What is a Roundelay?

I learned about Roundelays as part of my Spatial Studies training with Jaimen MacMillan. Spatial Studies (now called Spatial Dynamics) is a system of movement education that has had most impact as part of the Waldorf School movement. The training I received, a five-year "in service" training that met a few times a year for a week (two weeks in the summer) was mostly full of people who worked with kids, as parents, Waldorf class teachers, movement teachers, gym coaches, etc.

Spatial Dynamics (and Waldorf education) both emphasize the learning about space and movement that people need to do at different ages, especially in childhood. We learned a lot of great games: string games, juggling, ball games like CometBall and SpaceBall.

Roundelays are one such entertainment. They are spoken poetry (as opposed to songs with tunes) that are done in groups (usually in a circle) and that have very strong movements associated with the words. Usually the roundelay acts out some part of a particular profession or livelihood. One of the first Roundelays we learned (in German) goes through the day of a woodcutter, who takes his cart to the woods, picks out his tree, cuts it down, trims it, and hauls it back to town.

I was so inspired by the great roundelays my classmates came up with (my favorite was "Joe the Garbage Man" by my friend Edmund Knight ???) that I decided to do a roundelay about music. I was struck by the rhythmic but not melodic quality of the roundelay language (accompanied with vigorous gestures, there's a kind of infinitely stretchable rubato built into the recitation) and thought it would be intriguing to see how much of the "craft" of being a musician I could convey in that way.

"The Sleepy Fiddler" was the result. I'm still hoping to turn it into a children's book sometime. In the meantime, feel free to try it out with your kids and see if they like it!

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