Laura Conrad

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.

Schedule for the Holiday Season

This is mostly to remind you that we will be taking a rare
Tuesday off meeting tomorrow, December 23.

Please come next Tuesday, December 30, as it will be our last
dropin meeting for a couple of months.

Tuesdays between January 6 and February 24 are restricted to
and compulsory for the performers on the March 1 concert.

Other events

If you’re anywhere near Fall River on New Year’s Eve, there
will be an Early Music Venue from 7:30 to 10:00 PM at the Fall River First Night
celebration: program.

Report on the December 2 meeting

There seems to be an epidemic of plague running through the
Cantabile Band. I hope everybody recovers soon.

We played:

Van Eyck recorder solos related to Elizabethan tunes:
- Daphne
- Pavaene Lachrimae
- Comagain
- Excusemoy
Charlton Christmas duets
DeLoach Christmas duets
Chedeville Christmas duets
Praetorius Christmas duets
Goldstein Christmas duets

Schedule

The meetings, rehearsals and the party are at my place. The
meetings and rehearsals start at 7:45 PM.

Tuesday, December 9, regular meeting
Saturday, December 13, 4 PM, Christmas party
Tuesday, December 16, regular meeting
Tuesday, December 23, no meeting.
Tuesday, December 30, regular meeting, unless we end up with
a New Year’s Eve gig, in which case this will be a rehearsal for
that.
Tuesday, January 6 — Tuesday, February 27, rehearsals for
March 1 concert, limited to and compulsary for performers in
that concert.
Sunday, March 1, 3 PM, Concert at Loring-Greenough House in
Jamaica Plain. Please come and bring all your friends and
relations. It’s a beautiful 18th century house, and in addition
to the music there will be an elegant
tea reception following the concert.

Party

I have asked for “consideration” for parking for the party, so
don’t worry about parking in permit only areas on Broadway,
Windsor, and Clark Streets. I haven’t done this in the past, but
we’ve usually had it on a Sunday, when the permit only parking
restrictions don’t apply, and I have the impression they may have
stepped up Saturday enforcement recently.

There will be a vegetarian and a carnivorous main course; side
dishes, appetizers, and deserts are welcome.

Please invite anyone you think would enjoy the party.

Cantabile Christmas Party: December 13, 2008

Come to the Cantabile Renaissance
Band Christmas Party
on December 13, 2008, starting at 4 PM, at Laura
Conrad’s place, 233
Broadway, Cambridge.

Bring any food or drink you want to share, any instruments you
want to play, and a cheerful voice. If there’s music you
want to do, bring 10 copies or so.

This is a tell everybody you know to bring everybody they know
party. Here are some invitations to print and give
the people you want to invite.

The pictures on the invitation are by Hans
Baldung, a contemporary of Durer. The Christmas carol snippet
in the heading is from the West Gallery tune, Shepherds
Rejoice which represents the opposite tradition in
Christmas art:

No gold nor purple royal shining things

Baldung drew lots of gold and purple royal shining things.

I’ve asked for “consideration” for parking, so don’t worry about parking in the permit only spaces on Broadway, Clark St, and Windsor St.

Report on the November 18 meeting

We played:

Duets from Thesaurus Musicus
Weelkes:
- Come, sirrah Jack, ho
- The Nightingale, the organ of delight
- O now weep now sing
- Some men desire spouses
Dowland:
- Thinkst thou then by thy fayning
- Come away, come sweet love
- Rest awhile, you cruel cares
- Sleep, wayward thoughts
- All ye, whom love or fortune hath
  betraid;
- Wilt thou unkind thus reave me of my heart,}
Purcell, Down with Bacchus

Schedule

Our regularly scheduled dropin sessions at my place will
happen on Tuesdays starting at 7:45 PM from now until Christmas.
We’ll have to discuss
December 23; I normally leave town then.

At some point after that, meetings will be restricted to the
people performing on the March 1 concert at the Loring-Greenough
House.

Party

Based on the small number of people who responded to my
request for feedback about when to have the party, it looks like Saturday,
December 13 will be the best date. If that isn’t good for you
and you want to come, complain soon, or I’ll start
sending out invitations for then.

I’m now open to feedback
about when it should start. In general, I prefer later, which
gives me more time for cooking and cleaning, but of
course the people who turn into pumpkins at 8:30 want to start
in the middle of the afternoon. So tell me your preferred time,
and I’ll decide something based on consensus.

West Gallery music in context

The West Gallery
Quire, whose membership overlaps heavily with this group,
will be performing at St. Mary’s Church in Newton Lower Falls
this Sunday, in the context of their 10 AM service. If you’re
interested in this music and haven’t gotten to the monthly
workshops where you could play and sing it yourself, this would be a good way to find out
what it’s about. It’s also one of the better ways to hear the
way voices sound with a serpent.

The Cambridge Revels is
using a West Gallery theme this year, and has the Mellstock band
(including Phil Humphries on serpent)
performing with them. Bruce Randall and Renni Boy are also
performing. Tickets will probably sell out soon, so if you want
to go, order your tickets now.