Schedule
We’ll continue to meet on Tuesdays at 7:45 PM at my place for the forseeable future. We’ll be doing our usual mix of familiar music and sightreading.
Last Meeting
We played:
The spelling of dueil in the Josquin Mille Regrets is indeed the one used in the Oxford Book of French Chansons.
The concert Saturday was a success, and now we can resume our casual, drop-in sessions, with lots of sightreading exciting new music, and playing any old music people want to see again. We will meet tomorrow, Tuesday, July 25, at 7:45 PM at my place.
Bonnie and I have both been transcribing at close to our usual rate, and we haven’t been having time to check it all out, so there are several new things to try. I think there’s some Ravenscroft that we haven’t done, and I’ve done the Josquin Mille regrets. I’ve also done an Orlando Gibbons In Nomine. And of course, there are several things we’ve tried and haven’t had time to work on like the new Byrd (Lord in thy Rage rebuke me not) and the Jenkins Pavanne‘s.
If we do feel like working on something specific, I’d like to solidify the Swan set.
If there’s something specific you’ve been looking forward to singing now that we’re singing anything we want to, let me know so that I can have the music out instead of fumbling for it in rehearsal.
Concert report
It was a good concert, and we helped make that happen. The compliments I got afterwards specifically mentioned that they liked hearing the singing with the cello.
I was pleasantly surprised with the variety in the other sets. I especially liked the Shaker dance demonstration and the solo singer who sang some of the tunes in the Primitive Baptist style.
Last meeting
As expected, we worked mostly on the program for Sunday’s concert, but we finished our second run-through with 15 minutes to spare, so we sang Come again.
I’ve been listed as a recorder teacher on the Boston Recorder Society teachers’ list for some time, and I’ve gotten one student that way. It’s being a pleasant way to make a little extra money, and I’m learning at least as much as she is, so I’ve decided to see if I can get a couple more students. So I’ve made up a flyer that I will put up on some bulletin boards. If you know anyone in Cambridge who wants recorder lessons, send them my way.
More of the backlog. This was transcribed last winter by Kay Dekker, who was using the ABC export feature of Harmony Assistant. She was interested in whether it would work smoothly with abc2ly — the answer was that it was pretty good but there were a few glitches in the ABC that had to be fixed by hand.
Anyway, she had been transcribing a lot of Dunstable, and the piece my group likes is O Rosa Bella, so she sent me that one.
The July 18th meeting is restricted to the players on the July 22 performance. Everyone else is welcome to join us next week, July 25, when we resume our regularly scheduled dropin meetings.
Last meeting
At our last meeting, we played:
I usually don’t put things up on the site before my group has played them, but I promised this to someone who might need it next week, and we can’t play it until the week after next, so here it is. Let me know if there are any problems.
An In Nomine is a four or more part piece where one of the middle lines is playing the In Nomine chant tune in very long note values, and all the other parts are playing highly decorated and often rhythmically complex parts in short note values.
In Nomine‘s are great if you have a mixed group — if you have one person who can’t play as fast as the other people, they can play the In Nomine line, and if you have one very advanced person in the middle of a bunch of players who are high on being able to play rhythmically complex stuff, they can play the In Nomine line and work on their breath control. In our group, the serpent usually grabs that line.
Probably for at least some of those reasons, lots of great 16th and 17th century English composers wrote at least one; here’s one by Orlando Gibbons.
In honor of Bastille Day, I publish the version of La Marseillaise that we’ve been singing this time of year for several years. It’s just the tune, with all seven verses underlaid. The instrumentalists play from a four-part arrangement by Christian Mondrup.
Continuing to publish the backlog, today we have Lord in thy rage rebuke me not by William Byrd. Again, we’ve only done it once, since it doesn’t fit any of the gigs we’ve had the last couple of months, but we will surely get back to it. It’s good for a group with tenors and altos but no basses; the part called tenor is for a low alto and the part called bassus is for a tenor.
The transcription is another contribution by Bonnie Rogers. The lilypond conversion is the new style, with the notes in a separate file from the styling commands.
Less publishing over the last week, because my flaky old computer died on July 4, and I’ve been having to get everything installed on a shiny new computer.
But I finally got to testing the publishing procedure, and the first thing to go up is Browning by Elway Bevin. It’s a pretty challenging piece; we definitely used the rehearsal letters to get through it the first (and so far only) time we did it. But even the less experienced players were able to join on the tune, which is one of the big hits of the late sixteenth century.
The meeting will be mostly a rehearsal for the July 22 performance. We may have time for a little bit of other stuff (I like singing La Marseillaise this time of year, and I’ve improved the Browning we did last week), but basically, we’re going to get the Ingalls route decided on and run it a couple of times. So if you aren’t performing, you’re welcome to come, but I don’t know that I’d bother if I had to go any distance.
Last meeting
We did:
LayMusic.org 