Laura Conrad

Concert yesterday

Here’s the program.
We didn’t take pictures yesterday, but here’s one from last week in Lowell, at the ALL gallery: [Cantabile band]

The Cantabile
Band does a fair amount of performing for a dropin group, but
it’s mostly things like The
Walk for Hunger and background music at Boston Wort Processors picnics.

There’s a big difference between that and playing a concert for
a bunch of people who have paid money for the privilege of sitting
and listening to the music.

This difference may be particularly acute in the case of the
Renaissance polyphony that we specialize in. There’s a fairly
long distance between being able to sing it well enough that
everybody in the group enjoys it, or so that people walking by
think it’s pretty, and being able to actually stand in front of an
audience and put together each line in its precise relationship to
all the other lines so that the audience can hear it all.

Five people from the dropin group signed up for this concert.
Three of us don’t treat it as a dropin group, and come every week,
and learn the music we work on as we work on it. Two of them come
much less often, and started rehearsing this playlist in January
with very little acquaintance with any but the more commonly
performed pieces.

In addition, the soprano/harpsichord player fell and broke two
ribs and her left wrist in early February.

So it was with some trepidation that I approached this
concert. I knew it would be a stretch when I signed up to do it.
I think I can report with satisfaction that we did stretch. I can
also report that if you’d been there you could have seen a number
of places where we could have stretched harder or better. But I
think the concert yesterday was what that group can do this week,
and if we turn out to be able to do something better next month or
next year, it will be largely because of the work we did the last
two months.

Things I personally learned include:

Always make anything you’re playing comfortable. If it
isn’t after a couple of weeks of practicing, either change it or
drop it. One of the pieces I got a lot of compliments on after
the concert was the van Eyck variations on Come Again,
which I interspersed with the 6 verses of Dowland’s song as the
ending number on the concert. Since it was interspersed, I had
to play it on the G alto so that it would be in the same key we
were singing in. On that instrument, I can’t reliably hit the
low G, so I was getting tense about it and not hitting other
things which should be easy. So I just rewrote the piece so
that there weren’t any low G’s.
Always make sure that everybody knows where the cadence
points are, and rehearse starting from each of them. This way,
if someone makes a terrible mistake and gets lost, they can get
back again at the next cadence. In the Lowell tryout, it turned
out some people couldn’t do this on The Silver Swan.
We worked hard on that piece on last Tuesday’s rehearsal.

Drop in tomorrow

Thanks to those who played the concert yesterday, and those who came. I
think we all had a lot of fun.

If you’ve gotten out of the habit of thinking about coming over
on Tuesdays, try to get back into it tomorrow. We’ll have new and
different music, and I got lots of food for my birthday, including
a very nice cake.

It will be at the usual time (7:45 PM) and place.

We’ll be dropin at least through March.

I’ll need to know by the March 30 rehearsal whether you’re
planning to play the Walk
for Hunger on May 3. If it’s mostly music that’s familiar to
most of the people playing, we may not have to rehearse the whole
month of April, but if we decide we want to learn some new May
music, or we get lots of people who haven’t played previous Walks
or didn’t play this concert, we’ll need at least the four Tuesdays
in April.

The sedge is still not withered from the backyard

I had a gift certificate to White Flower Farms a couple of years ago.
The thing I wanted to buy most (rhubarb) cost less than the
certificate, so I had to order something else, so I looked at the
ornamental grasses and picked out a sedge. I made the mistake of
planting it behind the mint and the daylilies, which are taller
than it was, so it wasn’t a lot of use in the summertime, but all
through the winter of 2007-2008, it stayed green and nicely
shaped.

That winter was what I think of as normal, and it might have in
fact been on the mild side of normal, but it certainly got lots
colder than it does in any of the places Keats ever hung out, so I
started thinking about what he could possibly have meant in La Belle Dame Sans
Merci when he said:

The sedge has wither’d from the lake,
And no birds sing.

I discussed this with my
sister, who has a degree in botany, while we were walking by a
lake in early April, and she pulled up a sedge plant to look at it. It was a bit
more withered than the one I got from White Flower Farms, but much
less withered than any of the other grass-like plants growing by
that lake.

So we concluded that when Keats said, “The sedge is wither’d
from the lake,” he meant, “Even the sedge is wither’d
from the lake.” And his audience probably understood that it
meant that it was the end of a really long hard winter, instead
of just getting the generalized picture of bleakness that we
get.

This has been one of those winters here in Southern New
England. As an urban dog-walker, I measure the difficulty of a
winter by how many days there’s ice on the sidewalks, not by
which species of grass-like thing has withered from the lake
shore, but this has been a bad one. And as you can see, the sedge is still nice
and green. Maybe the sedges Keats knew were more
wither-prone than the one White Flower Farms sent me. Or maybe
he was writing science fiction, and imagining that the
knight-at-arms was hanging out somewhere colder than he had ever
experienced.

Today I’m giving a concert, with
lots of practicing and packing beforehand, and celebrating my
birthday afterwards, so there won’t be time for a blog post.
So I’ve scheduled one from the spindle; I hope it works.

The sedge is not withered from my backyard

Pruning roses

This was the first day the ice has been melted enough from our
back yard that I wanted to get back to my plot and prune the
roses. The buds are already swelling, so it should have been done
a week or two ago, but the dog-walking already gets me more
walking on ice than I want, so the roses have had to wait.

The actual pruning isn’t that much fun, but you get to see all
the leaves that have already struggled through the still mostly
frozen ground.

woodruff and wild onions struggle through frozen ground

New Tuner

My old Korg MT-120 tuner, which allows tuning multiple
temperaments, has gotten really flaky. Last Sunday, when we were
trying to use it to tune a harpsichord for a performance, we had
to give up and use a cheaper tuner that only does equal
temperament. So I decided it was time to buy a new tuner.

A builder on the harp list had recommended a strobe tuner, the
Sonic Research Turboo Tuner
ST-122.

So I ordered it Sunday night, and it arrived yesterday at lunch
time.

I immediately tuned up both harps in equal temperament. It did
go faster watching the lights than it does with a needle, but I’m
not sure whether it’s because I’m not obsessing about getting
lights to stand still the way I was about getting the
needle on 0. In any case, it sounded like a pretty good
tuning.

So far, I’ve been having trouble using the strobe for telling
whether my recorder playing is in tune, but it could be that I’ll
get used to it.

This morning, I entered quarter-comma and fifth-comma meantone
temperaments, and will go downstairs and try them on the harps and the
recorders.

I was worried about whether it would be possible to enter
something as complicated as a temperament on a box with only 8 buttons,
and it was a bit slow at first, but I picked up speed as I got
used to it. And it isn’t something you’re going to do every day.
It does seem like a lot of data to enter on a device that can’t be
backed up, though.

Links

For those who have no idea what a temperament is, try the

wikipedia article.

For those who wondered why I wanted fifth-comma as well as
quarter-comma, read Why
I hate Vallotti… by Ross Duffin.

The way I translate the name of a tuning into the numbers to
enter into the tuner is via a program called scala.
It comes with almost 4000 tunings defined, and you can load them
and look at all kinds of data about them, or export them so that
MIDI players can use them.

Of the two Ross Duffin books below, I haven’t read the one on
temperaments but based on the article pointed to above, I would
expect it to be much more readable than most of the stuff written
about such things. Shakespeare’s Songbook is an
indispensible reference if you’re going to do anything at all with
music in that period.

http://rcm.amazon.com/e/cm?t=laymusicorg-20&o=1&p=8&l=as1&asins=0393334201&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=0393058891&fc1=000000&IS2=1&lt1=_blank&m=amazon&lc1=0000FF&bc1=000000&bg1=FFFFFF&f=ifr

Squash Pudding

I’ve been cooking something easy to eat and share at the end of the Cantabile Band
rehearsals. It started when I got the farm share last fall,
and had lots more vegetables than one person could possibly eat,
so I started making them into soup. Now I do it even when there
isn’t something that needs to be used up, because chopping
vegetables at 6 PM to eat soup at 10 seems less rushed than
trying to throw together a dinner and eat it before people start
arriving at 7:30.

Last Tuesday, the thing I had that should be used up was two
butternut squash from last fall’s farm share. The squash soup
that I’d made one week hadn’t been a great success, and I was
too lazy to make piecrust for squash pie, so I decided to make a
squash pudding instead.

googling turned up a recipe
that looked doable, with some modifications:

I couldn’t figure out what the baking powder could possibly be
doing there, so I left it out.
I usually reduce the sugar, so I
used just a half cup instead of three quarters. Next time I may try substituting maple
syrup.
I was too lazy to get out the blender, so I just mashed
the squash with a fork.One really nice feature of this way of doing it that way was that I just
baked it in the same pyrex bowl I mixed it in, so no extra
cleanup.
The recipe called for 2 medium butternut
squash, and I had a medium and a large, so I left half of the
large one out.
It’s winter, so running the oven is essentially
free, so I baked it instead of microwaving it. One really nice feature of this way of doing it was that I just
baked it in the same pyrex bowl I mixed it in, so no extra
cleanup.

I liked it; most people had seconds; one person asked for the
recipe. The quarter or so left was a good sized breakfast the
next morning.

Blogging in my 59’th year

Today’s my 58th birthday. I’ve been reading Lorelle
on WordPress since I started having my own wordpress blog.
Last year, I got hooked on Mike Cane’s blog
where he posted (almost) every day in 2008. I was mostly
interested in his take on the ebook industry, and found his rants
on the economic downturn much less interesting, but the idea of
just writing every day is a good one, and I decided to try it.
The New Year was a pretty busy time for me, so I missed starting
then, so I decided to start on my birthday.

Some of the things I do, and therefore expect to write about
are:

Directing the Cantabile
Renaissance Band.
Publishing music.
Playing with various technologies, including those for
running websites, reading books, playing music…
Living with a dog.
Living in a condo. I’m currently president of the condo
association. I have a small garden plot in the back, that I may
share pictures of.

Anyway, one of the reasons writing on the computer has taught
me more about
writing than writing classes in school did is that you get
feedback from people who wanted to read what you wrote. So
please comment or email me when I say something you’re
interested in.

News from the Cantabile Band

The 5 of us playing the concert this Spring are working hard,
but I wanted to update the rest of you about the concert and the
Cantabile Band’s future plans.

Concert Dates

In addition to the previously announced performance on March 1
at 3 PM at the Loring-Greenough house, we will also be performing
at the ALL (Arts League of Lowell) Art Gallery on Sunday, February
22 at 1 PM.

Please try to make it to one or the other performance. In
addition, here’s the flyer, which has
more information about when and where, and has the program on the
back. It would be helpful if you could distribute it and post
it, especially if you live or work anywhere near the venues.

Future plans

In March, we will resume our dropin meetings on Tuesdays at
7:45 at my place. I hope to see
some of you then.

On May 3, we will be playing our usual Walk for Hunger
performance, for 40,000 or so people on Greenough Boulevard.
Please consider playing with us then, or at least coming by to
listen. Some or all of the April meetings will be reserved for
rehearsing that performance.

Got a New Toy

Santa Claus gave me some money, and I hadn’t bought a new
instrument for a while, so I gave Amazon $300 for an EWI-USB.

It’s a MIDI wind instrument controller that doesn’t have its own
battery or sounds, so it’s cheaper and lighter than serious wind
instrument controllers have been in the past.

My fantasy was that I would plug it in and immediately start
wailing away on Gershwin and Duke Ellington without having to buy
and learn to play a saxaphone or flugelhorn.

This hasn’t happened yet (I got it Wednesday afternoon) for two
reasons:

The fingering is called flute fingering, which is
similar to recorder fingering and I did play modern flute for a
while in high school. So I expected to just be able to pick it
up. Within one octave I can, but to go into the next octave,
you do a different thumb movement than on the recorder, and the
fingerings, instead of being different for a couple of notes, go
right back to being the same as the first octave. So using
recorder fingering notation, and ignoring all the extra keys
that are used for producing accidentals without forked
fingerings, c is “2”, and D is “12345”. (With the thumb up on
the next roller). I’m sure I can learn to do this eventually,
but not yet.
I knew I was going to have to boot windows to run the
software that came with it; what I didn’t know was that even
when I did that, the software was going to be useless for
playing anything. I think the name for what I hear when I load
an instrument and play is “dropouts”. In any case, what happens
is that several times a second, whatever sound is playing stops,
so the effect is something like a vaguely pitched vacuum cleaner
motor. If you listen real hard, you can tell the saxaphone
vacuum cleaner from the tuba vacuum cleaner, but I don’t think
anyone would be able to identify them from scratch. Or enjoy
listening to Gershwin with those sounds. Note that no other
MIDI synth I’ve tried, on either Windows or Linux, has this problem.

So what I’ve actually spent pieces of the last two days on is
figuring out how to load a soundfont from hammersounds into a LINUX
synthesizer and play it. I think I have that pretty much solved,
so the next thing is to figure out how to move the fingers. So it
will probably be a couple of weeks before it’s ready to amaze my
friends with. But maybe it will work out some day. And when it
does, it will be something I can join pickup rock bands with, if
the opportunity ever arises.

For the record, the LINUX setup is qjackctl; start jackd; start
qsynth; load soundfont if different from last time; connect qsynth
to EWI-USB in qjackctl connect window, alsa pane; select the
instrument you want in qsynth, and play. If you want to record
what you’re doing, you also start rosegarden. The default
connections may work here, or maybe you have to connect rosegarden
and qsynth. I have made this work, but I’m not yet playing well
enough to want to record it for posterity. But when I am, it will
be an alternate way to input music for transcription in lilypond.
(That’s another post.)

WordPress upgrade

If this blog looks different to you, it’s because I upgraded to
WordPress 2.7 on Sunday, December 21.

It mostly went pretty smoothly, although there were a couple of
scares:

Some pictures disappeared. This turned out to be because
I had ended up deleting wp-content/uploads. Be sure to follow
the instructions about backing up your blog before doing an
upgrade (I had), and you will be able to fix this kind of
problem. I’m still unconvinced that the automatic upgrading is
going to work on my system, since a bunch of other allegedly
automagic stuff doesn’t.
The silly “>>” bullet style came back. That’s just editing
the default .css file, but I should get myself a style that has
a good bullet style to start with.
It looked like the raw-html input wasn’t going to work, so I
tried a plugin called WP Unformatted, which has very little
documentation and what there is is pretty incomprehensible. It
seemed like it would work ok for new posts, but would
necessitate going back to the old posts nad setting a custom
field in all of them. Also, I have enough trouble remembering
to set a category, I don’t want to also have to set a custom
field. In general, anything you can do in emacs (like the
start-raw comment) is preferable to anything you have to
remember to do in a GUI.
So I went back and tested the old raw-html plugin, and
it seems to be working OK. Let me know if you find any problems
that matter.
One of the good things I did during the upgrade was switch
to managing my sidebar with widgets instead of editing the
sidebar.php file. Unfortunately, the “monthchunks” plugin I was
using doesn’t work for 2.7, and I haven’t found a good
substitute. Let me know if you have any suggestions.
The quotes plugin I was using has been superceded by a newer
and probably better one. Unfortunately, I was too lazy to write
a program to convert the database, so I had to spend some time
putting the quotes into the new database by hand. But you can
sit on the page and grab a new quote without reloading the whole
page now. Isn’t Ajax wonderful?

Anyway, let me know about anything you see that you don’t like,
or anything you don’t see that you miss.

In general I recommend staying up to date on important
software, but it is more of a nuisance with software like
WordPress that has a lot of contributions that aren’t integrated
into the core software.