Give Me a Day

This morning, I learned from The Writer's Almanac web page that the piano tune ushering in Garrison Keillor's voice every day on that site is a Scandinavian folk song called "Gi Mig En Dag" ("Give Me a Day").

Next, I did a Google search and found a paper on the "internets" written by a musicologist named Frans Mossberg. He uses the tune to offer some "principal and methodogical issues on studies of timbre in words, music, and vocal performance." Yup, that's what Frans' paper does. I think I'll leave that work to him, but he provides this English free translation for part of the song:

Give me a day of winds and of sun by beaches so light and so clear,
Where silences roam in meadows and grass by the sea down by the valleys of Osterlen.

Lovely words, aren't they?

Then, I wondered exactly what timbre means. This comes from my dictionary on cdrom:
timbre (tàm´ber, tîm´-) noun
1. The quality of a sound that distinguishes it from other sounds of the same pitch and volume.
2. Music. The distinctive tone of an instrument or a singing voice.
[French, from Old French, drum, clapperless bell, probably from Medieval Greek *timbanon, drum, from Greek tumpanon, kettledrum.]

The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Third Edition copyright © 1992 by Houghton Mifflin Company. Electronic version licensed from InfoSoft International, Inc. All rights reserved.

Life would be so much less interesting without our computers.