By DA66834
12-Aug-2009

JOCULATORES UPSALIENSES: Early Music at Wik  

You can hear that the musicians are playing the tunes with great joy. They are also skillful, playing in the right medieval tempos and often really swinging - for example in tune nr 2. In tune 5 an interesting thing is that the tempo gets faster right at the end. In tune 12 skillful instrumentalists play more swinging in the end of the tune.

Tune 6 is beautiful song with the interesting beat of 8/4, at least as I have found out.

The song is sometimes meant to resemble castrato singers - with a female loud voice - she sings quite good but sometimes it can be a little bit annoying. In tune 7 the singer sings about a man, his wife (in German: Weib) and her temporary lover - and when the male singer is singing what the wife is saying - he sings in falsetto - which can be seen as a little bit annoying as well.

One song is sung in medieval English "Sumer is icumen in", tune 18, three in Spanish or Catalan (the three last songs) and the others (which are not instrumental) in (sometimes folksy) German with some old details in the language, but still understandable for people who know some German. There are also Flemish and French tunes, but they are instrumental, as the other of two tunes from England (tune 19).

In my view almost all songs are good music which can more or less both be catching, folksy and good musical compositions and beautiful. But I think the tunes 9, 10, 15, 16, 17, 20, 22, 23 are quite boring. Not the best in my view are also the tunes 4, 18, 24 and 25. The rest are good I think even if there are some falsetto singing in some of them.

A curiosity is that one or two of the Spanish songs was refound as far north as Uppsala in Sweden, that can be one of the reasons of this record. I read this in the old envelope of this record I once had and I have also read it on youtube.
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