St Catherines Faire and the Bal d' Argent 2016

The weekend of the 5th and 6th November was Ildhafn’s annual St Catherines Faire. Normally this event runs in December but this year it was in early November. As part of the event, Ildhafn hosted the Bal d’Argent. This is the annual ball of the guild of the Silver Rondel, Lochac’s official dance guild. This meant that most of the weekend was devoted to music and dance practice, with the main ball being on the Saturday night, This was exciting for us as we have been dancing with the SCA for almost 3 years now and we have been hosting the Ildhafn music group for over a year.

The weekend itself was very enjoyable but the really special bit for us was being able to meet the requirements of the guild in both music and dance. We are now officially Silver Rondels and Silver Semibreves. Wendy also got recognised as a Guildsman of Ildhafn because of the work she puts in with music within the Barony.

As the guild has a charter to promote music and dance across the kingdom we have volunteered to do some work to try and help. This is off the back of something we had already started working on for the local music group but if we can get it going it will become a kingdom resource. The aim is to transcribe the various pieces that are played, re-arrange some of them to suit the instruments that are being played, provide downloadable mp3’s so people can hear what they sound like and play along with their piece or play against the main melody. We have also suggested that there needs to be a kingdom wide discussion forum as different parts of Lochac use different repeat structures, so when travelling to different places it would be good to have a consistent set of music that allows anyone to easily join in with the pieces they know.

While we will be doing this through either the Ildhafn , kingdom or Rondel websites we will also be adding a section here for music.