Author: Laura Conrad

The Cantabile
Band plays every year on the first Sunday in May at the Walk for Hunger, at a
beautiful spot on the banks of the Charles River, near the
Cambridge-Watertown line.

Some years we’ve had as many as 11 people (which is a mistake
because the right half doesn’t have any idea what the left half
is doing). The last two years we’ve been down to 4, and had to
recruit people from the guest group that gives us a couple of
breaks in order to do Now is the Month of Maying,
which has 5 parts.

This year, I thought we had four poeple, but one of them has
been falling down and getting herself injured, so she’s decided
she doesn’t want to make the commitment. So we’ll be a
trio.

It’s the right three people — if you were going to pick three
people from the people who come at all often, these are the
three you’d want. There are some problems because the best
singer doesn’t play an instrument, so it won’t be as easy to
intersperse instrumental versions of the things we sing to give
voices and audience a break, or to just play three part dance
tune arrangements instead of learning songs.

So here’s what we’re going to be drawing from for the
program:

• Weelkes,
  Ayres and Fantastic Spirits
• Thomas
  Morley, Canzonets
  for 3 voyces, and maybe the Canzonets to two
  voyces.
• Thomas
  Ravenscroft wrote a lot of good three-part stuff.
• William
  Byrd.
• Various three-part things in the Drinking Songs
  collection.
• Maybe other three-part rounds.
• Maybe some stuff from the Glogauer LIederbuch
  or the Odhecaton, but we might decide to just
  stick to our core English repertoire.
• Two part improvisations from Playford.
• Improv on things from The Division Flute.

There should be enough there to put together a sprightly,
upbeat program, of the kind that if you’d just walked 15 or 20
miles and needed a break would encourage you to have a pleasant
rest, but not make you feel like you never wanted to get up
again.

One thing I criticized in my review of How
Equal Temperament Ruined Harmony (and Why You Should Care)
was that it didn’t give enough information about where to go to
hear what the different temperaments sounded like.

Now one answer for the computer literate is that any good MIDI
player can be convinced to play in any temperament you can think
of. But it takes both an understanding of how to think of
temperaments and an understanding of how to read MIDI
documentation, and in some cases an understanding of how the
people who wrote MIDI documentation think of temperaments (which
they don’t tell you), so I thought I’d do some of this for you and
produce some MP3 files to listen to.

The MIDI file I picked was the Arcadelt Il
Bianco e Dolce Cigno from the lilypond transcription on this
website.

Here’s the MP3
file from just playing in timidity without telling it
anything special about tuning, so it’s equal temperament.

Here it is, telling timidity to play pure intonation in G
major, i.e., the timidity command was “timidity -Ow -Zpure1
score.midi”. There’s some evidence that what MIDI calls “pure”
may be the same as what early music people call “just”, but I
can’t find any explanationof where the MIDI people get their
idea of pure.

And for this
one, I told timidity to use the tuning table, meanquar that scala had
produced from the meanquar.scl it supplies in the scala
archive of about 3700 different scales. The timidity
command was “timidity -Ow -Z ~lconrad/src/scala*/meanquar.tbl
score.midi”.

In all cases, the timidity command produced a .wav file, which
I converted to an MP3 file with lame.

Let me know if this helps at all.