Frisian Songs – Introduction

1. “Eala Fria Frisia” by the poet Rudolf Justus, who hails from the small town of Leer, dating back to 1842. This poem, consisting of 17 stanzas with each stanza containing 8 lines, showcases a grandiose rhetoric and the use of poetic license at the expense of the actual historical events.
It was first published in the inaugural issue of the Emden magazine “Frisia” and was regarded in the 19th century as the East Frisian ‘national anthem’.
The poem can be viewed as an indulgence from the waning era of Romanticism, a European cultural and artistic movement that lasted approximately from 1790 to 1840. It emerged as a reaction to the Enlightenment, prioritizing emotion, longing, the mystical, and the individual over reason. The focus was on the connection with nature, imagination, the Middle Ages, and the exploration of the uncanny.

In an attempt to push the boundaries of the subscribed AI online service for generating musical compositions, this poem was selected and indeed surpassed some of the intended limits.
Therefore, the resulting output required significant editing with an audio editor (Audacity) to make the musical presentation somewhat acceptable.

More about that Frisian ‘freedom motto’ can be read at:
https://boudicca.de/eala-frya-fresena/

2. The oldest song titled “Ela fria Fresena” was included in 1828, so to say as a motto, in the preface of the autobiographical novel “Rhonghar Jarr” by the North Frisian Harro Harring during his exile in Munich. It is not recorded whether the song was ever sung.

The farmer’s son Harro Paul Harring, born on August 28, 1798, at the Ibenshof (Iben Farmstead) near the village of Wobbenbüll in North Friesland (Germany), and who passed away in Saint Helier on Jersey on May 15, 1870, was a North Frisian revolutionary, poet, and painter. He traveled extensively and was fluent in several languages; in addition to North Frisian and German, he also spoke Danish, English, Spanish, and Russian.
After having to flee from the Metternich government, he temporarily settled in Munich, where he became part of the circle of friends of the famous German poet Heinrich Heine.

As with Song 1, Harring’s poem was also used as ‘test material’ to explore the possibilities of creating musical adaptations of poems with the help of AI.