News of the week of April 27, 2021

We played:

• Rhau, Dulces Exuviae
• Morley:April is in my Mistress’ Face; Joy, joy doth so arise; See, see mine own sweet jewel
• Dowland: Fine knacks for ladies, A Shepherd in a shade
• Gibbons, For deliverance from a publick sickness
• Arcadelt, Il bianco e dolce Cigno
• Wise, When the plague was in town
• Ravenscroft, He that will an Alehouse keep

We will be meeting weekly, generally at Stuart’s place in Somerville. But Wendy Grey has offered her home in Newton Corner as a backup if the Somerville location doesn’t work some week. So the next meeting will be at Stuart’s on May 4 at 7:45 pm.

Note that for a number of reasons, most notably that the giant notebooks with all the music we’ve played for the last two decades are in storage, we can’t be a dropin group these days. You can still come to one meeting without committing to coming to any other meetings, but you do have to let me (and Stuart, see below) know that you’re coming. And not coming after saying you will is also a faux pas.

I need to know who is coming because I have to plan music and get it printed. Stuart needs to know because he wrangles parking and seating. So copy him when you send email about whether you’re coming.

Printing is being more of a problem than I would have expected. So if you’re planning to come, and have a good printer, I would appreciate if you would let me know so I can have you do some of the printing for that meeting.

When I first thought about having these meetings without my giant notebooks, I thought one solution would be to have them in a place with good WIFI and have every bring a tablet or a laptop computer. If you had the site http://serpent.serpentpublications.org/drupal7/?q=pieces-by-parts you would have a list of all the pieces for the number of parts we were thinking about.

But nobody seemed very enthusiastic about that solution. If anyone has an idea for how to get people more enthusiastic, it would save a lot of printing trouble.

I have reasonable confidence that I will be back in my home with my notebooks and instruments 2-4 months after our contractor gets a building permit. The current roadblock seems to be the structural engineer, who hasn’t completed the work that would enable putting in the application. After that there are potential roadblocks while the city and the insurance company work out whether the application should be approved or modified. I do not know (nor does the contractor) why this hasn’t happened yet, so I can’t give you even an approximate estimate for when we can go back to our usual place.