Grantville Gazette 46 gg-46

by Paula Goodlett

  Waltz No. 7 in C sharp minor, Opus 64 No. 2, from the album Chopin put out by Regency Music, performed by various artists.

  However, a down-time composer might have produced something like this:

  Waltz Opus 62 (Chopin) from the album The Natural, by Buddy Wachter, put out by Plectra Musica Profunda, Buddy Wachter (and it really is Opus 64 — that's a typo in the title)

  The banjo has a very interesting history, which I'm not going to go into now, but if you're ever in Oklahoma City, I encourage you to go by the American Banjo Museum and check it out.

  Around 1660, in southern Spain, a musician may be experimenting with that exotic instrument, the "u-ku-le-le", and he might put out something like this:

  Google Jake Shimabukuro and look for Bohemian Rhapsody

  And around the same time, a guitarist in Naples who had just taken delivery of his new up-time mature design guitar, might be trying it out with something like this:

  Bohemian Rhapsody from the album Classical Demands by Edgar Cruz (Feel free to check him out at http://edgarcruz.com/)

  (At this point we had a question from the audience about whether the down-timers had guitars before the Ring of Fire. The answer is yes, but they were very different from the mature up-time guitars. They were smaller in body and neck, there was no standardization of strings-luthiers would make them with anywhere from four to ten strings, often doubling them in octaves like an up-time twelve string-and the sound was softer and not as resonant.)

  Earlier in the presentation there was a question from the audience about how they would use rock instruments with orchestra. I deferred the answer until this point in the presentation.

  First sample of possible orchestra effects:

  Opening of Pinball Wizard from Tommy, London Symphony Orchestra, put out by Essential Records, ESM CD 404.

  Second sample:

  Overture of the 2000 revival of Jesus Christ Superstar, put out by Sony.

  Third sample:

  The Call of Ktulu by Metallica from S amp;M concert album, put out by EMI, cd 62504-2.

  Orchestra music will change a lot. Not just the guitars, but all the percussion.

  And instrumentalists will think of things to do differently with their instruments, especially those who play the low register instruments. So maybe, one summer evening in Paris, you might be walking in a plaza and hear something like this from a group of musicians sitting off to one side:

  Where the Streets Have No Name, by 2 Cellos, from the album 2 Cellos, put out by Sony.

  The next topic up was serial music. (And yes, there is a standard joke about 'cereal' music, but it's hard to set up.)

  Serial music is a style of composition that was developed in the early 20th century by Arnold Schoenberg in Vienna. It's more commonly known as 12-tone music. (When I asked for a show of hands for those who knew what serial music was, I got a lot fewer hands raised than when I asked for those who knew what 12-tone music was.)

  There are twelve tones available within the span of a musical octave in Western music. If you take a piano keyboard and play every note up the keyboard from middle C to the B just before the next C, you'll play twelve tones.

  The concept behind this school of serial music is rather simple. You take the twelve possible tones, and you arrange them in a pattern such that no one of the tones is repeated until every possible tone has been played.

  In this text I can give you an example I couldn't give in the audio presentation, as I had no video capability.

  Example: C-E-C#-F#-F-D-A-D#-B-A#-G-G#

  You can play the row left to right, right to left, stack it vertically, or reverse stack it vertically. But the rule is you can't repeat, say, the F until you have played through the rest of the row and then started the row over again and played up to the F#.

  Okay, back to the presentation.

  You can write some good music doing this. The problem is, it is very rigid, and very formulaic. And a lot of composers latched on to it because once they create the row and its pattern, you don't have to exercise a lot of creativity. You just manipulate the row a few times, and you're done. They got lazy, and wrote a lot of second-rate music.

  My personal opinion, there are four composers who wrote first rank twelve-tone music: Arnold Schoenberg, who created the concept; his disciples, Anton Webern and Alban Berg; and Aaron Copland.

  Here's a sample of a twelve-tone row:

  You'll have to listen to the podcast up at the top of the page, please.

  For twelve-tone, that's not a half-bad melody.

  What are the down-timers going to think about this? I think they're mostly going to think the whole idea of rigid serialism is silly. However, the idea of serial patterns in music is not unknown to them. They have musical forms that use repetition as part of the basis of musical works: forms like fugues, canons, chaconnes, and passacaglias. So they're going to look for works in the up-time music that exhibit repetition and serial techniques. And they're going to find things like this:

  Ravel's Bolero, from Ravel — Bolero by Pierre Boulez and the Berliner Philharmoniker, put out by Deutsche Grammophon, cd G2-39859.

  And this:

  Mars, from Holst: The Planets by John Eliot Gardiner and The Philharmonia orchestra, put out by Deutsche Grammophon, cd G2-45860.

  And this:

  Money, by Pink Floyd, from the album Dark Side of the Moon, put out by Capitol.

  All using serial techniques, whether melodic or rhythmic or both. And the Pink Floyd piece starts out in 7/4, to boot.

  And then, back in that salon in Florence, you might have heard this one:

  Senza Catene, from the album The Opera Band, put out by Victor, performed by Amici Forever.

  I played the whole thing because I think, of all the clips I found, this was the single best example of the kind of thing that the down-timers will do in the first generation or two after the Ring of Fire. An up-time rock ballad, arranged in five-part Italian voicing. Wow. And Paula Goodlett's (Our Fair Editor) favorite song, at that.

  This was the period in which opera and oratorios were invented. The first opera was generally considered to have been written by Claudio Monteverdi in Venice in the 1620s. Heinrich Schutz is credited with writing one not long after that. The first English opera was written in the 1680s.

  There are no opera halls in this time. We're building the first one in Magdeburg in 1634-5. These operas were basically staged in the largest rooms in noblemen's palaces. They were often done in concert style — standing in one place, no emotive acting, no costumes. If there was any scenery, it was very simple and wasn't changed during the performance.

  The big opera voice was being developed in this time. Prior to Monteverdi, most voices were just used with whatever natural talent or facility existed in the singers. Up-timers will have something to teach the down-timers there, although the down-time preachers had learned how to project their voices without wearing them out. They had to; no p. a. systems or microphones existed before the Ring of Fire.

  My personal belief is that opera in the New Time Line will sound a lot more like Rodgers and Hammerstein than like Verdi, Puccini, or Wagner; more like Broadway than Old Time Line high opera.

  But I am convinced there will be a Ring cycle of opera in the New Time Line. Only it won't be Der Ring des Nibelungen, by Richard Wagner. Instead, it will be Der Ring des Frodo by some genius yet to be born.

  Musicians-and actors-tend to be an irreverent and bawdy lot. And they look for humor in their music wherever they can find it. (When I called for a show of hands as to whether anyone knew Peter Schickele, a few hands went up. When I explained he's the alter ego of P. D. Q. Bach, I got more hands up.) And so the down-time musicians would have heard something like this.

  My Bonnie Lass She Smelleth, from The Stoned Guest, Peter Schickele et al, put out by Vanguard Records, cd VMD6536. My clip was the first three verses.

  There are enough people in Grantville with college training in music that I promise you that
every single P.D.Q. Bach album produced before the Ring of Fire is there. And once the down-timer musicians discover this music, it will literally go viral. They will scarf this up, everywhere, and whether or not they dare play it for the patrons, they will play it for themselves.

  One of the new instruments that will come back from the future is the harp. Now the concept of the harp isn't new to the down-timers. They have lap harps, and even some relatively large harps similar to the Tara harp. But the big modern concert harp will be something very new to them, and I suspect it will become pretty popular. And so, they might do things like this:

  Prelude, from the Violin Partita No. 3, BWV 1006, Johann Sebastian Bach, by Caitrin Finch, from the album Crossing the Stone, put out by Odyssey.

  (Here someone asked if there would have been an actual concert harp in Grantville. The answer is no, but there would have been photographs, descriptions, and perhaps some partial diagrams of the mechanism. It might have taken some experimentation to duplicate the concert harp, but it's within the down-timers capabilities.)

  And many people can learn to play harp. If you can play piano or harpsichord, the skills transfer easily to harp. My wife and I have a friend who has played piano for decades, and a few years ago decided to take up harp. Her biggest problem in learning to play, she said, was that the strings are color-coded, but the colors don't match the colors she hears when she plays.

  Moving on, think about what would happen when gypsies get ahold of modern instruments. You might get something like this:

  Mundo Cocek, by Boban Markovic Orkestar, from the album Balkan Brass Fest, put out by Piranha Records, CD-PIR1790

  And meanwhile, back in that plaza in Paris, you might hear something like this:

  Hurt, by 2 Cellos, from the album 2 Cellos, put out by Sony.

  Somewhere about here I played a clip as an example of another kind of thing the Germans might pick up on: German rap. (Unfortunately, I lost the link to the clip and haven't been able to find it again. But Google on German rap, and you'll find a lot of samples.)

  Yeah, by 1660 I can see German kids out rapping on the street corners. And maybe even some doo-wop happening as well.

  Following is a piece that I think the down-timers will be seriously affected by.

  Fanfare for the Common Man, Aaron Copland, played by Erich Kunzel and the Cincinnati Pops Orchestra, from the album Copland: The Music of America, put out by Telarc, CD80339.

  I don’t have any idea as to where they will jump off to from it. I just know they will.

  And here is where I realized I was running out of time. I had to skip over six excerpts to get to the piece I was going to close with, which was an absolute must-hear item.

  Before I played it, I encouraged people to go outside the hotel and listen to the street-drummers in downtown Chicago, and to go to YouTube and search street-drumming. I think that is something that the down-timers will take to, especially the idea that you can make percussion out of anything: pots, plastic buckets, boxes, whatever you can drag up and play.

  (Someone asked about steel drum bands. I suspect they'll catch on.)

  And now, the finale: in 1730 in a small hall in Edinburgh, Scotland, you might hear something like this:

  Red Hot Chilli Pipers — scroll to the bottom of the page and click on the Smoke On The Water YouTube link.

  Rock and roll bagpipes! How cool is that? (By The Red Hot Chilli Pipers. Check them out at www.redhotchillipipers.co.uk Buy their albums.)

  That was the end of the presentation.

  What's that? You want to hear the excerpts I had to skip?

  You'll have to wait for next year.

  David

  Naval Armament and Armor, Part Two: Ready, Aim, Fire

  Iver P. Cooper

  In part 1, I provided an overview of how warships were armed in the seventeenth century and later in the old time line, and considered the choices between muzzle and breechloading, and smoothbore and rifling. I also explained how cannon were manufactured. Here, I look at how the guns were mounted, laid, sighted, and fired, and at their internal ballistics. I also review the propellant options.

  Gun Mounts

  There are two basic gun mounts. First, the cannon could be mounted on a mobile carriage which recoils by rolling or sliding. Secondly, it can be mounted on a fixed pivot on the bulkhead, or a pivotable turntable on the deck; the recoil force must then be absorbed by the ship structure.

  Mobile carriage. The wrought iron guns of the Mary Rose (sunk 1545) were mounted on "wooden beds," said to resemble "hollowed tree trunks," and these were equipped with one pair of wheels. In contrast, her bronze guns were mounted on four-wheeled truck carriages. (Konstam, 40). The gun carriages of the Vasa were of the latter type.

  When a gun fires, the Law of Conservation of Momentum applies. Momentum is mass times velocity; the backward momentum of the cannon must equal the sum of the forward momenta of the projectile and of the gases that escape out the muzzle. The cannon being a lot heavier than the projectile, the effect upon it is less dramatic, but still quite visible; the cannon recoils backward.

  The recoil is arrested eventually as a result of friction (rolling or sliding), gravity (the deck was cambered so the backward movement was slightly uphill), and elastic tension (the carriage was fastened to the hull with ropes, "breeching," that stretched taut when the gun moved backward enough). If the ropes broke, you had the proverbial "loose cannon on deck." The distance of recoil would depend on the weight of the cannon and shot, the powder charge, the elevation of the gun, and the particulars of the restraint. A 24-6.5 fired with a six-pound charge at point blank elevation had a recoil of 9.4 feet. (Beauchant 21). On narrow-beamed ships, port guns could be staggered relative to those on starboard to allow more recoil room. (Ireland 47).

  It's worth noting that if the gun is elevated, the force of recoil is partially horizontal and partially vertical. While the gun carriage rolls backward as a result of the former, the deck must absorb the shock of the vertical component. That's one of the reasons that bomb ketches, whose principal armament was a large mortar, had a strongly-reinforced mortar bed to absorb the shock.

  Fixed Carriage. Initially, pivoted guns were light weapons. However, some of Chapman's designs had pivoted heavy guns, and the nineteenth-century British and American navies toyed with the concept of providing a ship with fewer but heavier, more versatile artillery pieces. Both long guns and carronades were placed on pivots. (ChapellaHASN 238, 319, 422).

  Early pivot designs had to be combined with raised decks or cut-down bulwarks, which exposed the pivot gun crews to small arms fire. This problem was corrected by a mount introduced during the War of 1812. With improvements to sturdiness, it could be used with a "long" 18-pounder. (319).

  With a pivot mount, guns could be given a broad field of fire, but this meant that to avoid obstruction, a ship had to carry fewer (but perhaps larger) guns. Larger ships nonetheless retained broadsides; it took time to abandon the notion that the rank and seniority required to command a large warship shouldn't be based on the number of guns, but rather on the weight thrown. Hence, pivot guns tended to be used mainly in smaller vessels until the 1840s. (422). Eventually, design philosophy changed, and the big guns (say 10" up) were mounted on turntables and the smaller guns (9", firing 72 pound shell, or smaller) in broadside. (Canfield).

  When pivoted guns became heavy enough to need to be mounted on a turntable, the designer had to decide whether to protect the crews from enemy fire and if so, whether the armor would rotate with the gun (true turret) or be a fixed part of the hull, a semicircular parapet (hooded barbette) that the gun fired over. The "hood" could be a light hood, just to fend off splinters, or a heavy one, to resist shells directly. If there was no protection at all, just a turntable, that was an open barbette.

  The problem with the hooded barbette was that it limited the gun's range of elevation, whereas the true turret's disadvantage was weight (you probably want to use an auxiliary engine to turn it)
.

  Another option was the disappearing gun; after the gun fired, its turntable would sink more deeply down inside a barbette for reloading. This design was used on HMS Temeraire (1877). It worked, but it was expensive to build and slow to reload, and was deemed a failure.

  A true oddity, the British Wolverine (1798), had eight main deck guns which could be switched from side to side by thwartship tracks or skids, and which also had pivot mounts. (ChapelleHASN 422).

  Recoil Reduction. With a muzzle loader, recoil had the advantage that it ran the gun into a reloading position. With a breech loader, recoil is simply annoying.

  To reduce the recoil distance, you need to supply some countervailing force. If the gun was on a slide mount, the slide could curl upward on the inboard side, and the carriage's recoil would be slowed by gravity. Friction brakes were sometimes used to slow the recoil of wheeled cartridges. Pneumatic (compressed air) brakes were experimented with, but there were problems with air leakage.

  The most successful recoil brake was of a hydraulic nature. The carriage was connected to a piston that fit into a liquid-filled cylinder. As the carriage recoiled, the piston was thrust into the cylinder, encountering fluid resistance. Tapered grooves in the cylinder allowed some liquid to pass from one side to the other, thus altering the dynamics of the system. A typical recoil liquid was a mixture of glycerin and water.

  After the recoil was exhausted, the carriage had to be returned to the firing position. In our period, this was done manually. Later, gravity, springs, pneumatics or hydraulics were used to effectuate the return, and an additional brake might be used to soften the end of the "counter-recoil."

  Admiral Simpson's ironclads have guns with hydraulic recoil and hydraulic counter-recoil (and, for that matter, hydraulic gunport control and ammunition hoisting). However, it's important to note that the hydraulic systems were salvaged from mining equipment, not made from scratch. Hence, only a few ships can be so equipped.

  One method of avoiding recoil is to fix the gun securely and sturdily to the ship structure. This is not a Third Law violation; the force and momentum are transmitted to the entire ship, and that is so massive that the firing of a single gun is not going to have a discernible effect. (A full broadside would probably roll the ship substantially, and could strain the hull, which is why broadsides were actually rippled, not simultaneous.)