Music video made with images from the Codex Manesse: Touch But My Lips

Thirty some odd years ago my vocal ensemble "The Solstice Assembly" got hired to do the occasional Renaissance Fair. We became acquainted with the Society for Creative Anachronism. I'm at the bottom right with my mouth hanging open.

We didn't really have enough suitable material so I wrote some. Like most things at Renaissance Fairs, my songs were mashups. For this one I selected three quatrains from Shakespeare's romantic poem "Venus and Adonis" (not medieval, obvs), which is as I recall (I haven't googled it) about the goddess Venus falling in love with a mortal man and getting the cold shoulder from him.

Then I went to the UNC Music Library and looked for suitable melodies, but all I could find from way back when was wandering trails of noteheads, without any indication of rhythm or duration. I took one of these wandering trails and hammered it into this melody, which I think is the prettiest one I ever came up with. 

Bob Vasile and I used to play it in Pratie Head concerts, and at weddings, but for the cd Under The Drawbridge David DiGiuseppe accompanied me on the cittern. Here's the video for it which I finished just today, decades later.

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Almost all the images in the video are from the Codex Manesse, a German songbook of the early 14th century. I cut them out on the computer and mashed them up with whatever.

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As I did it I was thinking about the method demonstrated in the video Terry Gillium teaches Monty Python animation (1970). Terry cut things out of photographs and magazines and the pieces were so flimsy he had to put a piece of glass over his scene to keep them from flying away. He doesn't say how he kept them from all sticking to the glass when he went to make his miniscule adjustments. It's much easier to do in Photoshop (I'm still using an ancient version because I refuse to pay a monthly fee to have the newest iteration). Of course there are other programs that make this all much easier, but I think my technology has plateaued. 

I was thinking about this song because I'm on a campaign to throw away all the heavy boxes of old cds in my attic. It makes me sad, we loved this music so much (I still do) but not that many people got a chance to hear it.