Portadown, Bendemeer

Subject: Portadown, Bendemeer
From: Haruo
Date: 29 Dec 00 - 11:01 PM

I'm getting the Esperanto hymn-text "Glorkantas angheloj" ready to post in my hymnal, and note that the tune it's set to is named "Portadown" but bears little or no resemblance to the tune by that name in the DT, and more than a passing resemblance to what I think of as "Bendemeer's Stream". Anybody know what's up? Is this tune in British hymnals, say, under the name Portadown? Or was there a Portadown lyric (not the Prod one in the DT) that antedated Bendemeer's Stream? Or what?

Liland

Subject: RE: Portadown, Bendemeer
From: *#1 PEASANT*
Date: 30 Dec 00 - 09:37 AM

Portadown is an old tune. You will find a midi and abc at this address. http://www.geocities.com/CapitolHill/5567/ooooo2.html#port You will remember that the song remembers a terrible act of violence brought upon Protestants by CATHOLICS.

While one may say that it is a protestant song one would be neglectful if one did not realize that the tragedy was in any accounting an act of inhumanity and that the rememberance of the suffering of the victims can be neither Catholic nor Protestant.

Conrad

Subject: RE: Portadown, Bendemeer
From: Haruo
Date: 30 Dec 00 - 06:34 PM

Thanks, *#1 Peasant*. When I wrote

Or was there a Portadown lyric (not the Prod one in the DT) that antedated Bendemeer's Stream?

I didn't mean that the text we know as "Portadown" wasn't old; what I was asking was if there had been another Portadown text that was sung to "Bendemeer's Stream" prior to the latter text being written, i.e. were there two "Portadowns", one of them to the metre of "Bendemeer's Stream" (they're not metrically interchangeable as far as I can scan them)?

I certainly agree with you that massacring people is unacceptable behavior (even if the victims are downright infidels and not mere heretics!), but the text of "Portadown" (as in DT or at your link) is not creed-neutral, not at all at all.

Liland

Subject: RE: Portadown, Bendemeer
From: GUEST,leeneia
Date: 31 Dec 00 - 12:12 AM

My encyclopedia says that Thomas Moore (the author of Bendemeer's Stream) wrote many poems to be sung to traditional Irish airs. Thus the tune to the song we call Bendemeer's Stream was in existence before the words. Possibly it was called "Portadown".

Surely if you are changing the text from English to Esperanto, you will have to change the meter to fit, so why not just go with a modified version of the melody to Bendemeer's Stream? People will like it.

Subject: RE: Portadown, Bendemeer
From: Haruo
Date: 31 Dec 00 - 12:25 AM

No, I've got the text and tune both already finished ("Glorkantas anĝeloj) in the hymnal Tero kaj ĉielo kantu, all I'm doing is putting the text into html in my online-hymnal's format, and sequencing a MIDI file based on the tune in the book. Listen to it when I'm done and tell me if it doesn't sound an awful lot like "B's Stream" ... yet the hymnal calls it "Portadown").

So I'm still wondering, whether perhaps British hymnals (the author of the text was William John Downes, who was an English Congregationalist and a University Professor in Hebrew and Old Testament at one of the British colleges (non-Oxbridge). He's one of the most important hymn-writers in Esperanto) call this tune "Portadown" even though it's nothing like the folk tune of that name.

Liland