Author: Laura Conrad

Report on the October 7, 2009, meeting

We played:

Schedule

We will be having our usual dropin meetings on Tuesdays at
7:45 PM at my
place.

We will probably miss the meetings where there are elections,
i.e., November 3, December 8, and January 19, if the Cambridge
Election Committee continues to hire me to serve as an official.
I’ve been saying this for a number of weeks now, and still haven’t
gotten any indication that they do want me, so it may not be true. I
would expect to have a card at least for November by now. But I do
enjoy being an election official, so if I get the chance, I’ll take it.

We may also miss one or two more meetings in December. But for
September and October, assume there are regular dropin meetings.

Playing opportunity

The Boston Wort Processors
annual Ciderfest picnic in an apple orchard is on Sunday, October 25
this year. The details are on the
wiki. It’s the same place as it’s been the last couple of
years. We have often had a few people who wanted to go hang out and
eat and drink and play a little bit of music.

Let me know if you’d like to go, and I’ll sign you up.

Lute tablature

They’re having a discussion at the lilypond
users mailing list about how and whether to have a lilypond
mode for entering “ancient” lute tablatures.

Some people seemed to like the idea, but not to have much idea
what the place of lute tablature was in music history, so I
contributed a post. Someone else had written:

I am not at all familiar with these old tablatures, but they
look just amazing, so simply for typographic and aesthetical
reasons, these should be made possible with lilypond.

And I replied:

Actually, there are good musical reasons, too. In the 16th and maybe
most of the 17th, and in some places longer than that, the
dominant instrument which could play many notes at a time, at least in
the home, was the
lute, or various other plucked string instruments which could read the
same tablature.

So this means that lots of the kinds of music which would later be
published with keyboard accompaniment, which lilypond transcribes very
well, was published with lute tablature.


My edition of all the part songs of John Dowland (which
many people think of as lute songs, but most of them are really
accompanied madrigals) is really incomplete, because I’ve
only transcribed the vocal lines, and in general not the lute
tablature.

For a lot of them, the lute tablature is very little different from
just a transcription of the vocal lines, but in others there’s a lot
of decoration.

I’ve made some efforts to transcribe the tablature, but what I want
ideally is to transcribe what’s there, in an input form that doesn’t
require me to translate the tablature into notes, and then use that
transcription plus the tuning of the strings to produce both a
tablature that looks like the one in the facsimile and standard
notation that a modern keyboard player could deal with.

Lute players should note that I’m aware that tablature has different
information from notation: specifically that the beginning time of the
note is specified, but not the length of the note. However, I believe
that good keyboard players are just as capable as lute players of
making the decision about where to end the note; they just aren’t as
capable as players of 6-course fretted instruments of playing
tablature for 6-course fretted instruments.

There’s a red flag in there that I’ve been meaning to address for
some time — there are eminent musicologists who have studied
the period deeply who would disagree with my statement that “most of them are really
accompanied madrigals”. So I’ll tell you why I think that some other time.

I’m back, and what’s next

I seem to have returned to the land of the living — I woke up
this morning wanting to get out of bed and walk the dog. I then
did a reasonable imitation of my usual morning routine, and still
don’t feel like it’s quite time to go back to bed.

As far as what the diagnosis is, since it’s getting better and
not worse, I don’t see any need to burden the medical care system
with this problem, so you’re going to have to put up with my lay
diagnosis. I was running a fever for a good bit of Saturday and
most of Sunday, so I would normally call it flu, not a cold.

Because people have been worrying about flu lately, I’ve been
just saying it’s a cold. I’m not someone who’s ever had the kind
of cold a lot of people get where it slows them down for a week or
even longer, but they never run a fever or get into a state where
they should clearly be in bed. I suspect that this isn’t because
I’m immune to those viruses; I suspect it’s because the virus that
gives some poeple a stuffed up head but not much else for a week
gives me a fever and a stuffed up head for a couple of days.

But if it is flu, I had the regular flu vaccine 2 weeks ago.
So it’s either a regular flu virus that got in under the wire
before my immunity took hold (or even got a little bit of help
from the virus in the vaccine), or a flu strain that isn’t in the
regular virus. In which case, it’s entirely possible that it’s
H1N1. But if so, I don’t seem to be one of the people that H1N1
kills.

What I would have been doing if I hadn’t been in bed

I have to move the laymusic.org site from the old
ISP (hostrocket) to the
new ISP (dreamhost). Note
that this isn’t in any way a criticism of hostrocket as a host if
it meets your needs. I acquired the dreamhost account when I
desperately needed a way to move a bunch of mailman
mailing lists to a new place. They’d been hosted on my home
machine when I had my internet connection from speakeasy, and this wasn’t
going to work when I started connecting with comcast.

Hostrocket doesn’t offer mailman, and while I could probably
have managed to move the mailman lists to what they offer instead,
the non-technical people who’ve been administering some of the
mailman lists would have had a lot of trouble, and I thought that
even for my purposes, mailman was better. So I found a coupon
code that gave me the first year of dreamhost hosting for very
little money. Last Spring I moved the music publishing part of
the site to dreamhost, and now I’m moving the rest of it, before
I owe hostrocket for another year.

Just moving the existing site to a place on dreamhost and
pointing the laymusic dns to the new place would be easy, but what
I’m trying to do is to move the pieces that should be on this site
and that I want to maintain
into the laymusic wordpress installation, and then I’ll just have
a pointer to the old stuff for historical reasons.

The job is a bit less tedious than it might be because of the
wordpresslib
program that adds files to the wordpress media library. I may
write a version of that that creates a post from the part of a file between
certain markers. But mostly it’s tedious because it involves
doing minimal updating of a lot of stuff that could use major
rewriting, but that would be major thinking, and that isn’t going
to happen before October 15.

I have a cold

It was coming on yesterday, which is why after trying to make a
post come out through the masses of wool in my head all morning, I
gave up and tagged the post
 for the West
Gallery Quire as my post for October 2.

This isn’t quite as much cheating as when I use the posts I do
anyway for the Cantabile Band or
Serpent
Publications, but it’s pretty close, since there wasn’t any
actual writing involved.

I knew I should stop even trying to work later in the
afternoon, when I managed to break both the CSS and the DNS for
this site, and spent a fairly long time before managing to fix
it.

So today I’m going ot take the day off. This means I can’t
write you about how much fun the New England Sacred Harp
Convention was going to be, or about what I cooked to take
there, since I’m not going.

I hope this cold clears up by tomorrow so that I can go and
write about those things then.

Songs for October meeting

We will be having special guest leaders for our meeting on
Sunday, October 11. They have sent 6 songs in advance, and it
would be helpful if people could print them in advance, the way we
did for the August workshop with Francis Roads.

Here’s the PDF
file.

Bruce writes about the leaders:

Edwin and Sheila Macadam, from Oxford, England, are the co-editorial revisers of Praise & Glory, pub. 2000, and have been members of the West Gallery Music Association since 1990.

Edwin founded Sussex Harmony, the Lewes-based West Gallery quire, in 1992 and together with Sheila, founded Warwick’s Immanuel’s Ground quire in 2001.

Between them they run five West Gallery and American shapenote singing events each year in the UK, as well as workshops at both the Sidmouth and Warwick Folk Festivals, and in collaboration with the Royal School of Church Music will be leading SingBirmingham 2009 in November, following the success of SingBirmingham in 2007.

Edwin specialises in the psalmody and anthems of composers from the Midlands and South of England, whilst Sheila is interested in the transmission of New England psalmody to England in the 19th century.

Don’t miss this opportunity to sing West Gallery music with two of the
leaders of its revival!

Housecleaning story

I mentioned in my post about cleaning
out Bonnie’s house that there were more stories than fit
into one post. Here’s one of them.

Part of what I needed help with was just carrying all the old
papers out to the trash. Of course a lot of people who came to
“help” were really more interested in snarfing things, and I
didn’t have a problem with that. But I think most people did
manage to take a couple of bags of trash out along with the
books and CD’s and kitchen equipment they were taking.

However, one day I arrived and there were two bags of wet paper
smack in front of the front door. I moved them enough to open the
door, and later had to stop my 86 year old mother (a dedicated
snarfer of books, objets d’arts, and plants) from trying
to take them all the way to the trash. They were really heavy
enough that my shoulders felt it the next day after moving them 10 feet to
the trash cans.

I wrote the mailing list:

A couple of undesirable things seemed to have happened between when I
was last there on Thursday and when I arrived yesterday afternoon:

For those who have been inhabiting some alternate universe and
have just arrived in this one: the current climate of New England
has a fair amount of rain in the summer months. Therefore, it is
unsuitable to leave paper outside exposed to the elements. Please
put paper trash into plastic bags before taking it out.

One of the points of this exercise is to remove large amounts of
stuff from the house. Therefore, it is counterproductive to leave
things in front of the door.

The culprit replied:

Sorry, that was partly my fault. There was a large pile of paper trash
blocking the door when I tried to leave. I had to put it outside in order to
close the door.;-) I was exhausted by the time I noticed that problem and
didn’t have the energy to try to bag it.

Someone who had been there while she was opined that if there
was trash blocking the front door, she was who had put it there.

So if you’re dealing with this kind of housecleaning problem, be careful who you get
to “help”. If a volunteer has any kind of history of creating
messes and then leaving them for other people to clean up, you
want to direct that person’s energy elsewhere.

Roasting vegetables

A frustrating part of getting a giant box of vegetables every
week at the height of summer is that the easiest thing to do
with lots of vegetables is to roast them in the oven. But when
the temperature and humidity are both high you don’t actually
want to turn the oven on.

I no longer have that excuse, so tomorrow or Friday lots of
things are going in the oven.

I’ll be spending the weekend at the New England Sacred Harp
Convention (5 hours of singing a day, and nobody minds if
you sing loud), which means I’ll have to bring potluck
contributions for lunch on both Saturday and Sunday.

I’ve already written about some of the possibilities:

The announcement of what’s in the share this week suggests
another option, courtesy of another shareholder:

Oven Roasted Kale
the kale last week was the most amazing. I roasted it in the oven at 350 until crisp, with a little olive oil and sea salt–better than potato chips!

There’s also just plain potato salad, a bunch of leeks staring
at me wanting to be put in a sharp mustard vinaigrette, a
cabbage that wants its leaves to be stuffed with something…

Report on the September 29, 2009 meeting

We played:

Schedule

We will be having our usual dropin meetings on Tuesdays at
7:45 PM at my
place.

We will probably miss the meetings where there are elections,
i.e., November 3, December 8, and January 19, if the Cambridge
Election Committee continues to hire me to serve as an official.

We may also miss one or two more meetings in December. But for
September and October, assume there are regular dropin meetings.

Web page

We had a new member come last night, and when she called me it
was clear that the website had not been as enlightening as I’d
hoped. When I looked at it, it was clear that it was confusing,
erroneous, and outdated in some major respects.

So there’s a new
version. Please look at it and let me know if you can think of
any improvements.

First they came…

I thought everybody knew and had reflected on the famous poem:

First they came for the communists, and I did not speak out — because I was not a communist;
Then they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out — because I was not a socialist;
Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out
— because I was not a trade unionist;
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out — because I was not a Jew;
Then they came for me — and there was no one left to speak out for me.

But I had dinner with a friend last night, and was telling her
about my
neighbor being arrested. I said that the fact that they’d
siezed his computer and all the peripherals and his cameras made
me feel I should have off-site backup.

She said, “But why? You don’t grow marijuana.” So I pointed
out all the other stories of people being arrested without having
done anything illegal: Gates,
the
father who took pictures of his kids, and the more recent story
about the grandmother who’s being prosecuted for buying
two bottles of cold medication in one week.

She said, “You’re not black,” and, “You don’t have kids,” and
“You don’t live in Indiana.” (This last one still has me
puzzled.)

About this specific problem, she’s just plain wrong — I’ve
been worrying about the hole in my backup
procedure that it doesn’t produce an off-site backup for some
time, and of course I’m worried more about it because my
next-door neighbor in the same building has been in a situation
where he should have had one. After all,
even if there’s no conceivable situation where the police would
break into my apartment and steal my computer, someone else
certainly could. And there’s the risk of fires and natural
disasters. Having an off-site backup of the things that are
important to you is just a Good Idea.

But I’m concerned that she doesn’t empathize more with all
these people getting arrested. Especially the grandmother in
Indiana. Her grandchildren all live in the same household at the
moment, but if her other son ever gets married and has kids (which
is something she wishes for), I would think it quite likely that
she could buy two bottles of something for the grandchildren in
one week.

Then they came for the people who had two children with
offspring and I did not speak out — because only one of my
children had offspring?