Author: Laura Conrad

Successful party

It wasn’t great day for it — I’d hoped to be out in the back
yard with the grill going. If we’d been fanatical outdoor
cooks, we could have done that; I don’t think the rain ever
exceeded a heavy drizzle. But we all decided there was nothing
wrong with cooking on a stove and staying dry.

So it was good that in spite of having invited the whole
attendance of the Boston Early Music Festival, the people who actually
showed up fit comfortably in my living room.

One thing I mean by a successful party is one I’m excited
enough about to get housecleaning done in advance, and this one
worked quite well for that. While little
roomba vacuumed the living room, I sorted music from the
stack that had accumulated on the sideboard where I leave music
when I’m running a rehearsal, but put drinks on when there’s a
party. There’s still lots more music to put away, but it isn’t
getting in my way as much as it was yesterday morning.

I said in the invitation that if poeple told me what they were
bringing, I could coordinate. Of course, this is true only if
people tell you what they’re thinking about bringing before they
actually cook it, or do the shopping for it. One guest asked me
whether I’d prefer a green salad or sweet potatoes, and since
one point of this party was to use up the greens that Picadilly Farm has
been sending me, I told her sweet potatoes. Then the next email
I get is from another guest who has just made a sweet potato
salad. So I decided we were just going to tell everybody that
sweet potatoes were this summer’s trendy health food, and
suggested that the next person who emailed me might want to get
in on the fun, too. She said she’d done her shopping the day
before and already had the cookies in the oven. In the end, one
sweet potato dish was mashed with pecans and maple syrup and the
other was a salad with peppers and scallions, so it wasn’t a
problem.

I have my friends pretty well trained to bring stuff when they
come to parties, so all I did was provide beverages, a large
green salad, and sausages and veggie burgers. I’d planned to
make the veggie burgers, but I decided more cleaning was more
useful than more cooking, so I bought them.

The less successful aspect of the party was that nobody new
came, but the flip side of that was that everybody liked each
other, and the conversation was pretty good. My sister was
there, so we did singalong around the piano (with serpent and
fiddle) instead of playing Renaissance or West Gallery
music.

Another good thing that happened was that one of my friends
borrowed my xaphoon.
I forget why I wanted to buy it a few years ago, but I did learn
to play Never on Sunday on it at the time, and
concluded that getting saxaphone chops was going to be too much
work. I couldn’t demonstrate it at the party. Anyway, he might
end up buying it, or even if not, it will clutter up his apartment
instead of mine.

http://rcm.amazon.com/e/cm?t=laymusicorg-20&o=1&p=8&l=as1&asins=B00004RALR&fc1=000000&IS2=1&lt1=_blank&m=amazon&lc1=0000FF&bc1=000000&bg1=FFFFFF&f=ifr
http://rcm.amazon.com/e/cm?t=laymusicorg-20&o=1&p=8&l=as1&asins=B002E860KK&fc1=000000&IS2=1&lt1=_blank&m=amazon&lc1=0000FF&bc1=000000&bg1=FFFFFF&f=ifr

http://rcm.amazon.com/e/cm?t=laymusicorg-20&o=1&p=8&l=as1&asins=B0002ODPDI&fc1=000000&IS2=1&lt1=_blank&m=amazon&lc1=0000FF&bc1=000000&bg1=FFFFFF&f=ifr

Bonnie’s major blood loss on April 1, 2008

I mentioned yesterday that
reading about the Silverwood family sitting on the coral reef with
the father dying from blood loss because his leg has been mostly
amputated by a falling mast reminded me of the afternoon I sat
with Bonnie while
she was bleeding from her gastrointestinal tract and getting
transfusions so she wouldn’t die. The
timeline says this
was April 1, 2008, a couple of weeks after we were officially told
to assume that she wouldn’t recover, and a month and a half before
she actually died.

I was driving to a physical therapy appointment, planning to go
on from there to visit Bonnie a the rehab hospital in Salem. I
don’t believe in doing phone calls while I’m driving, and
certainly not the kind of phone calls where doctors are explaining complicated
procedures to you and asking you to make treatment decisions. The
part of Cambridge and Somerville I was in has pretty busy traffic,
but you can sometimes find a parking place to pull over into. So
with these several calls, I was sometimes able to pull over and
answer the phone, and other times I had to attempt to call the
busy doctors back and deal with the switchboard trying to find
them. (This is in a parking space, but with a lot of truck traffic
going by.)

So the first phone call said that she was bleeding heavily and
they wanted my permission to do a transfusion. So I said OK.

But then the questions got harder — did I want them to do an
endoscopy? Did I want the blood thinning medications stopped? (I
was surprised they were still doing blood thinning medications.)
Could I give permission to move her from the rehab hospital to the
Lahey clinic? I said I’d be there in about an hour, and we could
talk about it better then.

When I got to Bonnie’s room, it was bustling. Normally there
were the two hospital beds with patients in them, and the noises
the machines made that were breathing for the patients, and an
occasional visitor or nurse speaking quietly. But this time
they’d cleared a fairly large area around Bonnie’s bed, and there
were several people standing around doing things. Eventually I
sorted it out that there was a special nurse keeping an eye on
Bonnie because she was critical, and the people actually doing the
transfusion.

They were telling Bonnie she shouldn’t go to sleep. She was
conscious, and writing fairly clearly — one thing I remember
vividly was that she wrote “Will I die?” We asked her whether she
wanted the endoscopy. I think the way they put it was, “Do you
want to go to the Operating Room again?” She said, “Yes.”

At this point the decision had been made to stabilize her as
well as they could with the transfusions and then move her to the
Lahey Clinic, which was better set up to deal with patients like
her, and the endoscopy would be there if there was one. So I
stayed around to keep her awake until the ambulance people
came to “pack” her. (That is the word they use.)

I had left hymnals in her closet, and one of the things I
carried in the bag I brought when I visited her was Rise
up singing. So I started with the lullaby section in that,
but then moved on to the other sections. I must have sung
several things I probably hadn’t sung since high school. One of
the nurses sang along. When I started having trouble singing
because I was crying, a nurse would come hug me. The special
nurse who was staying there was afraid of Sunny (one of the good
things about this rehab hospital was that they were tolerant of
well-behaved pets visiting the patients), so I kept him leashed on
the other side of the bed from her. He was unusually good about
getting out of the way of the people working on the transfusions.

It was a couple of hours later that the EMT’s came to put her
in the ambulance. By then, I think she wasn’t as cold from the
blood loss and the transfusion process. For reasons which are
completely obscure to me, I let them talk me into taking all her
stuff, which took up most of the available space in my car.
(There were things like the walker with the seat which she wasn’t
ever going to use again, and a giant teddy bear someone had given
her.)

I had a recorder lesson that evening, and it was interrupted by
calls from the emergency room at the Lahey Clinic. Some of what
they wanted to know was why she was on medications I’d never heard
of. They wanted to know how she was “coded”, which meant nothing
to me, but then they explained that she was “Do Not Resuscitate”,
which we had agreed to verbally, but I’d never signed anything.
(I’ve talked to people who believe that doesn’t happen.) The
doctor I spoke to told me that it was unclear whether she’d make
it through the night.

Of course, when I called the following morning, I wasn’t able
to get any information about her status because the nurse didn’t
have a “code” for her. (Different code — a password you can set
up when you’re there so they know you’re someone they can talk
to when you call.)

Eventually, they did do the endoscopy, and found no problems in
the part of the colon they were able to access. There was a
section that was so squeezed in by the cancer that they couldn’t
get to it to see it. But it looked like all the bleeding must
have been caused by the blood thinners, not by actual ulcers.

It was shortly after this that the doctors started discussing
hospice care with us. One of the things they emphasized was that
if she were in a hospice, she wouldn’t get the transfusions if she
started bleeding again. But they also wouldn’t be giving her IV
medication like the blood thinners, so in fact, she never did
bleed seriously again.

If I had it to do over again, I think I’d be more pro-active
about making sure I knew what medications were being given and
why.

I actually think it would have been better to die of the blood
clots earlier in the process than the way she actually died, but I
given all the decisions she made both before and after the stroke,
I can’t say I believe she agreed with me, so I really couldn’t
have made a different decision about the blood transfusion and the
endoscopy.

http://rcm.amazon.com/e/cm?t=laymusicorg-20&o=1&p=8&l=as1&asins=1881322149&fc1=000000&IS2=1&lt1=_blank&m=amazon&lc1=0000FF&bc1=000000&bg1=FFFFFF&f=ifr

Black Wave

I read this
book because I’ve always been fascinated by books about life aboard ships, and I thought it would be interesting to hear how it worked
out with a real, contemporary family.

That part was interesting, although it’s mostly from the
mother’s point of view, so you wonder how well it meshes with what
the children would have said. The short version is that the kids,
especially the oldest one, were grumpy about leaving their friends
and toys behind at first, but then settled down to become
amazingly adult crew members.

What was more interesting was the description of the night they
were shipwrecked on the coral reef, with the father’s leg having
been practically amputated by the mast falling on it.

And probably the best-written section in the whole book is the
one comparing their shipwreck experience with the shipwreck in
almost exactly the same place in 1855.

Some things I thought while reading the book:

  • Definitely not very good “experience of alcoholism” writing
    — there’s description of the family reaction to the idea of the
    father taking a drink, but no description of why this would be
    something to worry about.
  • The area where the shipwreck happened had been mapped by the
    Bounty under Captain Bligh. Both the 1855 and the 2005
    shipwrecks occurred when the captains believed they were 16
    miles away from the atoll. It’s apparently possible to believe
    that the chart was compiled with an error by the disaffected
    crew of the Bounty that has never been corrected. (John
    Silverwood thinks it’s more likely that some of his electronic
    equipment didn’t work quite the way it was supposed to, but he
    still likes to think about the other possibilities.)
  • I still don’t really know why you aren’t supposed to go to
    sleep when you’ve been losing a lot of blood. I spent several
    hours with Bonnie once when she was hemorrhaging, and the
    doctors and nurses thought it was important for her, and John
    Silverwood’s family and the medical personnel who rescued him
    tried hard to keep him awake. After the fact, he denies that he
    was ever unconscious, but you apparently could have fooled all
    the people closest to him.
  • It was hard to stay oriented in time — a timeline or even
    just some dates on the map in the front of the book would have
    been helpful.

It’s a pretty quick read, and I enjoyed it in spite of some
flaws, so you might, too.

http://rcm.amazon.com/e/cm?t=laymusicorg-20&o=1&p=8&l=as1&asins=1400066557&fc1=000000&IS2=1&lt1=_blank&m=amazon&lc1=0000FF&bc1=000000&bg1=FFFFFF&f=ifr

Lilypond vs. Petrucci, round 3

After my last
post on the subject of trying to get Petrucci-like spacing out
of lilypond, someone came up with a conceptually simpler way to
get equal spacing — just tell lily to treat all the notes as if
they were quarter notes. It isn’t automated yet. For each note,
you have to tell both the value to print and the fraction of the
note value to use for
spacing, and you effectively have to put the line breaks in by hand, but it really does look a lot more the way Petrucci did
it, and less like a nineteenth century engraver who thought a
breve was a large note value instead of a short one.

So here’s what the tenor part looks like now:

[lilypond equal-spaced output]

And to remind you, here’s the facsimile:

[petrucci's version]

Age of consent

I was feeling uninspired, because what I’ve been thinking about
is the site, and even if you’re technical, you don’t want to know
the details of how I’m setting up the database queries to list the
most popular downloads.

So I decided to look at the movies I’ve seen in the last year
or so and rated 4 stars on Netflix.

I watched Age
of Consent in February, shortly before I started this blogging
every day routine, and I recommend it highly.

I think I got it because it was Helen Mirren’s first movie
role. It also has James Mason at the height of his career. And
there’s gorgeous underwater photography of the Great Barrier Reef,
which you couldn’t take today because it doesn’t look like that
any more.

I’m not sure it says anything very useful about how artistic
inspiration happens, but you can’t have everything.

http://rcm.amazon.com/e/cm?t=laymusicorg-20&o=1&p=8&l=as1&asins=B001IZNIV4&fc1=000000&IS2=1&lt1=_blank&m=amazon&lc1=0000FF&bc1=000000&bg1=FFFFFF&f=ifr

Report on the June 16 meeting

We played:

Schedule

We’ll be meeting as a dropin group for the next few weeks, at
7:45 PM every Tuesday, at my place.

We probably won’t meet on Tuesday, August 11, so that we can go
play with Francis Rhodes and the West Gallery Quire.

Party

Remember that we’re having a party on this Sunday, June 21,
starting at 4 PM. Invitations are
here; invite anyone you think would enjoy it.

If the weather is decent, we’ll be out in the back yard with
the grill going, so if you want to bring something to grill, feel
free, or bring a side dish or dessert.

New Site

I’m making a fair amount of progress on the new site design.
If you’ve been going to laymusic.org to download music,
you should now be going to serpentpublications.org
for that. Please change any bookmarks or links.

laymusic.org will
continue to be the site for groups such as this one and The West Gallery Quire,
and for my
blog.

AOL users

If you get your email from AOL, you probably haven’t been
getting these emails for a while. Please read my blog entry
about why not to use AOL for an explanation of why this happened,
and what I did to get it to stop. If you have another address, I
recommend that you use it for this list. If the emails stop, and
you want to read them, most of what’s in the emails is also posted
in the blog.

Farm Share has started

One of the exciting things that happened last week that didn’t
have anything to do with Early Music was that my farm share
started delivering.

Of course, I had less time for cooking and spent more time
eating out than usual last week, so I haven’t done much with it except eat
a lot of salads for lunch. But the band is coming over tonight,
and I have dinner with friends on Thursday and the party on Sunday, so I’m sure I’ll start getting rid
of all those bags in the refrigerator faster than I have been.

Here’s some of the email they sent me last week before I picked
up the share:

Spinach, one pound. We’ve had a warm spring, and this first spinach is big! The flavor is outstanding, and you can eat it stem and all. The spinach, like just about all of our produce, is washed once by us. You will likely want to wash it again, to remove that last of our fine sandy loam topsoil from the leaves.

Salad mix, 1/2 pound. Our mesclun is a mix of lettuces, tat soi, mizuna, baby red kale, and a handful of other mild greens. We washed it twice, but it will want another washing. The key to keeping the mesclun and other greens fresh all week is to store the greens dry. You can pat them dry with a towel, or, better yet, wash and spin them dry with a salad spinner, then store in a sealed plastic bag or plastic container.

Lettuce, 2 heads. We grow a dozen or so head lettuce varieties over the course of the season. The butterheads are especially delicious this time of year (my 10 year old niece, a picky eater, had 3 helpings of “really good” salad last night). We’ve included one butterhead and one leaf lettuce today.

Radishes A crunchy addition to salads, we grow these only in spring. Their grand size is evidence of the warm spring. I just found a recipe for Sauteed Radishes with Radish Greens or Arugula in the Farmer John’s Cookbook. Basically, sautee quartered radishes and the greens in butter, lemon, salt and pepper. Sounds interesting…

Bok Choy Also known as Pak Choi, this Asian cooking green is lovely sautéed, in stir-fries and soups. Store it loosely wrapped in a plsatic bag in the fridge, so the outer leaves don’t wilt. To prepare, pull or cut the stalks away from the base. Cut the stalks in crescents like celery. The leaves will only need brief cooking time, so add them at the very end. See the recipe below.

Arugula This green is slightly peppery, and very tender today. We grow it under row covers, to protect the leaves from nibbling beetles. Try in salads or on sandwiches. The snappy taste will mellow if you slightly wilt the arugula.

Salad Turnips These “Hakurai” turnips are like a sweet radish, and are delicious raw in salads, grated or chopped. We also like them sauteed with greens. Unlike the more traditonal fall turnip, these Hakurai are too watery for roasts or stews – I find they get mushy.

Coming Soon: Strawberries.

I had Hakurai turnips in the farm share last fall, and I didn’t
think of eating them raw, so I braised them in white wine, and it
was good, but I’ll probably try them in a salad this time.

This is making me hungry, so I’m going to go cream the spinach
and have it on toast.

The last I heard, there were still a few shares left, so if you
live in this part of the world (Boston area or Winchester, New Hampshire) and this sounds interesting, go to
the Picadilly Farm
site and sign up.

Schedule reminder

This is to remind you that we will be meeting as usual this
evening, Tuesday, June 16, at 7:45 PM at my place. I
don’t remember when we’ve had a two-week hiatus before; we’re back
now.

Also, remember that we’re having a party on Sunday, June 21,
starting at 4 PM. If the weather’s decent, we’ll be in the back
yard with the grill going, so you can bring grillables, or salads
or desserts. You could let me know when you know what you’re
bringing so that I can coordinate.

Please invite anyone
you feel would enjoy the party.

Sunday at the Boston Early Music Festival

The Flanders Recorder Quartet

At some point during all-recorder concerts, I always find
myself thinking of Samuel Johnson’s remark about the women
preachers: “Sir, a woman’s preaching is like a dog’s walking on
his hind legs. It is not done well; but you are surprised to
find it done at all.” I really think that even if you play
as many different recorders as well as these guys do, it still
isn’t enough variety for a concert-length program. Adding
keyboard, strings, or especially singing makes it a lot easier on everyone.

That being said, the Flanders Recorder Quarted did do one of my
favorite recorder concerts of all time four or five years ago,
when they toured with a very good singer and did the English
Consort Song repertoire.

I should also point out that a very large fraction of the
audience on Sunday afternoon was people who play in and direct
recorder consorts, so a very common remark to overhear (or make)
at this concert was, “We should play some of this stuff.” So
there are reasons for some concerts that go beyond the aesthetic
satisfaction of the audience at the time of the concert.

I thought the second half of this program worked better than
the first half — the first half was mostly early sixteenth
century music played on Renaissance recorders. It was interesting how
they combined two or three of the pieces seamlessly into a set,
but it really wasn’t enough variety.

On the second half, they played one set with three grounds on
three different consorts of instruments: medieval, Renaissance,
and baroque. The Renaissance one (Upon La, Mi, Re
by Thomas Preston (d. ca. 1563)) was the piece on the program
that most made me say, “We should play that.” And the Purcell
Chacony, which I have played, mostly made me say, “They need a
serpent.” I love recorders, but I really think there are other
instruments that work better for that kind of driving bass
line.

The final piece on the program was an arrangement from a
Sweelinck keyboard piece of Dowland’s Lachrimae
Pavane. That was the best piece on the program for
showing off what the recorder in the hands of these virtuoso
players can be used for.

Festival Wrapup

I got home to a flurry of emails from a set of keyboard playing
friends with the subject BEMF — dying, and me with
it. I’m not sure which of the three people wrote that
subject line. I don’t have permission to quote any of them
directly by name, but the complaints included the dearth of
keyboard makers exhibiting, the poor choice of instruments at
some of the harpsichord concerts, and the poor presentation
skills of some of the performers. There apparently wasn’t a
harpsichord masterclass this year.

I didn’t see any of the brass players who normally come from
out of town. The Sunday afternoon recorder concert was lightly
attended two years ago, and even more so this time. Saturday’s
11 PM concert, with a reputation for often being the best
concert of the festival usually fills at least the downstairs of
Jordan Hall, and didn’t this year. Of the events I went to, only
the Friday concerts were as well-attended as I would expect.

So I think the Festival is in trouble. I really love a lot of
things about it, and I hope they pull through. I think there’s
some evidence that the organizers don’t entirely understand how
important the Festival’s diversity is in making it such an
important part of so many people’s lives, and I hope they figure
it out by next time.

I’d really be happy to give them good advice about how to get
more and better brass playing. They essentially ignore all the
European early brass playing, and it’s much better organized
than anything we have on this side of the pond. If they got one
of the good ensembles that has several kinds of instruments and
some good teachers, it could really be a draw for a lot of
people who love the idea of cornetto or serpent or baroque
trumpet and haven’t had a chance to hear it or to study it.

Tomorrow I get to blog about something else. I enjoyed lots of
things about the last week, but I’m looking forward to being able
to write about other things.