Waresongband

A Waresongband, or swaygathering, is a great band of gleemen playing on all kinds of songwares. Waresongbands come in manifold spans and ilks, songsmiths such as Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, and John Williams have written their greatest works for Waresongbands.

Eretide
Nowaday's kind of waresongband can track its eretide back to the Baroque days, when the songs of Vivaldi, Bach, and Handel held sway over all Europe. The first waresongbands had only a handful of string songwares, such as fiddle and its kin. In the path of time, songwrights at times put in a single wind songware, playing against the strings, in a kind of waresong called a togetherplay. In these days, waresongs were still at the back of most Europeans' minds, as speaksong, most often the kind of speaksong sung in the Lord's house, was thought of as by far the greatest kind.

But in time, new kind of song, Gatherplayings, were written to bring out the best of the waresongband. Soon, not one but many winds and pipes in the waresongband were the mean, and songwrights began casting in horns and drums. At first, few of these were used, since the horns could hit few pitches, and seldom played as sweetly as they should. But with the making of better horns, the waresongband burst these bands. Beethoven led a great overturning in the way the waresongband was brooked, by writing his greatest and longest songs for it, of which the most well-known are his Third, Fifth, and Ninth Gatherplayings. He also added a new songware, the slidehorn, and eked the tally of woodwinds, striking-things, and drums.

Makeup
In Beethoven's day, the makeup of the grovekind waresongband was:

Winds: Two blowpipes, two clearpipes, two highwoods, two lowbundles; maybe a littlepipe and underbundle

Brasshorns: Two trumps, two, three, or four Frankish horns, two or three slidehorns

Striking-Things: Two, three, or four bowl-drums, perhaps a lowdrum, snaredrum, threenook, or clashworks

Strings: Many fiddles, underfiddles, great fiddles, and twainlows.

The tally of these was not always the same. Fiddles were sundered into First Fiddles and Second Fiddles, each playing a different bit of the song. There were always more strings than any other songwares.

Since Beethoven's time, some waresongbands have gotten bigger, a few of them even growing twofold. Among the new songwares are the underclearpipe, English horn, burrow-horn, harp, chimes, glockenspiel, and hammerbones. Keyboard songwares are also brooked more often; among them are the hammerkeyboard, skycall, and pipestock.