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Medusa

Medusa head
  • Medusa, the snake-haired monster who turned all who saw her into stone, actually lived most of her life as a beautiful, winged maiden.  She was so lovely that the god Poseidon, lord of the sea and of horses, fell in love with her, and she became pregnant.  The goddess Athena (who was born directly from the head of a man - the lord of the Greek Pantheon, Zeus)  took a dislike to her, and laid upon her the curse that made Medusa famous and brought about her death at the hands of the warrior Perseus.  At the moment of her beheading, Medusa gave birth to Pegasus, the winged horse, whose beauty was such that he was given a place among the stars as a constellation. The many interpretations and resonances within this legend perhaps account for its enduring for more than three thousand years.  But I thought it was time the story was told, for once, from Medusa's point of view.   This song is dedicated to all of us who have been turned to stone by the goddesses born from the mind of man. 
  • Most ancient depictions of Medusa show her with a hideous face, but there are a few in which she keeps her sweet face under the snaky hair. In these representations she is depicted as sorrowful; in the ugliest ones, she is more of a "mad hag" type, often sticking her tongue out, and with leering or wild eyes.  There are a few very early sculptures still extant in which she is depicted holding snkes in her hands as well as having them in her hair, and some believe that she was in the older, pre-patriarchal mythologies, an early earth-goddess. 
  • Under this interpretation, the conflict between Medusa and Athena could be seen as a symbol of the eradication of the older earth and woman-centered world view in favour of the Classical Greek patriarchal pantheon, with the father god Zeus at its head
  • In my song, I mainly wanted to explore the idea and image of beauty and the "damned if you are" and "damned if you are not" dilemma that we face in this world where surgically altered, airbrushed and digitally enhanced supermodel godesses face us at every turn.
  • For more on the Medusa story, you can check out these other web pages:
  • http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/classes/finALp.html
  • http://citd.scar.utoronto.ca/CLAA02/Medusa/page3.htm
  • http://www.loggia.com/myth/medusa.html
  • http://www.pegasus70.com/legend.html
  • Medusa pic
  • The media have given us shot after shot of noisy demonstrations, police in riot gear, pepper spray and broken windows, but very rarely do they give airtime to the people who could supply the reasons that so many people around the world are ready to put their lives in danger to demonstrate against unbridled economic globalization.  This song gives just a few of those reasons.
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  • Under one of the provisions of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), elected national governments may not pass laws that interfere with the profits of a foreign company operating in their country.  Yes, you read that correctly.  Canada was sued under this provision by a chemical company that produced a chemical that the Canadian government banned, for safety reasons.  The company won a multi-million dollar settlement, paid by the Canadian taxpayer.  This NAFTA provision appears in the agreements that the globalization forces are trying to have passed on a worldwide basis in documents like the MAI and its successors.  That's just one dubious provision among hundreds.

Skye Water Kelpie's Lullaby • The Water-Kelpie was a shape-shifting monster of Scottish legend.  He would appear to men as a wild horse, and if the man mounted the horse, the Kelpie would dash into the water and drown him. But if he met a young woman, he would appear as a handsome young lord.  In this story, he has been married to a human woman, who upon discovering his true identity, fled from him, leaving their baby behind since the child too would likely be a Kelpie.  The Kelpie sings his lament in an attempt to persuade his bride to return to him and the child.  This song is from Skye, the Gesto Collection, translated from the Gaelic.
 Young Clifford 
& Fair Rosamond

 

King Henry II of England (1154-1189) was a notorious womanizer, so much so that pretty women were hidden if he was to ride through their town.  This song is an ancient one that tells of how Henry first heard of the young woman whom he was to make his only long-term mistress: the lady who was to go down in legend as “Fair Rosamond”.
Rosamond was the daughter of a Norman knight, Walter de Clifford, who lived near the Welsh border.  She was a young teenager at the time that Henry first encountered her, and the legends about her are consistent in claiming that the liason was not Rosamond's choice.  This song is a version from the seventeenth century, though clearly it is from a much older source.  For more on the story, keep reading...

Queen Eleanor 
& Fair Rosamond 
• Eleanor, ruling Duchess of Aquitaine, was the most powerful and influential woman of 12th century Europe.  First married to the king of France, she divorced him (out of boredom) to marry the man who was to become Henry II of England. After bearing him many children, she tired of being kept from any real power,  and as soon as her  eldest son was old enough, she organized a rebellion that very nearly unseated her husband.  The son was pardoned by his father, but Eleanor was thrown in prison, where she stayed for over 15 years until Henry's death.  Perhaps unable to bear the thought of a woman being that powerful and formidable in war and politics, the popular imagination  attributed the rebellion solely to her son, and developed a more “romantic”  reason for the Queen's imprisonment:  that she had murdered the king's mistress , Rosamond Clifford, out of jealousy. 
The less romantic but much more interesting truth is that Eleanor had no time for killing off her husband's mistress: she was far too busy running a court in her native Aquitaine that became the center of the Renaissance of the twelfth century.  She gathered to her court the best poets, musicians, songwriters and artists of her day and encouraged and patronized them.  The flower of the young nobility of Europe flocked to her court and many of them in their turn became patrons of the arts.  The seminal work of Andreas Cappellanus, "The Art Of Courtly Love", was written at  or influenced by Eleanor's court as was much of the romantic and Arthurian literature of the day.
    The other thing that kept Eleanor busy was, of course, plotting with her sons to replace her husband.  In 1174, when her last attempt at rebellion failed, Eleanor was forced to flee from the advancing forces of Henry's army.  She was finally captured, in disguise among the troops of her allies, wearing men's clothes.  Henry placed her under strict house arrest for the remainder of his life, despite the attempts of their sons to end her imprisonment.  When Henry died in 1199, her jailers let her loose immediately, knowing that the new king, her favourite son Richard Lionheart, would hold them responsible if they did not. 
    Eleanor began her vivid court in Poitiers in 1167, the year after Henry met Rosamond Clifford.  There is little question that Eleanor was miffed at the affair, although she was used to Henry's philandering, he had never before taken someone on as a "kept woman", and furthermore, he installed her in luxury at the royal palace of Woodstock, which Eleanor herself had recently redecorated for her own lying in.  (The palace was a favourite one for Plantagenet royalty, but alas, did not have "an hundered and fifty doors" or any kind of maze or secret place.)  Eleanor was forced, however, to give birth to her youngest son, John, elsewhere, and shortly afterwards left for Poitiers, ostensibly to quell the rebellions there among her own barons who chafed under Henry's rule. 
    Rosamond remained the king's mistress until Henry tired of her,  and placed her in a convent at Godstowe, where  she died of natural causes in 1177.  At the time of Rosamond's death, Eleanor had been in prison for three years.
This song is an amalgam of two existing ballads about the death of Rosamond.  Each tells part of the story, and so I took the sixteenth century broadside and filled in the narrative gaps from the eighteenth century version.  The tune printed with the broadside version was taken from another ballad and was not the original one. It didn't fit well in many parts of the story, so I wrote a new tune for it.