Author: Laura Conrad

Report on the March 31 meeting

We played:

  • Loeillet, Sonata, Opus 1, number 8 in D minor
  • Playford, various
  • Weelkes, Upon a hill
  • Farmer, Fair Phyllis
  • Arcadelt, Il bianco e dolce Cigno
  • Two rounds based on The Silver Swan, Gibbons

Schedule

Meetings in April will be restricted to the people who want to
play the Walk for Hunger
on May 3. If you really want to, and are an instrumentalist or
a bass or soprano vocalist, and you let me know real soon, we can
still squeeze you in on the performance.

Think about dropping by while we’re playing the Walk for Hunger
— we’ll be on the banks of the Charles River roughly at the
Cambridge-Watertown line from 10:30 AM to 3 PM.

Dropin meetings will resume in May.

Transcribing from facsimile

It’s Tuesday, which means I have to get ready for the Cantabile
Band rehearsal, and I just finished guessing where to add time in
the parts for the facsimile I’m transcribing.

I had planned a nice post about my marathon train ride through
Germany, but it’s going to take until well past lunch to write,
and I have other things to take care of.

So that one goes on the spindle, and I’ll just tell you how
much I marvel that they ever got any part books right before there
were computers to take the notes from the parts and combine them
into a score for them.

It’s also surprising that the sixteenth century singers didn’t
care more that there were all those mistakes. In the case of the
Weelkes, I think they weren’t really reading the music the way we
do at all — they just learned it to get the basic tune and then
put the parts together they way they had to go. They knew the
style, and so they didn’t need every ending note to be exactly the
right length to know where to start the next phrase.

You’ll be able to see what I’m talking about when I put the
piece I just transcribed up (maybe tomorrow), but there’s an A
section where the parts are supposed to all cadence together, and
a B section where they all end together. In both cases, once I’d
entered the notes as they were in the facsimile, one part was
short — in the A section the cantus was a half note short, and in
the B section the bassus was a quarter note short.

In both cases, if you knew the style and were really singing by
ear, it wouldn’t have thrown you — of course the Cantus goes back
and starts the A section the second time the way it did the first
time, and starts the B section the way it’s written, even if the
Cantus final note should be a half note longer. In the B
section, the Bassus part was clearly doing the obvious cadence,
even though it was written a quarter note short.

So I doubt that Weelke’s singers had any problem with his
mistakes, but the Cantabile Band would have if I hadn’t fixed them.

Dune

I have a dentist appointment this morning, so this is from the
spindle, scheduled yesterday.

I haven’t read the book recently enough to review it, but I saw
the movie from Netflix Saturday night, and enjoyed it more than I
expected.

Of course, I might have gotten madder at it if I was more
current with the book, but the movie seemed to include everything
I remembered vividly from the book. I remember the little sister
as being more important, but that might have been from the
sequels. (I think I read two sequels and then gave up. It’s not
a book that really benefited from sequels.)

The special effects are of course not done the same way they
would be now, and I don’t think there were any computer
programmers credited. But that made the movie look more
artistic. I remember being really excited when there were lots of
computer programmers with credits on the first Lord
of the Rings movie, but really the computer programming
doesn’t add as much as one would hope to movies, and can get
really boring if it’s the only thing you do, as in the more recent
Star
Wars movies.

There were some problems with the pacing of the movie — it
started a bit slow. And for all the brand-name actors (Kyle
MacLachlan, José Ferrer, Dean Stockwell, Brad Dourif,
Sting, Kenneth McMillan, Patrick Stewart, Sean Young, and Linda
Hunt), there wasn’t really that much impressive acting. But if
you want the Roman Empire translated into space opera, I don’t
think there’s much better than this out there.

The scene for Sting fans would have been even more artistic if
they’d left it nude, but the studio decided at the last minute
they didn’t want to deal with nude, so he’s wearing a g-string. But
the top half looks good enough you don’t really need the rest.

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Curried Bok Choy with tofu, tomatoes and coconut milk

I had friends over to watch the World Baseball Classic final
last Monday, and made enough of this to also be the soup of the
week after the Cantabile
Band rehearsal on Tuesday.

It’s a recipe I got out of Mark Bittman’s How
to Cook Everything Vegetarian. He calls for peas as the main
vegetable, but I’ve used it pretty frequently and find it works
pretty well with any green vegetable with some flavor to it. I
think I first did it with kale, and have done it with Swiss
chard, and maybe spinach.

The green vegetable that said, “Buy me,” at Whole Foods Market on
Monday was Bok Choy, so I used that.

I took three onions and a can of plum tomatoes. The recipe says
to chop them in a food processor, but I decided to try the Cuisinart
Smart Stick Hand Blender. This would have worked fine for the
tomatoes, but was a bit small for the onions. You can just chop
them any way you normally chop tomatoes.

You simmer the tomatoes and onions for a while and then add a
can of coconut milk and the vegetable and seasonings and cubed
tofu.

For seasonings, I just used Garam Masala and salt, but you can
add other things if you like. I sometimes add some star anise.

With a vegetable like Bok Choy, I add the stems first and the
leaves later. In this case, I had everything simmering except
the leaves and tofu before my recorder lesson at 8, and then
when the lesson was over at 9 I added the leaves and tofu and
started making rice. We ate when the rice was done.

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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.