Author: Laura Conrad

Report on the May 19 meeting

We played:

  • Sermisy, Aupres de vous (2 voices)
  • Campian:
    • When the god of merrie love
    • I care not for these ladies
    • Fain would I love a fair young man
    • When Laura Smiles
  • Sermisy:
    • Aupres de vous (3 voices)
    • C’est une dure despartie
    • Changeons propos

Schedule

Next week, May 26, we will have our usual dropin meeting at
7:45 PM at my place.

The following week, June 2, that meeting would conflict with a
rehearsal for a West
Gallery Quire performance on June 3. All the people who’ve
been coming to this group regularly are also singing in that
performance, so we may decide to rehearse instead of meeting that
night.

The week after that, June 9, is BEMF, and that meeting would
conflict with a Renaissance concert, so we’ll probably not meet
then.

But after that, we should go back to our usual dropin
meetings.

We’re also thinking about having a party on Sunday, June 21, to
celebrate the Summer Solstice.

Homebrew club newsletter

I’m late today, so I’ll just tell you about how the homebrew club newsletter I mentioned last week
turned out.

You can see it on the club site.

I’ve done quite a number of these newsletters before, but I’m a lot more
fluent now in some of the relevant LaTeX, like boxes
to associate a picture with its caption. (The LaTeX built-in
figure capability is designed for a book or serious article, not
for an informal newsletter.)

It’s still a bit of a pain using Latex, instead of a program
designed for that kind of publishing, but I’m so used to the way
to do things in LaTeX, and how good the results look, that I just
do without putting several articles on the front page and flowing
the continuations onto later pages, and such features.

If there’s interest, I could upload the source so that people
could see how you do such a thing. For now, just email me if you
want it.

The major energy drain doing this was that the club isn’t any
longer used to having a newsletter come out, so a lot of the
resources I needed weren’t on the web site, or hadn’t been used,
so they had problems. For instance:

  • The new logo adopted last month wasn’t yet on the site.
  • The link to the archive of beer-related images hadn’t been
    checked since the website redesign a year or so ago.
  • The list of officers wasn’t current.

Unfortunately I ended up doing most of the work over the
weekend, when a lot of the people who could have helped with these
problems weren’t available by email. And when they returned on
Monday, it wasn’t clear that some of the newer officers really
realized that they needed to support the editor of the
newsletter. So I ended up pretty crabby
by the time I got the masthead edited to as good a state as I
could get it into.

But I think it turned out pretty well, considering. Some of
the people on the informal newsletter committee whom I asked to
help proofread said good things about how it looked. No real
feedback from the membership yet.

Garden, May 18, 2009

Time for another set of garden pictures. It changes fast this
time of year.

Alliums

[Giant Alliums]

They’re in full bloom now.

[single allium]

It’s not a good year in terms of
numbers; I often dry them and put them in vases, and last year I
had two tall winebottles full. You can see I espouse the “buy things
neat bottles from discount stores” theory of interior decorating.

[dried alliums in two tall wine bottles]

Roses

All the roses in the back yard (which is fairly shady) are
still in tight bud, but some of the ones in front (southwest
exposure) are starting to bloom.

[roses]

Angelica

The Angelica has buds.

[angelica]

Iris

Both the iris and Siberian iris are budding.

[iris]
[Siberian iris]

Rhubarb

The Rhubarb continues to look healthy, but I don’t see any new
leaves coming in. If it were later in the season, I would say
that meant I should harvest the largest of the current ones, but I
thought you didn’t harvest rhubarb until June. On the bright
side, whatever was eating the leaves might have stopped.

[rhubarb]
[no new rhubarb leaves coming]

Woodruff

This doesn’t really look much different from last week, but the
picture of the flowers last week wasn’t very good, and I wanted
one for the homebrew club newsletter.

[woodruff]

Mental Health Day

This has been a bad year in this part of the world for people
with pollen allergies. I’ve been singing O bother the
flowers that bloom in the Spring vigorously and frequently. On Thursday
night, I was congested enough to be having real trouble sleeping.

I realized on Friday morning that while I was almost certain it
was the pollen, I was actually hoping for a bit of a fever, so
that I could spend the day in bed.

Then I realized that since I work for myself, I didn’t really
need the thermometer to validate a day off, so I declared a mental
health day, and went back to bed after posting to this blog.

Two hours later, I woke up feeling refreshed and much less
congested. I took the dog on a walk, and hit the money machine
and decided to eat lunch on the patio at the Cambridge Brewing Company.

[Cambridge Brewing Company]

Then I went home and fooled around instead of practicing and
watched a lot of the baseball game and then watched other TV all
evening.

Results

Of course, what you hope about a day like that is that you’ll
wake up the next day invigorated and get lots more done than you
would have if you’d kept your nose to the grindstone both
days.

I won’t claim to have set the world on fire yesterday, but I
did some good practicing, solved a couple of problems on the blog
(note the Most Read
Posts section on the sidebar), and took the computer apart
to put back a video card.

I did spend more time watching TV than I sometimes do when I’m
getting a lot of work done, but it was TV I wanted to
watch. The Kentucky Derby had been a good enough horserace that I
wanted to watch the Preakness, and I had a movie from Neflix that
I’d been looking forward to.

Choosing a blogging platform

I started thinking about this again after my post
about how I write my posts.

I got a comment from a
reader who blogs on a platform (jekyll) that’s set up so that everyone
posts directly from their editor.

I actually started blogging on blosxom, which
is a really nice simple program. If all you want is to post your
own thoughts in a blog sort of format, I would recommend it.

However, if you want to add features, you will soon run into
problems like this,
from a pyblosxom (a close relative of blosxom) user:

I’ve just spent the whole night setting up blog comments. PyBlosxom doesn’t make it painless, sadly, more like the opposite.

First: don’t be scared by the list of comment-related plugins on the PyBlosxom site. There’s only one important plugin: comments. All others depend on it and enhance its functionality. The last three or four times I was about to add comments to my blog I got scared at step one: evaluate the available plugins. Don’t repeat my mistake!

Second, follow the instructions carefully. There’s no shortcut.

Third, fix what’s broken. Be prepared to debug the source
code. print >> sys.stderr, "message" is your friend.

Fourth, fiddle with the look (CSS and HTML).

It was when I wanted to add comments that I switched to wordpress. I figured that if you want other people
to do the testing for you, you need to sign up with a widely used
program, so that there will be lots of other people running it.

It has worked out pretty well. When I’ve run into problems,
I’ve pretty often been able to find a solution just by googling
the problem, and someone else had hit it before me and written up
the solution.

Monoculture

Of course, there’s a dark side to using the most commonly used
anything, which has been called the monoculture
problem.

If someone wants to do the work to crack a site for their own
nefarious purposes, they aren’t going to do it on some little
python program that’s used by a small fraction of the people who
wish they could post directly from emacs to their blogs. They’re
going to crack wordpress. This is the same reason why Mac and
Linux people worry a lot less about viruses and other malware than Windows people.

My blog has in fact been hijacked
several times, and when it happens, I always think of going back
to something simpler and less common.

My current solution to at least some of the hijacking problems
is to not use the wordpress uploading facilities. I’ve often
found they don’t “just work”, and to make them work, I’ve
sometimes done undesirable things that have compromised the site
security.

What’s supposed to happen is that you tell wordpress while
you’re writing a post that there’s a file you want to upload,
e.g. a picture. Then it uploads the file somewhere it knows
about, and there’s some simple syntax you can use for including it
in that post, and a slightly more complicated syntax for showing
it with a different post.

What actually happens when I do it is that is tells me I can’t
upload, and then when I finally do get it uploaded, I can’t
remember the syntax for including it. And if I have to upload 5
pictures (for instance, for the garden posts), I have to go
through this for each one of them.

So what I do instead these days is just upload the pictures
into a directory on my site (not under wordpress) and refer to
them by their normal URL’s. This would be a bit more typing if I
did it all for each picture, but since I’m in emacs, I just type
the URL once, and modify the filename for the next picture.

Organizing

I had been thinking that I might be moving towards not being an
organizer for a while. The thing that started this line of
thought was the number of places I’ve been (including NEFFA without bringing flyers for the Cantabile
Band.

But this week has refined that perception. I’ve done two
competent pieces of organizing (see below), and so I think the
problem with the Cantabile Band is that at this point in its
life it’s starting to need a different kind of organizing than
that flyer represents, so I haven’t been feeling like printing
off the flyer and taking it places.

Meeting

The first piece of organizing I did this week was the next
condo meeting. This could have been a pretty routine thing, not
requiring any special organizer gifts. But I decided to address a
long-term problem of the association: a lawyer bought a unit in
the building 15 years ago, and he read the rules to say that
nobody who wasn’t an owner should come to the owners’ meetings.
This has effectively disfranchised the one absentee owner, who
would have liked to send her property manager as a
representative. There are also
units where the owner has a roommate or partner who isn’t named
on the deed but who might be a good person to do some of the condo work. Since it’s only an eight unit building, and
there are always some owners who aren’t willing or able to
contribute, having even one unit that could be contributing and
isn’t makes extra work for the people who are.

I have in the past tried to get the rule clarified so that
owners could send representatives and roommates could come, but haven’t gotten any
support for that.

So my strategy this time was to concede the point about owners’
meetings being only for owners. The rules require one owners’
meeting a year, for the purpose of electing 4 trustees, who have
the power to make most of the decisions without necessarily
consulting the other owners. We had that meeting in April.

So instead of organizing an owners’ meeting, I organized a
meeting of the trustees, to which other residents and owners’
representatives are invited to come. I got all the other
trustees to buy into doing it this way, so that if the lawyer
decides to complain about it, I should be able to depend on some
support.

Newsletter

The other piece of organizing (still not completed) was to
revive the newsletter of the Homebrew Club.

This used to be an important organizing tool for the club,
which came out every month, and if you were trying to organize
an event, you knew you had to write it up for the editor (who
knew he had to twist your arm to write it up before the
deadline).

The club went through a rough patch a couple of years ago, and
got out of the habit of recruiting an newsletter editor every
month. We’ve
has been adding new members pretty regularly over the last year
or so. But of course, they aren’t members who know about
writing up their proposed events for the newsletter, or
volunteering to be the editor and twisting the arms of people
who were organizing events.

So we’ve had a committee to revive the newsletter, and I
foolishly volunteered to be the new editor. I figured this week
would be a good week to do it, because all my performing
commitments would be over, and it wouldn’t yet be time for the
Boston Early Music
Festival.

I’d done what used to be the normal thing, of sending out a
request for articles as soon as I got the editor job, and
reiterating the request a few days before the deadline. That
didn’t produce very many articles.

I was feeling like I might be getting too old for this
business, because there was a meeting last week that I just
didn’t have the energy to go to. Or rather, if I’d saved the
energy for that, I would have done less practicing for the recital, and that was the priority.

But yesterday I looked at what I had (the original deadline had
been Monday), and wrote a post nagging the people whose stuff
was still missing, and for some reason, this turned out to be a
better description of what the newsletter could be than my much
more general request for articles.

So I now have several articles that I hadn’t explicitly
solicited, and the promise of a couple more by tomorrow or
Sunday.

Band

I’ll write up why the Cantabile Band probably needs different
organizing now than it did a couple of years ago later.

Wendy and Lucy

This was the most upsetting movie I’ve seen in a while. I
remember hearing a story on the radio about the R rating it got
seeming inappropriately “adult”. The story’s point of view was that if kids can
handle sex and violence, they should be able to handle a story
about a car breaking down.

I’ll avoid spoilers, as had the reviews I had read before I saw
the movie, because it would be a different movie if the viewer
knew the ending in advance.

But I think the reviewer who complained about the R rating
may have missed how violent (including a rape scene) the movie really
was. The rape scene is actually quite tame compared with the
scene where Wendy’s taken away to the police station, leaving her
dog (Lucy) in a clearly inappropriate place. This is what leads
to her having to sleep in the woods without the protection of the
dog, and hence to the rape.

So not only did I spend a good deal of time explaining to Sunny that what
happens in the movie isn’t going to happen to us, but I’ve also
been thinking about all the white-collar violence that’s been done
to me that really did hurt more than the couple of minor assaults
I’ve been victim of.

The most recent one was the crabby neighbor who lived next door
to Bonnie, who decided (without having seen the inside of the
house) that the way we were approching cleaning it up for sale was
the wrong thing to do. She interfered several times with the way
we left trash out, and probably reported our “violations” (putting
trash cans out at 6PM instead of waiting until 10) to the town.

I can understand a town needing to have limits on how much
trash can be left on the sidewalk for how long. But in this case,
the reason we had so much trash to leave was that Bonnie had been
too sick to be taking it out every week for quite a long time, so
in my opinion, they could have cut us a little slack.

Luckily, Bonnie turned out to also have some nice neighbors,
who asked what they could do to help, so I asked them if they’d
take the trash out after 10. They were surprised that that was
necessary, since apparently it isn’t a rule that’s enforced unless
someone complains (hence my theory about the crabby neighbor), but
they were very helpful when I assured them it was a real
problem.

Anyway, none of this is anything like as bad as losing your dog
because of an encounter with the police, but it really does make
you shake with rage and frustration for at least as long as some
actual violence.

To get back to the movie, it’s very well done, but watch it
when you’re prepared to be upset.

http://rcm.amazon.com/e/cm?t=laymusicorg-20&o=1&p=8&l=as1&asins=B001EUSYIA&fc1=000000&IS2=1&lt1=_blank&m=amazon&lc1=0000FF&bc1=000000&bg1=FFFFFF&f=ifr

Comparing Lilypond and Petrucci

While I’m working intensely on the site redesign, you might
have to put up with the things I’m writing about it to help me
think.

Here’s a query I made on the lilypond-users
mailing list:

In general, I love the way lilypond output looks when compared with
other computer-generated sheetmusic.

I’m aware that the ideal espoused by the developers is the 19th century
hand-engraved sheet music.

I usually like the look of my lilypond output as compared with the late
sixteenth and early seventeenth century printers I usually transcribe.

I always like the look of lilypond output as compared with anyone’s
hand-written music.

But when I transcribe Petrucci from the facsimile, the spacing lilypond
does always looks clunky, especially in the parts with large
note-values.

I’ve recently figured out that the large note-values look better if you
put:


context{
Score
override SpacingSpanner #'base-shortest-duration = #(ly:make-moment 1 1)
}

in the layout block.

I believe Petrucci’s spacing is just equal spacing for every note, no
matter what its value.

Does anyone have any tricks for making lily’s output look a little more
like that?

I’m trying to redesign my website, and one idea I have is to have a
graphic in the header with a facsimile on one side and lily’s output on
the other. So it’s important that people not look at the lilypond
output and say, “Wow, that’s ugly compared to the facsimile.” Of course
one way to do that would be to use an ugly facsimile (of which there are
many), but it would be more fun to use a beautiful facsimile and also
have beautiful lilypond.

I’ll let you know if I get any useful answers.

PIctures

Here’s the first page of the Petrucci facsimile of Adieu
mes amours by Josquin:

[Petrucci facsimile]

And here’s the cantus part lilypond produces:

[Lilypond cantus]

And here’s the tenor part from lilypond:

[Lilypond tenor]

Site Redesign Progress

I finally got started on the site redesign, so this has to be a
short one.

It’s the kind of project that every time you solve one problem,
three others pop up, so I suspect it will be at least days if not
weeks before I have it ready even for friendly perusal, let
alone to loose on the unsuspecting public.

I’m starting with the thematic wordpress
theme framework. It allegedly lets you customize almost
anything, but that turns out to be only true if you know CSS. I
learned a bit about it the last time I did site redesign, and
actually sort of liked the look of the site I did for the Boston
Recorder Society (they changed it when I stopped maintaining it,
so you can’t see it there). Anyway, I have the mechanics pretty
much the way I want them, and the look something like the old
BRS site, so now all I have to do is:

  • Write the content for the new pages, including the new
    search form.
  • Fiddle with both LaTeX and Gimp to get the banner at the top
    of the pages right.
  • Fiddle with the wordpress stuff so the sidebars and footers
    are the way I want them.

My accomplishments for yesterday included:

  • Finding where the home page on the new hosting site should go. I
    broke accessing it altogether twice yesterday afternoon trying
    to be too cute about that.
  • Setting up a test environment on my home machine. There’s
    still work to do on this, because I used the Ubuntu wordpress
    package to do it, so I have to fiddle with permissions and
    ownership and groups and maybe links before it really lets me
    work on it right. But I made substantial progress.
  • This morning before breakfast, I installed keyring and now I can do openssh to both the old
    and the new hosting sites without entering passphrases.

I was frustrated enough yesterday when I had access to the new
site broken and hadn’t yet figured out how to customize anything
in thematic that I considered just going to bed and reading
trash fiction, but I have persevered, so far.

The most inspiring story I learned in high school was in the
history of English literature book. Thomas Carlyle had spend
several years writing the history of the French Revolution, and
he gave the only copy of the manuscript to his friend Macauley
to see what he thought. Macauley’s maid (at least, she had to
take the rap) thought it was trash and put it in the fire.
Carlisle went to bed and read trashy fiction for a week and then
got up and wrote the book over again.

I admit that story has more often inspired me to go to bed and
read trashy fiction than to write the history of the French
Revolution. But it’s really true that there are times you just
shouldn’t be doing some things, and it was looking like
yesterday afternoon was the wrong time to be slaving over a hot
computer.

Student Recital

My recorder teacher, John
Tyson, had his annual student recital on Saturday.

This year, we played in a charming little auditorium in the
Morse School, one of the Cambridge public schools.

Program

John teaches a wide range of students, from a doctor who’s
close to a complete beginner, to conservatory students who are
ready to give full-length concerts.

The usual arrangement for a student recital is to put the
less-experienced performers on first, on the grounds that they’re
more nervous, and also so as not to have a beginner playing right
after a virtuoso performance. That got modified a bit this time,
for two reasons:

  • All the students who were being accompanied by John’s wife,
    harpsichordist Miyuki Tsurutani, had to be programmed at the
    end, because she had prior commitments that meant she didn’t
    arrive until almost an hour into the program.
  • There were two composers, Loeillet and Marcello, who were
    represented by two sonatas, and John programmed them so that the
    sonatas would be adjacent to each other.

My performance

The result of that was actually quite favorable placement for
my piece. I was playing a Loeillet sonata with my sister, Judith Conrad, on harpsichord, and the other
person playing Loeillet has only been taking recorder lessons
for a year or so. (He’s been playing piano for years, so he
isn’t actually an inexperienced performer or musician, but he
hasn’t been playing recorder for long enough to be able to make
the amount of difference between an Allegro and an Adagio that a
better player can. Sonatas are really more interesting when the
fast movements are faster than the slow movements.) So I was the first of the more
experienced players to play, after the audience had heard almost
as much intermediate recorder playing as they wanted to.

I played well. I’ve been doing a lot of performing this year,
and it’s been good for getting consistent breath support. I
also finally figured out this spring how hands my size can hold
an alto recorder without having the wrists in a tortured, bent
position, so that makes it possible to have my fingers almost as
relaxed on a 415 alto as they are playing dance music on a
soprano. And I spent the spring doing articulation exercises
while I walked the dog, so I’m finally in a position to play the
fast movements faster than they used to be. And the space was
really very friendly to the alto recorder/harpsichord sound.

My sister, who is a professional keyboard player with a real
flair for continuo, also played well. Unfortunately, we had
only run the whole piece once, and it was before I figured out
how I wanted to play it. Of course someone who’s a professional
accompanist can adjust to an interpretation she’s never heard
pretty fast, but it probably wasn’t fast enough to really carry
off some of the false endings and free tempos I had planned.

So I told people I wished my sister and I had had more time to
rehearse before performing. John said he didn’t think it
mattered; that you could tell it was two intelligent musicians
doing really cool stuff, even if not quite the same cool stuff.
He did say how impressed he was with my poise.

The rest of the evening

The disadvantage of using this space is that the modest fee
John paid to rent it only covered three hours, including
harpsichord setup and takedown time. The penultimate group was three New
England Conservatory students, including Ching-Wei Lin, John’s
most advanced student, playing the Dieupart Cinquieme
Suite in F. They had to cut it short, and play only the
first three movements. If you were considering this as a concert
that would have been the wrong place to make the cut. Of course,
considering it as a performing opportunity for people who don’t
always have as much chance to play for an audience as they should
for the amount of work they do, it was exactly the right thing to
cut, since they have all kinds of opportunities to perform.

But most of the players and their families could go over to
John and Miyuki’s house for a very good party, including jazz and
rock improvisations by the assembled.