Many of you may not know that I play a little guitar...
It turns out through conversation that I learned that our friend Lorelline is a musician as well. In fact I've learned that some of my friends here have a musical proclivity which is great. Anyway, the reason I am blowing the whistle on Lorelline and posting on the Fan-art forum of our beloved site is that Lady Lorelline and I have been talking music.
We have been discussing a version of Namarie (to which she had the sheet music from Tolkien and Donald Swann's collaboration from the 40's sometime). I looked all over the net to find a complete version of this song, just to get an inkling of what Tolkien felt the style of the High Elven songs would sound like. But all I found was a version of Donald Swann singing an A'capella version to a couple of simple piano strikes with no music to accompany him throughout. Here's his version to see what I mean: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=onbR23Kmcf8
To make a long story short, I cannot read sheet music so Lorelline transcribed the notation into Layman's terms for me (into chords) and I played guitar to the song. But it wasn't really much to write home about until Lorelline, she knew a talented vocalist and sent me the video of the singer doing a very sweet operatic type version. The young lady is a student of music and had a very honest and well-honed voice. So we collaborated. Took the singers singing chops added a little guitar to it, added a couple of CC's to the engine, shot some paint on it and voila! we have a version of Namarie that (to my knowledge) is rare and hard to find on the internet. Here is the link to the video on Youtube.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VlKb7sxQIDA
I hope this encourages any of you who are secret musicians to contribute to this little fan-made conglomeration of music honoring Professor Tolkien. Even if you don't play but want a version done just because you wanted to hear it but not sure if anything has ever been recorded....PM me and we'll put our heads together and make a rock pile...lol. Just kidding.
Coming real soon, is a version of The Greatest Adventure from the Hobbit Cartoon from Rankin/Bass from the early 80's late 70's.....keep your eyes peeled for it.....thanks and happy belated Birthday Professor Tolkien...Jan. 3rd......:)
-- Edited by Jaidoprism7 on Saturday 4th of January 2014 03:17:20 PM
-- Edited by Jaidoprism7 on Saturday 4th of January 2014 03:39:40 PM
Indeed Galadriel's voice is described as deep and low. We too noted that this description and the melody as composed by Tolkien himself didn't really fit together. We however wanted to use his original melody, in its original key, as a foundation. It is a chant, that's true. Our idea was to build on it and add to it, in an attempt to bring out its beauty, but not to change the vocal score. There are many other totally different versions (but not Tolkien's) of Namarie as well. The singer had to overcome a major obstacle, which was laughter. I am sure others might have been more successful in instilling a serious mood in her, but I wasn't helpful at all. I was laughing myself, real hard. I know the song is very sad. Yet that had little effect...
-- Edited by Lorelline on Monday 30th of June 2014 06:36:57 PM
Well said and what is more: This version is the only one of it's kind on the Youtubes (meaning the true original version besides the one done by Donald Swann) and most of the other versions have nothing to do with Tolkien's original score (besides the words). I can understand why, because it was difficult to get my head around the unconventional method in which it was written and it took some time for me to become comfortable with it. But then again, it is supposed to be of another world and as such, have timing and signatures unlike our commonplace timings. The original is a little chanty with long spells of a monotone nature and not particularly lovely at all. So others decided to fluff it up a bit, but changed the song in the process.
