Author: Laura Conrad

Concert Program Construction

This is also something I need to think about. We’re planning
the Walk for Hunger
program. Also, I’ve been mulling some of the comments I got
about the Loring-Greenough house program.

Last program

Apparently everyone found the first half of the
Loring-Greenough program a bit heavy and hard to take:

  • A friend who’s not a very experienced concertgoer said,
    “It’s all about dying, it’s so depressing.”
  • A very experienced performer told me that I should have made
    more comments, which would have paced it better.
  • A fairly experienced musician said, “There was an awful lot
    of stuff in minor keys.” I think this one isn’t even true, for
    instance, The silver swan is in a major key.
  • Another experienced performer said she thought there should
    have been more instrumental music on the first half. The
    original version of the program did have some, but it was part
    of what got cut to get the length right.

These might all really be the same reaction. I’m sure having
some instrumentals breaking up the vocals would have been a good
idea. Also, there were really two sections, both fairly dark.
The material flowed pretty smoothly between the section about
tears and frustration and the section about death, but maybe
having one of those sections on the second half, and some of the
stuff from the second half about dancing and singing and having
fun on the first half would have made a better balance.

Of course, it’s also possible that it came out so dark and
frustrating because we weren’t doing it well enough. Things
like Flow my tears and The silver swan
should be uplifting, not depressing, and maybe we just aren’t
quite good enough to do that.

Next program

Every year, the Cantabile Band plays for the Walk for Hunger. This
happens on the first Sunday in May at a beautiful spot on the
banks of the Charles River. This is one of the more reliable
times for good weather in this part of the world, and The Walk
for Hunger is one of the popular charities where it’s possible
to tell the people you work with that you’re doing it and get
them to contribute money. So this is our opportunity to play
for tens of thousands of people, although not many of them
stay to listen for vary long, even when the weather is warm
enough to sit and listen.

So you want fairly upbeat, walking tempo music; there’s no
chance of too long a section about death and dying. It will
be most of the same people who played the last concert (Stuart
the cellist is going to be out of town, but the rest of us are
all playing). I haven’t heard from anyone else who wants to
do it, but I’ve given people another couple of weeks to
decide.

At rehearsal yesterday we came up with one set that goes
together:

  • Weelkes, Pipe it up tabor, which is about the
    frustrations of a Morris team dance leader who has people with
    aching joints who can’t dance very well.
  • Weelkes, Come, Sirrah Jack, ho, which is about
    using tobacco to fix the aching joints.
  • Morley, Arise, get up my dear, which has morris
    dancing in it.

We might also include some real morris dances, and preface it
with the Dowland It was a time when silly bees could
speak, where an exasperated king gets the last word about
the complaining silly bees.

Another feature of that spot is that it’s where I chose to
scatter the ashes of our group member who died last May, so we
do have to sing something for Bonnie, but I’m sure we’ll find a
cheerful thing she liked to sing in May, rather than insisting
on all the stuff that helped us while she was dying.

Report on the March 10 meeting

We played:

  • Weelkes, Pipe it up, Tabor
  • Weelkes, Come, sirrah Jack, ho
  • Morley:
    • Love learns by laughing
    • Where art thou wanton?
    • Good morrow, fair ladies of the May
    • Whither away so fast
    • Blow, shepherds, blow
  • Billings, Easter Anthem
  • Randall, Haverhill
  • Arcadelt, Il bianco e dolce cigno
  • Purcell, Cakes and Ale
  • Ravenscroft, Cuckoo, as I me walked
  • Talking Vegetable Round

Schedule

We’ll be having dropin meetings at least through March, at the usual time (7:45 PM) and place.

Remember that I need to know by the March 30 rehearsal whether you’re
planning to play the Walk
for Hunger on May 3. If you want to play, you should also
tell me your schedule for other weekend days in May, since we’d
like to also play the program at the art gallery in Lowell.

Website redesign (part one)

I have hitherto avoided inflicting my technical problems on the
readers of this blog, but this subject is what I really need to
think about, so it doesn’t really make sense to go finding other
things to write about the way I did yesterday. I’ll
try to keep the tech talk understandable to the lay user; let me
know if I fail.

This post is going to discuss only the basic functionality of
how the transcribed pieces are described, and how the user finds
them. The other parts of the site will be discussed in future posts.

Why a redesign?

Because the original design has gotten unwieldy both for
me and for the users.

The reason I didn’t add new pieces to the site for over a year
wasn’t that I wasn’t transcribing new pieces, it’s that the
procedure for adding things is quite clumsy. After I changed
computers and ISP’s in August it was clearly going to need an
unknown amount of debugging. The debugging turned out to be small
when I finally got around to it, but adding a piece that’s been
transcribed and proof-played should be just an easy couple of clicks.

For the users, the one-page By
Composers listing is an increasingly unwieldy way to find what
they want, and doesn’t include all the information they need. For
instance, one of the most-requested things is a way to find pieces
by number of parts. It would also be good to have some idea of
the ranges of the parts.

The original site design did have both number and ranges of parts
when you got to the page for the piece,
but it happened by displaying short excerpts
from each of the parts, which
broke fairly early on, and wasn’t really the right answer for
doing searching anyway.

So here’s my picture of how the site should look:

  • The primary entry to the collection of transcribed works
    should be a search page that allows selection by composer,
    dates, number of parts, instrumentation, country, language, or
    any combination of those things. That is, if I’m looking for a
    trio for voices in German, I should be able to just say, “Show
    me all the three-part vocal pieces in German.” Or if I want to
    know what there is by Billings, I should be able to just request
    that.
  • The current static html pages which are generated from the
    database by a script I wrote, should be generated dynamically
    from the database. (If that doesn’t make sense, see below.) This will make adding a new piece much
    simpler. You don’t want to know what I do now; what I’ll do
    then is run one script which will add the piece to the database
    and upload the files.
  • I think it might make sense to leave both the current search
    pages (By
    Composers     and By
    Date    ) there, but of course have them dynamically generated.
    The idea is that for browsing, having a way to look at what’s
    been added or changed since the last time you browsed, or at
    what the distribution of stuff by composer is, is easier than
    just dealing with the search page. Possibly it would make sense
    to add other pages like that, such as “By Country” or “By number
    of parts”.

Static and dynamic

It looks like the major technical jargon I wasn’t able to edit
out of the above was the static/dynamic distinction. So here’s
an explanation.

In general, if you go to a page like www.laymusic.org/directions.html,
it’s static. HTML is a markup language, so the person who
authored the page just wrote text, and then put in some commands
to say things like, “Here’s a new paragraph,” or “Display this
image here.” Then they put that page on the site, and kept
track of where they put it so that they could refer to it from
other pages, or from emails.

If you have 500 pieces, or a couple of blog entries a day, this
might not be such a good idea. So the way most of those sites are
done is that the information you want to maintain about each
individual item is in a database, and
the text you see when you look on the web at that item is
generated by a program from what’s in that database. For
instance, each piece on my site has a title, a composer and a
list of files someone might want to download
in the database, and there could be a program that gets run on the
server every time someone says, “I want to look at that piece,”
that would display that information.

It was even at the time wierd, but when I designed the site, I
did put the information in the database, but instead of having the
program on the server to display it, I have a program that runs on
my own computer that writes an HTML file to display it. This
means I have to rerun that program every time the information
changes, and run the program that generates the “By Composer” and “By
Date” pages every time I add something. This was fine when there
were only a few pieces, but it’s getting tedious now that there
are more than 500, with another hundred or so that I haven’t yet
put up.

Additions, March 9, 2009

I finally fixed the program that automagically puts
transcriptions written in lilypond directly into the database.
So here’s some of what I’ve done since February 27, 2008:

There’s still a lot of stuff I’ve done in the last year to add
— notably some baroque sonatas, some Weelkes, and lots of
Susato. I’ll try and get it done in the next couple of days, now
that my procedure is debugged (fingers crossed) for the new computer.

Forgetting a baby

I was pointed to this
item in the Washington Post from the Making Light
blog, one of many I read in Google Reader before
breakfast most mornings.

Like a lot of people, my first reaction was, “How can anyone
forget a baby?” But then I remembered a story from the early
nineties.

At that time, I had a cat named Geoffrey. I
thought he should be an indoor cat, but he wanted to be an
outdoor cat enough that in spite of how much bigger, stronger,
and smarter I was than he was, he quite often got out the door
when I got home.

[Geoffrey]

He didn’t want to be outdoors for very long at a time, and he
seemed to have a healthy fear of cars, so nothing very terrible
ever happened because of this — he would prowl around for half
an hour or so and then come sit by the front door and wait for
me to open it. I had the pet owner’s physical sense of where
Geoffrey was in relationship to me, so I always remembered to go
open the door a half an hour after this.

But one night, when the temperature was in the teens and headed
down to the single digits, I got home to a full answering
machine of messages I needed to do things about. I handled them
as well as I could, and tumbled into bed.

I think it was about 3 PM that I woke up to the sounds of a
very indignant cat outside on my front steps, and realized that
I had completely forgotten to let Geoffrey in.

I think I took this as a sign that I was trying to do too much,
and that this incident was one of many that led to my resigning
as chair of my neighborhood association, which had been the
source of all the answering machine messages.

But in any case, this happening gives me more sympathy for the
parents who somehow got their mental wiring screwed up enough to
forget a baby in a locked car on a hot day.

Thinking about this on my walk with Sunny this morning, I can
think of several reasons why this baby-baking phenomenon is
happening more often now than it used to:

  • More people trying to do too many things at once. You can
    make a case that just having a baby in this era is already too
    many things at once.
  • The technical problem alluded to in the article, where
    current thinking on physical safety of babies in cars leads to
    the car seat being in the back seat with the baby facing the
    rear of the car, that is, away from the driver.
  • Increased worry about security leading people to leave their
    cars locked with all the windows closed as a general rule. I’m
    sure when I was growing up (before most cars had air
    conditioning), most people left some windows open when they left
    their car on a hot day. When I leave Sunny in the car, which I
    try to avoid on days that are particularly cold or hot, I always
    leave two windows open several inches. Of course, he looks like
    a pretty formidable watchdog, even if he’s mostly retired these days.

I’ve loved you so long

I watched I’ve
loved you so long last night, and really enjoyed
it. I don’t remember seeing the original review, but I saw a
preview on something else I watched, and added it to my netflix
queue on the basis of the acting, and also because I like to
watch a French movie from time to time, on the theory that it
might help keeping up my French conversation skills, such as
they are.

My favorite part was the scene where the drunken host of a
party decides that the right game to play is to find out what
Juliette, the main character, has been doing before she suddenly
appeared in her sister’s life. Even people who don’t know the
answer try to convince him that he’s being boorish, but he
persists, and finally Juliette tells the literal truth: “I was
in prison for 15 years for murder.” Everybody bursts out
laughing, and they all assure the host that he’s no match for
Juliette’s wit. (The man who’s getting interested in Juliette
sees that it isn’t a joke, but that part is clearly a fairy
tale.)

The same party conversation has an argument about Eric
Rohmer. There are clearly
similarities with the production values that bowled me over when
I first saw Ma
nuit chez Maude. For instance, you believe that the scenes
in the kitchen were filmed by someone who had washed dishes at
least once. But I think the characters are much more
three-dimensional than is typical in Rohmer’s movies.

One disadvantage of the movie: the title comes from the folk
song A la claire fontaine, which I almost know, so
I’ve had it running through my head a little bit wrong all day.

http://rcm.amazon.com/e/cm?t=laymusicorg-20&o=1&p=8&l=as1&asins=B001M72J68&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=1572522127&fc1=000000&IS2=1&lt1=_blank&m=amazon&lc1=0000FF&bc1=000000&bg1=FFFFFF&f=ifr

Updating

I’m really sorry its been so long (over a year now) since I uploaded new stuff,
and I still haven’t done that, but I went through the stuff that
was still using ancient versions of lilypond and uploaded some of
it that is now using less ancient versions, including:

  • Campian, Never weather-beaten Saile
  • Dowland, Me, me and none but me
  • Gibbons, The Silver Swan
  • Josquin, Deploration on the death of
    Ockegham
  • Morley, April is in my mistress’ face

Nokia 810 syncs with google calendar

E-reading history

When I had my first pocket computer (a Palm III in 1999 or so), I discovered
that while I could live without my appointments and TODO list in
my pocket, I really liked being able to carry books around and
read them without adjusting lighting, and with adjusting the type
size to the state of my eyes. Since then, I’ve upgraded
the pocket device several times, including twice when the current
one wasn’t even broken.

Most recently, my Nokia 770 died with the White Screen of
Death. I had really liked it as a reader, with the size and
resolution of the screen being at a really good point, where you
can still get a reasonable fraction of a page on it at a readable
type size, but it still slips into a pocket easily.

When I bought it, I had hopes of being able to use the other
features, and found I mostly didn’t. The music player didn’t play
music loud enough, I didn’t feel like working hard enough to sync
the calendar with the google calendar that’s easiest to use on the
desktop and laptop, the sites I wanted to browse when I could
connect wirelessly seemed to use flash…

So when I had to replace it, I considered the Nokia 810, for
which the software is a bit better supported and which includes
features that aren’t on the 770, but also thought
about the ipod touch or a netbook.

In the end, I decided that the right screen size was the
important thing, and went with the 810.

As a reader, it’s at least as good as the 770. The screen is
the same size. I miss the built-in hard case, but the vinyl
envelope seems to work pretty well, and the foldout stand actually
does make it easier to use as a reader. The FBReader version
seems to be behind the one on my Ubuntu 8.10 desktop, which is a
pity since there’s a new feature that lets you download books
directly from some of the online free libraries that would be
really useful.

Calendar

Of the normal PIM functions, the only one I really wish I had
was the calendar. I’m pretty good at keeping my immediate future
in my head, but I’ve several times double-booked by depending on
that, and it would be good to not have to.

The built-in calendar seems pretty basic. For instance, I
haven’t figured out a way to configure it so that the daily view
shows you evening appointments.

However, there is an application called erminig which will
sync your google calendar with the GPE calendar. (This is not the
calendar that comes pre-loaded, but it can be easily installed
from the application manager.)

I installed this in my first set of installs from the
application manager, but stopped fiddling with it when my first
attempt said it couldn’t connect to google.

This week on the maemo-users list there was a long thread
started by someone who had bought an 810 and had been unable to
find an application he really wanted to use enough to be worth the
trouble of putting it in his pocket. At various points this was
about to degenerate into a flamefest, but a number of people
answered seriously about what they use their nokia tablets for,
including a couple who said they used erminit.

So I started another thread asking how they’d done it. Nobody
really said anything helpful, except that if I could get to google
calendar via the browser, it must be something wrong with the
erminig configuration. So I found the config file and looked at
it, and sure enough, it had my password in the clear, and it
started with a capital letter. The real password begins with a
lower-case letter. Fiddling with the shift key didn’t seem to
change this.

On my next dog walk, I realized that I could just enter some
other letter as the first letter, and then delete it, so I did
that and was successfully able to connect to google. Then the
next issue was that my 8 PM Monday recorder lesson was listed as 1
AM on Tuesday, but that was obviously a time zone issue, and I
fixed it. So now I have a working calendar that I can carry in my
pocket. I’ll let you know if there are problems with the syncing,
but so far it looks pretty good.

I get annoyed at people who complain about the quality of Free
Software and don’t report the bugs they find, so I did spend the
time this morning to register at maemo.org and fill out the bug
report.

But if you run into anyone claiming that the 810 is ready for
consumer use out of the box, you can tell them this story.

Other stuff

Another application I downloaded immediately, and even went to
the computer store and spent $8 on an adaptor for it, is the one that
allows a USB keyboard to plug in to the 810. This does seem to
work, but I haven’t used it yet. If I were to figure out how to
install emacs, it would be more useful.

I haven’t even bothered to install the app that would let me
use the camera. I hardly ever use the one on my cell phone — the
pictures that have been on this blog were taken with a real
digital camera.

I was interested in trying the GPS feature, and it did find my
latitude and longitude and let me look at it on a map, but in
order to get navigation you need to send somebody some more money,
and it sounds like if you’re going to do that, a special purpose
GPS device is still a better deal.

I haven’t yet tried the PDF reader, and most of the browsing
I’ve done hasn’t worked well without my glasses. But maybe
they’ll turn out to be of some use.

http://rcm.amazon.com/e/cm?t=laymusicorg-20&o=1&p=8&l=as1&asins=B001CX5UAO&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=B001FA1NZK&fc1=000000&IS2=1&lt1=_blank&m=amazon&lc1=0000FF&bc1=000000&bg1=FFFFFF&f=ifr

Site updated

I’ve been very remiss in not updating the site, although I have
been doing some transcriptions, and a certain amount of editing
old transcriptions as problems appear.

I can’t give you a good list of what’s changed, but the edits
to everything that’s already on the site have now been
uploaded.

I’m hoping to get to adding the new things that have been
transcribed since last summer soon.

And before the Boston Early Music
Festival in June, I hope to have the site redesigned, with
better search capabilities, and a more streamlined way for me to
add things.