Blackwater Press is pleased to announce the release of the audiobook of Mission to Madagascar: The Sergeant, the King and the Slave Trade, read by the author David Mould. You can listen to Chapter 1, “The Good Season for Travel” here and view a short teaser. Then scroll up to edition and select the “audiobook” option.
Here, David describes his research for music for the teaser.
What kind of music did James Hastie hear as he was growing up in County Cork? When he joined other army recruits in the assembly hall as they prepared to ship out to India? On the long sea voyage and on his later voyages between Mauritius and Madagascar?
That was the question I faced in selecting music for the teaser to the audiobook of Mission to Madagascar: The Sergeant, the King and the Slave Trade. It had to be historically appropriate—both the tune and the instruments played.
My publisher, Elizabeth Ford, is a scholar of Scottish music in the long eighteenth century, so she shot down several of my ideas before they were even out of the gate. This was the age when “classical” music was being composed but before the idea of classical music was invented, so Hastie’s soundscape would have included tunes from Ireland, England, and Scotland, ballads and tunes from popular operas, assembly dances, and theatre. Music was transmitted via the oral tradition and/or via manuscript book.
With those insights, I went looking for a tune with the right tempo and mood. I found it in the early music collection of Ernst Stolz, a teacher and performer of early music in The Hague. I was drawn to the tune of the ballad “Ny Kirree fo Niaghtey” (The Sheep Under The Snow).
The ballad records a tragedy that occurred in the Isle of Man, in the Irish Sea between England and Ireland, probably sometime in the eighteenth century. It was written in Manx, a Celtic language which shares a significant amount of vocabulary and grammar with Irish as both descend from Old Irish.
The words tell of how sheep grazed freely on the grassy hillsides. After a heavy snowfall, shepherds were unable to reach them, and many died, a huge blow to local livelihoods. The ballad reflects the island’s pastoral life and was passed down through oral tradition. Here’s the first and last verses:
The snow’s on the mountains, the snow’s in the gill;
My sheep they have wander’d all over the hill;
Uprise then, my shepherds, with haste let us go
Where my sheep are all buried deep under the snow.Then up rose those shepherds; with haste they did go
Where my sheep lay all buried deep under the snow;
They sought them with sorrow; they sought them with dread,
And they found them at last, but the sheep were all dead.
Ernst Stolz plays all instruments on “Ny Kirree fo Niaghtey.”