Music and Animei

A Raitbach. A record by the week, a player by the week or the month.

Most households make their own music. Somebody has an instrument and plays it badly, somebody else sings, and on a festival night the whole street can hear it. Beyond that, the Known World has six musical traditions, a recording industry, and moving pictures — and a way for a laborer's family to have all three in the house for a festival week.

Six traditions

Each city's music is described on its own page, and they have almost nothing in common.

• Shining Reach composes: written notation, trained ensembles, named composers, the salon as the setting — and a heavy repeated emphasis on a beat the melody does not want, and a drop into a low register nobody can explain.
• Forgegate builds: a drone, plucked strings and hand drums, long improvised solos over a cycle everyone is counting, and the city itself in the music — hammers, steam, the tick of a workshop.
• Stormharbor sings: the Skalds' recitations from memory, work songs with the beat on the effort, and a hall performance in a low forced guttural voice that carries over wind and water.
• Eldershore drums: layered percussion over a clockwork rhythm engine, a caller half singing and half speaking, and lyrics that name the singer's line.
• Clearhold executes: court forms, every part set down, drilled to perfection, judged on whether it was played as written — and a loud fast counter-current that the examination halls would find intolerable.
• The Iron Coves shout: shanties sung too fast and too high by a voice about to go, and songs about the singer that the room shouts back and never mentions after.

The Iron Coves

The Coves has no music guild, alone in the Known World, and its music is what that produces: self-taught, loud, fast and sincere, played on instruments that came off ships. The Heivra is the backbone of it, being the one instrument a person can learn without being taught by anybody. Klabak are played by the dancer, who therefore sets the tempo rather than following it. Everything else is salvage.

The archipelago owns a great many Baner, all of them imported and most of them stolen. Nothing is pressed there and nothing is written down.

Records

A Baner is a record, cut once and pressed into copies. A Hilae is the machine that plays one. The wealthy own both, and a record collection announces wealth and reach. Everybody else rents from a Raitbach: a record by the week, a player by the week or the month. A working family that could never own a player rents one for a festival week, and the house has music in it for eight days.

Eldershore presses most of the records in the world and records everyone's traditions and a great deal that is nobody's; a Clearhold ensemble cut in Eldershore sells everywhere on precision alone, and Stormharbor's hall performances reach the south on records the city itself buys back at import prices. Recording artists are the wealthiest musicians anywhere, and Eldershore's rivalries between callers are public, in verse, and closely followed. The Coves own records in numbers, all imported and most of them stolen; nobody presses anything there.

Animei

An Animei is a moving picture: drawn frame by frame, and advanced by clockwork. Master illustrators draw the key frames and a crowd of lesser hands — many of them skilled slaves — draws everything between; a projectionist runs the lantern and the mechanism that advances the frames. The finest carry sound on a record driven by the same clockwork, so the two never drift. It is the most expensive kind of entertainment to make and the most wanted to see.

Cinema houses show them in every city. Shining Reach's Hall of Projections in the Forum was built for public Animei. Eldershore's Arts and Entertainment District has the greatest concentration of cinema houses anywhere and the most hybrid tradition, and exports both the films and the records. See The Trades#The trades by kind.

Evenings

Musicians in halls, performances, an Animei house, a lecture in Shining Reach that ends in an argument. Forgegate's guild halls hold their own evenings. Eldershore's harbor quarter has music in the street most nights of the year, and the northern cities have never got over it. The wealthy engage musicians for a room of guests, and the room is the point. See Leisure and Games.

See also

• Leisure and Games · Clubs and Societies#Societies — musical societies · Meta:Cultural References — the modern layer of each tradition · Clockwork · The Iron Coves#Music · Heivra · Klabak