Chamber music for D'ni lyre, c. 1150 DE
While education was an important area of civic development during this time of early D'ni history, access to the Major Guilds was still significantly class-based. Acceptance of one's children into a Major Guild was a mark of social standing and prestige, and the ceremonies and celebrations that attended Guild life were often lavish.
Accompanying documentation indicates that this occasional piece for D'ni lyre was commissioned by a prominent member of King Mararon's court to be performed during his son's induction into the Guild of Healers. The two-voice composition demonstrates many of the musical developments of the time. It is written in queen's meter, a classical five-beat rhythmic cycle whose stresses fall on the first and fourth beat. The work is distinctly mode-3, centered on the third degree of the second pitch class; the melody conforms to the pre-Renaissance style. The presence of a second voice is not unusual by this time in music history, but it functions in interesting ways here, ensuring consonant intervals on the downbeat but freely exploring more distant harmonies elsewhere. Rhythmically, the two voices work to stabilize and then subvert our sense of meter in an unusual fashion.
The instrument on which this piece is played looks something like a halved nautilus shell, with twenty-five strings of increasing length emerging from a central peg on the upper flat surface, and a hollow resonating chamber curving below it. The D'ni lyre would be held in the left hand while the right hand plucked the strings.
The audio for this composition was taken from a recording device housed in the Concert Hall Archives; unfortunately, it seems to have suffered some damage over the years. Efforts continue to try to restore the sound as fully as possible. We do not currently know whose voice is heard in the background and what is being said, but it may be a high ranking Guildmaster speaking during the guild induction ceremony.
Listen to Occasional Music for Induction to a Guild
