[alison]

The Bards just wouldn't think like that. Getting a qualification would be like an abstraction of knowledge, not valuing knowledge itself. They would have ways of evaluating students, but exams wouldn't have been one of them.

[Akdor 1154]

What about choosing a candidate for a job? i.e. a teacher at a School?

[alison]

I would imagine that the Circles of the Schools would decide things like that. And being Bards, they would probably argue quite a lot. ;) They would discuss earnestly what they knew of a Bard, probably asking a Bard's particular mentor to give a lengthy opinion, and discuss what his or her skills were, their talents, their personalities, their achievements - and finally make a decision.

[Akdor 1154]

a Bard's particular mentor

But I thought

Bards having one mentor to teach was last practiced 500 years ago

;)

[alison]

:D

Actually, there's not a contradiction: you will notice that young Bards always live in a particular Bard's house (Saliman, Nelac, Malgorn etc) and are thought of as that Bard's students. But they are not taught only by that Bard: they will have different mentors for different skills, eg Maerad in Innail had two teachers (Dernhil and Indik) and three in Busk (Nerili, and two others).

What Cadvan is talking about is an older system, where one young Bard would "sit at the feet" of an older Bard, outside any School system. That senior Bard would be the sole teacher.

[Akdor 1154]

Oh well :D

How many teachers would a bard have if he/she went through the 'normal' schooling system?

[alison]

Actually, I'm not sure - but it would depend on what they studied, and I doubt it would be fixed. All Bards would learn scripting, music, the ethics of the Balance and swordcraft as a matter of course (three teachers at least) - but then it would depend where their interests led them. If you think about the Three Arts, that's a pretty diverse area of practices covering, well, just about every branch of knowledge.

Btw, I'll have to do some research on Bardic music - it quite possibly might be neither modal nor tonal and might be based on some totally other system. I'll see what some musicologists I know might have to say (in case you didn't guess, I'm personally a musical klutz).

[Akdor 1154]

Lol, nvm - that's why they invented GarageBand! ;)

[Gemini]

I'm extremely un-musical lol (i did learn piano for a while... lets just say it was a disaster lol). When i'm reading anything and somebody sings or plays a song i will imagine it in my head, thing is every one of those songs will sound exactly the same, as i don't have enough musical knowledge to imagine them anywhere near how they'd actualy sound :D. It's the same when you talk about a 'contralto' voice etc, i just imagine them in a way that seems similar (in my uneducated opinion) to the word (if that makes sense). So in reality, i'm probably way off the mark when it comes to inmagining these things :rolleyes: .

[Suzie]

Alison you should release a CD with all the songs in the book on it. i really want to hear it properly instead of inside my head :D