Author: Laura Conrad

Beverly Sills: Made in America

I watched this documentary on PBS last night. I enjoyed it a
lot. Some thoughts I had while watching it:

  • I was surprised how old-fashioned the staging looked, not
    only in the clips from the 40’s, 50’s, and 60’s, but even from
    the 70’s, which is when I started going to the theater.
  • The best thing about it was that there was a lot of singing;
    not just short clips but enough of an aria that you could really
    get into the characterization.
  • I’m surprised at how few of those performances are on
    Netflix, with only a couple more of the operas on amazon.
  • They used Roberto
    Devereaux     as an example of what Sills thought wasn’t
    completely bel canto singing in the bel canto
    repertoire. Also an example of why singing opera is an athletic
    feat — the makeup took two hours to put on, and the costume
    weighed 50 pounds. I’m not sure I could sit around watching TV
    in something like that, let alone stand and sing over an
    orchestra for 3 hours.
  • The crossover appearances were interesting — not only could
    she tap-dance with Danny Kaye and Lily Tomlin, but they could
    sing with her.

It made me feel very nostalgic; I did actually see a
performance of Guilio Cesare in 1972, with a group
of people who were doing opera performances at Brown
University. We went backstage and shook Beverly Sill’s hand,
and met Muffy, the deaf daughter.

Singing opera is one of the things that’s always made me say,
“I wish I could do that.” It still does, even though of course
there’s now no chance at all, and never was much.

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Same MIDI file with three diferent temperaments

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.

Following up

Tofu Croutons

Last Thursday,
I wrote about making Tofu Croutons for a salad. I’ve in the
past processed the Tofu into a vinaigrette to improve the protein
content of salad, but I thought the croutons would also be useful
for soups. The cookbook
I got the recipe from said that if you kept them tightly covered
in the refrigerator they would last for 3 days. Mine were fine
the second day, but soggy and tough on the third day.

Logitech 550

I posted the day after the Logitech 550 Universal
Remote arrived. I intended to not follow up until I’d had
another round of programming, but I’ve found a couple more
problems that I don’t think programming is going to fix:

  • I have my DVD player hooked directly to the Stereo
    amplifier, since I generally prefer to get the better sound
    quality on movies, although there’s lots of TV that I’m happy to
    just use the TV speakers. I will look around the next time I
    get around to booting Windows and running the Logitech program,
    but the remote is making an assumption that you can adjust the
    volume on a DVD with the TV volume control, and that isn’t true
    for my system.
  • The software button labeled “Aspect” during “Watch DVD” does
    in fact bring up the “View Mode” menu on my TV set, but the
    arrows that are the only way I know of to select a view mode are
    the DVD player arrows, not the TV ones. Again, I don’t know
    that there’s a way to program around this.

Speaking of aspect ratios, the TV set I have (a
Sharp AQUOS 32 inch with 1080p resolution) has a very
unfriendly interface for picking this. What you usually want
(sidebars) is at the top, but then to get to anything else, you
have to scroll through the useless “Stretch” option that
distorts the aspect ratio. Then if you’re trying to play a DVD,
you have to guess which of the other two is the right one. On
some kinds of screens, it’s obvious, but by Murphy’s Law, you’re
always going to decide you want the bigger picture on one of the
screens where you can’t tell which ratio the director used. I
would expect an option for “make the biggest picture you can
without distorting the aspect ratio”, which it must know how to
do since it knows how big the sidebars are on the sidebars option.

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On Not Programming

I didn’t realize until after I posted yesterday that it was Ada Lovelace Day, for
appreciating the contributions of women programmers.

So this morning I started thinking about what I should have
posted. My first idea was that there’s a program I’ve been planning
to write for some time, so maybe the right thing was to write it
and then to post appreciating my own accomplishment.

So I started thinking about how to write the program, and the
next thing that happened was that I figured out a way to not write
it at all, but to use already written software. This means I not
only don’t have to write it, but I don’t have to test and debug
it, and potentially miss a bug and publish a bad
transcription.

To the extent that I was a successful programmer, I think a lot
of my accomplishments were of that ilk — rather than churning out
tons of code, I could sometimes solve a problem by creative use of
code that was already there. I learned some of what I knew about
how and why to do this from a woman I worked for in the late
seventies, Jacqui Horwitz, who had done a successful
implementation of a computerized medical records system by
adapting an existing system rather than writing one from
scratch.

In that job, there were 4 programmers, 2 men and 2 women, and I
eventually found out what all our starting salaries had been.
Both men had significantly less previous experience than both
women, and less idea how to go about solving a problem, and larger starting salaries.

One thing I consistently refused to do in my career as a
programmer was to write lines-of-code counting programs. (Someone
else always wrote them; there wasn’t much solidarity in the
software world.) The
reason management wanted them was that they had the idea that you
could measure productivity by counting lines of code. This was
clearly wrong.

I don’t want to make grandiose claims for these anecdotes as
illustrating why women’s contributions are undervalued, but if
they illuminate that subject, or any subject, for you, I’m glad.

Additions, March 25, plus some catchup

I am a reformed character, and am trying to put things up as I
transcribe them. So this is what I did yesterday for the Cantabile
Band rehearsal. I don’t think it will be hard once we
know it, but it wasn’t an easy sightread.

I still owe you some stuff that I transcribed last year when I
wasn’t in the right Zen State for fixing baroque upload
procedures. So here are some Baroque sonatas. I haven’t been
transcribing Baroque sonatas, since there are good editions out
of most of what I play, and I can’t really add much value. But
it’s definitely better to have it electronically for
transposing, which I had to do last Fall because of having to
play with a keyboard at 392. And it turns out to be easier to
get copies to a continuo player at a distance, too.

Report on the March 24 meeting

We played:

  • Barnes, English Country Dance, various.
  • Byrd:
    • Lord, in thy rage rebuke me not
    • I have been young
  • Weelkes, Strike it up, tabor
  • Ravenscroft, Ut, re, mi, fa
  • Ravenscroft, As I me walked in a May morning
  • Purcell, Cakes and Ale

Schedule

Next week is probably the last regular dropin meeting until
after the Walk for Hunger, so if you like coming and sight
reading, or you have particular stuff you want to play or sing,
that’s your chance. The usual time (7:45 PM) and place.

I also need to know by then whether you want to play the Walk for Hunger on May 3.
So far, we have me, Sue, Anne, and Ishmael, and we could use a
couple more. It’s a great opportunity. Often the first Sunday
in May is one of the first really good Spring days, and you get to
be outdoors in it at a beautiful spot on the banks of the Charles
River with tens of thousands of people walking by. There are
opportunities for solos and duets as well as for our usual
repertoire.

I also try to find a group the doesn’t intersect with ours that
can play a couple of sets so that we can take breaks and go to the
bathroom and such. If you have or know such a group, let me
know.

World Baseball Classic

I’ve spent good chunks of the last three evenings watching the
finals and semifinals of the World Baseball
Classic (WBC). Here are some random thoughts:

  • Other things being equal, I was rooting for the team with
    the fewest major leaguers on it. I’ve always found it offensive
    that the Major League
    championship should be called the World Series, when all the
    eligible teams are located in two countries, neither of which
    seems to ever win a real world
    championship. Of course, other things weren’t equal — I
    usually felt like rooting for the Red Sox players I like, and I
    watched the finals with a Japanese friend, so I rooted for Japan
    over South Korea, even though Japan has several times as many major
    leaguers on their team.
  • I was annoyed that they abandoned play-by-play for a large
    chunk of the close-fought final game for an interview with the
    Commissioner of Major League Baseball. Baseball broadcasts tend
    to do this more casually than I like anyway, but you would think
    they would take a championship final a little more
    seriously.
  • Besides, the interview was not illuminating. They asked the
    Commissioner what could be done it increase fan interest in the
    WBC. Nobody mentioned the idea of putting more of it on TV,
    or some of it on broadcast TV.
  • If the Commissioner had been asked about TV coverage, he
    probably would have said that people with internet connections
    could watch it online at mlb.com. This isn’t true for anyone I
    know who’s tried. Admittedly I tried 3 years ago, but a friend
    who’s a big baseball fan and doesn’t have cable tried this
    month, using his Mac with DSL, and found it unwatchable.
  • An article I read before the WBC started said that it wasn’t
    going to be a real world championship until you could get 16
    teams without using weak entries like Italy and the
    Netherlands. In fact, both of those teams did quite well. What
    you would write with 20/20 hindsight is that you won’t get a
    good world championship until the semifinals can have 4 teams
    that are all better then Venezuela was on Saturday against South
    Korea. I didn’t see enough of the preceding games to be able to
    tell whether Venezuela was better at the beginning or whether
    they really got to the semifinals by beating teams that were
    even worse than that. The couple of games I saw earlier in the
    tournament were better than that.
  • I couldn’t figure out what the point of the pitch-count
    limitations was. I assume it’s to mollify the MLB
    managers who don’t want their players used up before the season
    starts. But it might have been to prevent a Davis Cup type
    situation where a country with a good pitcher and one or two
    good hitters can embarrass the countries with lots of good
    players. But that would be good television, if it
    happened.
  • The official scorers seemed a little error-happy to me. I
    saw several plays ruled as errors that if the player had made
    it, I would have been impressed. One particularly memorable one
    was on Sunday night, when Ichiro was batting for Japan against
    the US team. He hit what normally would be a routine ground
    ball to third except:

    • Ichiro is one of the fastest runners in baseball, so he
      beat it out.
    • The third baseman’s throw to first was a little
      wide.
    • The US team didn’t have a real first baseman, and were
      using a converted shortstop, and he had his right foot on the
      bag, when the throw was wide to his right side, so he could
      have stretched better if he’d had his left foot on the bag.

    I would have probably given Ichiro a hit, but the scorer ruled
    it a throwing error by the third baseman.

Spams and Scams

Boing-Boing
gleefully reports that the US attorneys’ office mistook a classic Nigerian
spam for a letter from a distressed Madoff investor in its
submission to Madoff’s sentencing judge.

It is funny, but reading through the whole document, with the
several hundred possibly real letters and emails isn’t funny at
all. The spam was probably just a slip of a finger — easy to do
if you’re moving hundreds of emails into one document. But all
those people who want to encourage the judge to lock Madoff up and
throw away the key, and especially the ones who want sympathy for
having lost their entire life’s savings, are really sad.

I’m not saying he shouldn’t be locked up — obviously one of the
things someone should be working on is finding all the money,
which will be easier if he doesn’t have unrestricted communication
with the people who can help him hide it. And I’m not saying I
don’t sympathize with the people who are really mad and spending
some of their mental energy inventing suitable punishments for
him.

But I really have very little sympathy for the people who
invested all their money in one place and have lost it all. You
don’t need a degree in high finance to have heard the proverbs
about putting all your eggs in one basket.

And while I understand the people wanting to invent the
punishments, I really don’t understand either the original person
or the US attorney wanting that kind of fantasy life to be part of
the public record.

Site redesign II: The Store

I was forcibly reminded this week of one of the major
weaknesses of the current site design, so I got energetic this
morning and replaced it with a different weakness.

The problem is that when I started publishing on the web I had
the fantasy that this would lead to a thriving (or at least
regular) print publication business. And at least until this morning, there were still
vestiges of this fantasy on the site where I claim that I will send you a
handsome spiral bound book for the costs of printing and
shipping.

This would probably be an OK way to spend a couple of hours a
week if you had several orders a week and could get reimbursed
for the time spent finding stamps and going to the post office
and adding paper to the printer over several orders. But if
there’s less than an order a month, you would have to charge a
lot to get your time compensated by one order.

Quick fix

What happened this week is that I got an order from someone who
gets really frustrated and angry whenever she has to deal with
computers. This is the only way I’ve ever seen her; a mutual
friend whom I trust assures me that in other contexts she’s
quite pleasant, and not at all stupid. My first interaction
with her was when she was ranting at me because she was trying
to print a book and had printed 40 pages and only had half
of it. Since the book has 21 songs and each song takes 4 pages,
this didn’t seem like a cause for wonder or astonishment or anger
to me. Anyway, none of our subsequent interactions has been any
more fun than that one, and they’ve been nothing like as good a
story.

When I gave up on having an easy, hassle-free shopping cart on
my own site, I started using lulu.com to do not only
printing but also downloads of PDF’s. I kept the PDF’s that I’d
previously allowed people to download for free on my own site,
especially since the lulu shopping cart doesn’t know about
multi-volume sets, so there’s no way to enforce that people buy
all the part books if you’re printing in part books.

But this seemed like an emergency, so I put the canzonets for
two voices up as two separate books, with dire warnings that you
can’t play the pieces unless you buy both books.

Longer term plans

If this works, and I don’t get lots of angry phone calls and
emails from people who only got half the pieces, I’ll put up the
Morley Canzonets for three voices and other part books.

Longer term, if I really want a publisher, I should get a block
of ISBN’s and get listed on Amazon and some of the book
wholesalers. I’ve been reading the Self-Publishing yahoo group,
and it looks like the people who are trying to get rich selling
the picks and shovels to the internet entrepreneurs have some
picks and shovels for self publishing that work some of the time
for some people.

It would be a modest investment in money, and a fairly large
investment in time, so I don’t know for sure that I’ll do it,
but I do think about it.

Canzonets for two voices are now at Lulu.com

I got another order for me to print out the Morley Canzonets for two
voices, and realized I didn’t really want to be in the
printing business. So I put the hard copies up at the Serpent Publications
store on lulu.com.

I’ve avoided doing that for any of the part books, because I
don’t have enough control over the lulu store to enforce that
anyone who orders one part also orders the other, unless they
say they really, really, really want to do that.
But I put it very clearly into the descriptions, so I’m going to
hope for the best.

I’ve been offering the PDF download for free from this site for
almost a decade. (It looks like the PDF file went up on September
17, 1999.) So I’m going to continue to do that, although I may at
some point move the download to the lulu store.