One of the reasons that people who spend a lot of their lives doing this kind of music look forward to BEMF is that they get to spend a lot of time talking to the other people who do the same things about what they’ve been doing.
I rode back to Cambridge on the train with a friend who plays viols and recorders and sings shape note and west gallery music. She had just spent 2 months in Oxford, England. She got to play with the viol players there, and also to go to a couple of shape note singings and one west gallery meeting. I especially wanted to know if she’d had a chance to sing West Gallery music with Edwin Macadam’s serpent, but he had been only conducting and not playing the meeting she went to.
LayMusic.org 