I posted yesterday that I
had a gig in Waltham and I didn’t know much about what I was going
to play.
As is usual with gigs where you don’t know much about what’s
happening the morning of the gig, it didn’t work out to very
much playing. It wouldn’t have been worth going to Waltham for
the 5 minutes of performing time, but the rest of the performance
was entertaining, and the rehearsing with Lynn and Ishmael was really
fun. They’re both good people to play with; I play with Ishmael
all the time but usually in the context of a larger group, not all
of whom are very experienced performers, and I’ve only had a
chance to sing with Lynn a couple of times.
The original email sent to possible performers talked about
two 5 minute intermezzos and implied that there might be a fair
amount of playing time before the performance. So we rehearsed a
fair amount of stuff, and we were all prepared to fill in with
solos if something needed setup time.
When we got there, the first person we talked to said there would
be 5 minute intermezzos, but that he didn’t think he wanted before
performance music. So we arranged to get food before the
performance. (At one point there’d been a mention of food during
the rehearsal time, but that didn’t happen, and I’d gone easy on
lunch expecting an early supper, so I was hungry by 6:30.)
The second person we talked to said the intermezzos would be
3 minutes or less, but he had no problem with lots of music before
the performance. So Ishmael played fiddle tunes when he’d
finished his sandwich. I could have played too, but I’d packed my
soprano recorder when they told us there wouldn’t be
before-performance music, and I wasn’t confident enough that the
right key would come out on the G alto.
So we ended up doing Ravenscroft’s
We
be three poor Mariners for the first intermezzo, but being cut
off before we could follow it up with To
Portsmouth and He
that will an alehouse keep, which would have been a 5 minute
set, or maybe a little more.
The second intermezzo was supposed to be Jenny went to
gather rushes, sung by Lynn with me and Ishmael chiming in
on the choruses to encourage the audience, and maybe doing an
instrumental verse if Lynn needed to catch her breath, followed by me and
Ishmael playing one or two Morley
Canzonets
to two voyces, but the actors popped out during the last verse
of Jenny.
Ishmael’s friend who came along and hasn’t had much experience
of this kind of thing was quite annoyed at how truncated the
performing was, but Ishmael, Lynn and I had really been
expecting it. I was surprised during rehearsal when Lynn
suggested we sing Purcell,
since he’s a good 200 years later than the play, but she denied
that she’d ever suggested we do it in performance — she says
she just said I
gave her cakes and I gave her ale is fun to sing, which it is, so we burst into song..
LayMusic.org 