Jesse McCormack

Welcome everyone! This is my third crowdfunding campaign, and I guess one could call it a direct sequel to my first. In that initial endeavour, I asked you to help me fund my solo album Enchanted Forest. In this campaign, I am going to give focus, in greater depth, to a single piece of music from that project. As a teenager, I was reading a lot of the works of JRR Tolkien, learning much about Celtic and Nordic mythology and folklore, as well as the way of life of those peoples, and discovering the music of Loreena McKennitt (now my musical hero) for the first time. Looking back, I believe all of these things were subconcious influences on the resulting piece of music I ended up composing.

Origins

Loreena McKennitt's song The Mummers' Dance is about the ancient tradition of "mumming", which involves a group of performers (traditionally all male) dressing up in masks and ribbons and making their way between neighbourhoods singing processional songs. They would also perform plays that incorporated achetypal characters such as the Hero, Antagonist, Fool, and Doctor. Many fascinating specific stories about mumming can be read in the liner notes of McKennitt's album The Book of Secrets, on which The Mummers' Dance appears, including a mention of the custom originating from the practises of the tree-worshipping peoples of ancient Europe, which was almost entirely covered in forest during those times. Such rituals involved decorating trees, as referenced in the line "tie a ribbon on the sheltering arms in the springtime of the year"...and they may very well have been the origin of the Christmas Tree tradition. I think I also remember reading somewhere that the custom of revering trees and expressing such dendrolatry by tying ribbons to, or placing candles or any other type of decoration in their branches actually spread to Europe from the Middle East, and as such I composed a section of the piece in a minor scale often associated with music from the Arab world...also inspired, as even a casual listener of her music would realise, by Loreena McKennitt herself utilising sounds inspired by travels to locations such as Turkey and Morocco during tangents from her musical research on the history of the Celts.

Personally, while I don't share the spiritual beleifs of the aforementioned tree-worshipping peoples of ancient times, I am vehemently aware that trees are, if not spiritually, at the very least biologically and scientifically "sacred" in that we as humans need them to survive, and it saddens me that generally speaking we seem to be much less in touch with nature as our ancestors were back then. Loreena McKennitt has arranged and composed several other songs which could be interpreted as highlighting the "sacredness" (however one chooses to interpret that word) of trees, which may have also subconciously influenced my own tunewriting; Bonny Portmore, a traditional piece, laments the desctruction of a single beautiful tree in Ireland, while The Two Trees, her musical setting of a WB Yeats poem, uses trees as metaphors for, as she herself puts it, "looking into one’s own self for goodness, and the struggle to avoid looking into the glass of cynicism". While released on McKennitt's 2018 album Lost Souls, and therefore not an influence on my piece of music (Enchanted Forest was released earlier that same year), I think her own composition Ages Past, Ages Hence, is also worth mentioning. It describes trees as "witnesses of our human folly".

Though the Celts were once the dominant culture of Europe, they were eventually pushed back to the western fringes of the continent, first by the Romans, then by various Germanic tribes. The latter, especially the Norse, who eventually filled the power vaccuum in Europe left after the fall of the Roman Empire (in some ways), were another culture who had a deep respect for trees. Certain oak trees were considered sacred to Thor, for example, and the Norse people often prefered to hold their sacred rites around such trees rather than in temples (though they had those too). In their mythology, the first man and first woman were made from an ash and an elm tree, respectively, and a great oak called Branstokkr was the centrepiece of the hall of the mythic King Völsung. Into this tree, Odin stuck a magical sword, and only the hero Sigmund (like Arthur in Celtic mythology) could pull it out. An apple tree belonged to the goddess Idunn, and from it she grew the golden apples which kept the gods young. And of course the entire cosmology of the universe, as seen by the Norse, was centred around the great World Tree Yggdrasil.

The Norse myths were a primary source of inspiration for JRR Tolkien's stories, which also contain many wonderous trees. The Elves of Lothlórien built their treehouse cities in the branches of enormous Mallorn, and Lady Galadriel, the ruler of this realm, gave a seed of one of these trees to Samwise Gamgee, which he planted in the Shire at the end of The Lord of the Rings. Galadriel is a frequently re-occuring character in Tolkien's legendarium, having been born quite early in the events of The Silmarillion, during the Ages of the Trees. These times were so named because the Valar (the "gods" of Tolkien's cosmology) had used two colossal Trees to give light to their realm. Two of the Valar, Yavanna and Nienna, caused the Trees to grow on a sacred hill, the former singing a song of power and growth while the latter watered the ground with her tears. The first Tree to grow was Telperion, who gave off a soft silver light from his flowers and had dark green leaves, while the younger Tree, Laurelin, radiated brilliant gold light from her blossoms, and had spring-green leaves. I have used both the Mallorn and the Trees of the Valar as labels for my top-tier rewards in this campaign.

Finding a Name

Despite this rich tapestry of inspiration (or perhaps, being spoilt for choice, because of it), for almost a decade I could not come up with a title for the piece of music that I felt suited it comfortably. Close to the release of Enchanted Forest, I got in touch with a few friends whom I'd connected with during my European travels in 2015. Thinking I would focus on Norse mythology to find the right name, I asked these friends for suggestions using Swedish and Icelandic words, but none of them felt quite right.

Instead, I turned my attention back to the ancient practises of decorating a tree's branches, and especially to The Silmarillion. The creation of the Trees of the Valar was perhaps a more direct influence on the form of my composition; four repetitions of the main theme, the last two of which were preceeded by a semi-improvisational interlude. The first of these interludes, in Mixolydian mode, could be interpreted as the song of Yavanna, while the second, in the aforementioned Arab-sounding minor scale, might be heard as the weeping of Nienna, before the main theme resumes in its most majestic variation as the Trees spring forth and emit their light for the first time. Thus, with mere weeks (perhaps even days) before I sent the album off to the printers, the tune was finally bestowed with the title Shining Branches.

The Music Video

As previously mentioned, it seems our ancestors were in touch with nature far more than we are today, generally speaking. I want to make a nod to that in this video, so I have used imagery that evokes what many ancient cultures believed to be the four essential componants that all of creation could ultimately be broken down into: Earth, Water, Air, and Fire. Josh and I will shoot five scenes for this video, one each for the four classical elements, and a fifth in which the elements become unified. In each scene, I have chosen an instrument to correspond with each of the elements. Low whistle, an instrument played using breath, will feature in the Air shots. Keyboard, powered by electricity, evokes the similarities between Fire and lightning. Slow motion shots of stringed instruments can show just how much the strings wobble when played, so this wave-like characteristic will complemented by the inclusion of my bouzouki, ukulele, and possibly my bass guitar in the Water scenes. Finally, dumbeg, perhaps the most "tribal" and "grounded" instrument featured on Shining Branches, will correspond to Earth. Some of the costume pieces I will be wearing in these scenes have been specifically custom-made for the video with the help of my Granny, who is AMAZING with a sewing machine. Josh and I plan to shoot the video in various locations around northern Tasmania, including the Cataract Gorge, the Mersey River, and Stoodley Beech Forest, where we took many of the photos featured in the Enchanted Forest lyric booklet.

The budget mainly consists of Josh's filming time, and the crafting of all the special effects. The lovely people here at Pozible will also receive a fee, and the rest of the budget coveres various administrational costs.