, and we have one or two about death, there are no more romantic love songs than there are songs about magic, and no tales of violence committed when love goes sour. These were stock-in-trade of the early Earth minstrels. Many of Pern's songs are more akin to the American work song about John Henry than to the older songs. The stories the harpers tell through their music do not seem to be fictitious, in most instances, or even parables, but instead descriptions of real occurrences.

Some Pernese songs do have themes and structures similar to medieval riddle songs and magic ballads. Unless the magical tasks in the latter are performed in a specific way, something unpleasant may happen to the person assigned them. For instance, they could be required to follow their dead lover back to the grave. In one version of the song now known as “Scarborough Fair,” the singer says, “Tell him to make me a cambric shirt without any thread or needlework.” Like the other verses in the song, the instructions are for impossible tasks. In the days when superstition ruled peoples' lives, songs sometimes taught preventative lessons and incantations. The common elements among them all is that they are simple to sing (they have a lot of repetition and rhyme) to make them easy for the listener to learn. But while Pernese songs may contain directions for the listener to avert death and destruction, the similarity stops there. Harper songs drill into inhabitants the need for preventive measures of a pragmatic nature to protect all within the range of the Thread (or whatever) from a very material disaster.

The rationality of Pernese song lyrics stems from the culture's postmodern roots. The differences between the ballads of Pern's Harper Halls and the ballads of old (and of many fantasy novels) make sense when you realize that the Pernese harpers are retrofitting their repertoire to suit a world whose original settlers had been scientific types who saw enough wonder in the universe as it is without embellishing it with further magical mysteries.

There's another kind of song in our world that instructional Pernese songs resemble even more closely, called teaching songs. Teaching songs set rules to rhyme and add a tune, making them easier for children to learn and remember. The “ABC” song is one of these. Similarly, “Old MacDonald Had a Farm” teaches children about animals and the sounds they make in an easy, repetitive musical rhyme. “This Old Man” is a counting song, rhyming each number with an object, as in “This old man, he played two. He played knick-knack on my shoe,” and so on. Another simple form builds from one object to its relationship in the world: “On this hill there was a tree/on the tree there were some branches/on the branches there were some twigs . . .”

On Pern, a classic example of a teaching song is a good tool to teach kids about—what else? Dragons and dragonriders! This little round, which we first encounter in
Dragonflight,
contains information about the movement and color of dragons, what they do, who they do it with, and what their motivation is, all in a few lines:

       
Wheel and turn

       
Or bleed and burn

       
Fly between,

       
Blue and green.

       
Soar, dive down,

       
Bronze and brown.

       
Dragonmen must fly

       
When Threads are in the sky.

This song about how to handle the dangers unique to Pern, which first appeared at the beginning of “Weyr Search” (later turned into the first chapter of
Dragonflight
), is another perfect example:

       
Drummer, beat and piper, blow
,

       
Harper strike, and soldier, go.

       
Free the flame and sear the grasses,

       
Till the dawning Red Star passes.

Anne had tunes in her head while she was writing the lyrics to Pern's songs, she said, but like many tunes not written down, they more or less fled after the lyric was written. While Anne was a lyricist, she was not a songwriter and wasn't all that interested in personally sitting down and composing repeatable tunes for her words. Nevertheless, they were songs, and she knew they had tunes—and should have tunes. She wanted people to be able to hear them.

Anne knew that to fulfill their purpose in Pernese society, most of the songs would need to have fairly simple tunes, easy to sing in the context of the story and also easy for her fans to sing, as she knew they would. She felt her two young musician friends, Tania Opland and her husband, Mike Freeman, would understand what she wanted. And in fact, it made sense to Tania that such a musically inclined people had scientifically advanced ancestors. As she explains her understanding of the unusual relationship between Pern's space-traveling legacy and its harpers: “Many studies in our own culture have demonstrated the close link between early musical training and aptitude in maths, sciences, and technology. It helps those parts of the brain develop. So (on Pern) we end up, centuries later, with a high percentage of vibrantly creative and intelligent people.” So Anne asked Tania and Mike to write the music and to arrange, perform, and coproduce with her two CDs full of Pernese harper songs:
The Masterharper of Pern
and
Sunset's Gold.

Anne liked the CDs so much she originally hoped to add their first Pern CD,
Masterharper,
to the book when it was released, since music is such an integral part of Robinton's story. This didn't happen, despite Anne's pleasure in it and her feeling that this was how the songs would sound. (The publisher apparently imagined something a little less medieval and a lot more rock 'n' roll. But a teaching song can't be overpowered by the music, and while “Oh baby, baby” might fit into a chorus instead of, for instance, “Hey nonny, nonny,” the words are the most critical element of the bardic ballads, both medieval and Pernese.)

I asked Tania why the duo settled on the melodies they chose for their work with Anne.

“Mike wrote the melody for ‘Red Star Passes' in his sleep,” Tania wrote from Ireland.

    
He says he went to sleep with the words in his head and woke up with the melody. His conscious thought beforehand was that we could use something with a more “contemporary” feel since, after all, the colonists arrived on Pern with all the musical traditions of Earth up to the time of their departure. There's even a mention in one of the prequel novels of a group of musicians who would have been first or second generation on Pern playing an old favorite called “The Long and Winding Road.” Don't know for sure if she meant the Beatles song, but why else use such a familiar title for a piece of incidental music?

       
My approach to writing the music had been based mainly on inspirations from early and liturgical music, to match the very medieval feel of the culture as it was described in the books.

       
A couple of the songs were heavily influenced by many childhood Sunday mornings, where singing together was, for me, the most meaningful expression of family and community that church had to offer. “The Duty Song” was meant to be very hymn-like. I also had Annie's description in one of the books, which had the melody being handed off between the sopranos, altos, tenors, and baritones.

       
Another hymn-inspired melody: “By the Golden Egg of Faranth. By the weyrwoman wise and true . . .” The rhythm of those first two lines reminded me so strongly of the song I know as “Of the Father's Love begotten”—a 5th century Latin lyric set to an 11th century melody and translated to English in the 19th century—that I had to use that as the basis for my composition.

In view of the fact that Pern has no religion, the use of liturgical music in some cases seems odd, perhaps. But much of medieval music (on which many bardic ballads are based) is closely intertwined with religious music, and it does indeed reflect the period of Pernese culture, which feels medieval but with significant differences in both the songs and the planet's history and culture. And although Anne often said there was no religion on Pern, there is definitely spirituality. People are born and die and speculate about what lies “between” and beyond death, as expressed in the song sung by Robinton and Piemur in
All the Weyrs of Pern
:

       
Get up, take heart—go, make a start,

       
sing out the truth you came for.

       
Then when you Me, your heart may fly

       
to halls we have no name for.

Likewise, it would be pretty hard not to be awed by something larger than yourself when your best friend, who can read your mind and whose mind you read, is a humongous dragon. And Thread! That alone is enough to send more primitive souls into paroxysms of genuflections to the Red Star and probably drive them to staking out a few maidens for sacrifice to Thread as well.

But the unusual thing about Pern is that they don't. Some Pernese are greedy or stupid or crooked, but they do not revert to magical beliefs and superstitions or try to use them to manipulate each other. These people were descended from those with the skill to morph a native beast into a telepathic dragon to protect them from Thread, which they recognized as a natural, if inconvenient, cosmic phenomenon. If their technology declined, their intellect remained sharp, if less informed of matters their ancestors comprehended.

More than pretty songs that entertain by stirring the emotions, Pernese music stirs the intellect and inspires the soul.

For Anne as a writer, the songs may have provided her a way to make shorthand references to past events in other books she'd written about this complicated society. Along with moving the story along, her use of music connects characters and places with a repetitive refrain, providing a Greek chorus that defines the scene at hand and even relates it to an earlier one where the same song was sung. For Pern natives, maybe the same connection occurs, and a song from another event brings to mind a former solution. Even if the new problem is unfamiliar and the lyrics don't hold a solution, the song at least tells the listener that Pernese people before them have faced seemingly impossible troubles and, with great ingenuity and perseverance, overcome them, even if it took inventing a new species of dragon or moving a star from its orbit to do so. Like the stirring ballads of old, harper ballads inspire the people of Pern and give them hope and courage, for they come of a people beloved by dragons. What can possibly be beyond the ability of such people?

In addition to writing twenty-two solo books, including 1989 Nebula Award-winning novel,
The Healer's War,
ELIZABETH ANN SCARBOROUGH co-wrote sixteen books with Anne McCaffrey, including the Petaybee series (the Powers trilogy and the Twins of Petaybee trilogy) and the two Barque Cats books,
Catalyst
and
Catacombs.
She also joined Anne and Margaret Ball in creating eight of the books in the Acorna series. Scarborough lives in Washington state with two black cats and a lot of beads, and occasionally entertains wandering minstrels.