News of the week of October 22, 2013

Meeting Report

We played:

• Ingalls, Fellowship, Experience
• Festa,
  Se mai vedete amanti, deh piacc’al cielo
• Byrd,
  Susannah
  Fair, Whyle that the Sunne
• Wilbye,
  Adieu,
  sweet Amaryllis
• The dark is my delight
• Pilkingt
  on,
  Rest
  sweet nymphs
• Farmer,
  Fair Phyllis
• Campian,
  Never
  weather-beaten saile
• Ravenscroft, To Portsmouth

Schedule

We will be meeting as usual on Tuesdays at 7:45 PM at my place.

Tuesday, November 5, is an election day, and I will be working
until 9 or so, so either someone should volunteer to open up and
start the rehearsal, or we can skip that day.

New Format

What I said last
week about wanting to know on Tuesday morning how many people
would be here on Tuesday evening doesn’t seem to have worked, so I
will be more specific this week.

One of the ways this group works, when it does, is that I go to
the computer after breakfast on Tuesday morning and transcribe a
piece of music I hope will be suitable for the group that night.
It used to be quite rare that the piece I picked was unsuitable in
the sense that it had the wrong number of parts for the group, but
it has become increasingly common that I transcribe something that
we can’t play because I don’t know who’s coming. And there’s a
very nice 5 part piece I transcribed last Spring that still hasn’t
really had a reading.

So what I want in the future is that everybody who usually
comes, tells me by 10 on Tuesday morning whether they’re coming
that night. And everybody who doesn’t usually come, if they
decide to come on a given Tuesday, you should tell me by 10 in the
morning that you’re doing that.

And if you frequently miss more than half the meeting, you
should tell me whether that’s likely for that meeting.

And whatever you have or haven’t told me, you should feel some
obligation to honor that commitment. I don’t want to go so far as
saying you aren’t welcome if I didn’t know at 10 AM that you were
coming, or that if a serious illness comes on between 10 AM and 8
PM you should come anyway, but casual or postponable distractions
should be avoided.

So that’s a pretty mild form of not being a drop in group, but
as of this week, we are no longer purely a drop in group.