Author: Laura Conrad

Plans for the July 6 meeting

Schedule

The next meeting of the Cantabile Renaissance Band will take place on Thursday, July 6, at 7:45 PM at my place.

Note the unusual day of the week. We decided it was easier to deal with that than with the unusual traffic patterns here on July 4, or with an unusual meeting location (which would still have required some of us to deal with the traffic patterns).

This meeting, and the following one on July 11, will have the first section devoted to rehearsing the Ingalls program for July 22. Those who are performing on that program should make an effort to arrive on time. The meeting on July 18 will be entirely devoted to the Ingalls program, and will be limited to those performing on July 22.

Last meeting

We played:

  • Ingalls Group:
    • Millennium
    • Friendship
    • Night Thought
  • Jenkins Group:
    • Pavan in D minor
    • Pavan in E minor
  • Ravenscroft, Joan come kisse me now
  • Isaac, Innsbruck, two settings
  • Byrd, Lord in thy rage rebuke me not
  • Susato, Ronde I
  • Slaves are they that heap up mountains

Plans for the June 26 meeting

Schedule

This week

We’re finally back to our regular drop-in groups. Come when you feel like it and suggest any music you want to play.

We’ll be playing some Ingalls, but we’ll also get back to our more normal Renaissance stuff.

There’s another Jenkins Pavanne that Bonnie’s transcribed that we’d like to do.

One of the advantages of having learned All ye whom love or fortune hath betraid is that it fits in our dying swan set, so we might play that. We also want to learn the Vecchi setting some time.

I probably won’t get to it for this week, but I dug out the Josquin setting of Mille Regretz and I’d like to transcribe it for us to do soon.

Next week

We have a problem with the Tuesday rehearsal following this one — it’s the Fourth of July. Our usual venue is not suitable for a rehearsal from 7:45 to 10 PM on the Fourth of July:

  • You can’t possibly park anywhere near here at 7:45.
  • You can’t possibly leave here at 10:00. That is, you can leave, but it will take you an hour and a half to get a mile away.
  • During the rehearsal time, it is unlikely that the percussion from the fireworks will be idiomatic or accurate for the music we’re playing.

There are several options for dealing with this problem:

  • We can have a party here, starting at 3 or 4 in the afternoon and going until midnight or so, with the music-making part of the party happening before the fireworks start. Then people who wanted to watch fireworks could go watch them, and maybe we could do some more singing afterwards.
  • We can skip the rehearsal that week. This is what we’ve done in the past, and if we didn’t have the Ingalls concert coming up, I’d be in favor of it.
  • We can rehearse some other time that week. I’ve polled a few people about Sunday night, and a couple of them aren’t available, but one of those is away for the whole week and wouldn’t come on Tuesday, either.
  • Someone who lives somewhere where there aren’t half a million people coming by to watch fireworks could offer to host this rehearsal.

After that

The July 11th meeting will still be open to dropins, although we will be spending time on the Ingalls program. The July 18 meeting is only for Ingalls performers. After that, we’re dropin for the forseeable future, unless we decide to do something crazy like make a demo tape.

Ingalls Concert

We will be working on the music for the Ingalls concert on July 22, but that’s three pieces of which we already know two pretty well, so it shouldn’t take up the whole meeting. We find the shape note stuff is a good warmup, so I’m going to plan to do the Ingalls first. This will accomplish several things:

  • People who aren’t interested in the Ingalls but do like the other stuff we do can just come a little late.
  • People who want to perform the Ingalls but need to get up early the next morning can rehearse without disrupting their schedule for several weeks.
  • People who are chronically late for everything will not have rehearsed the Ingalls, and therefore won’t be performing the Ingalls, so we won’t have to be stressed out before the performance about whether we have all the performers.

The program of our segment of the concert that I sent Tom Malone a couple of weeks ago says:

  • Millennium (instrumental followed by vocal)
  • Friendship (instrumental followed by vocal)
  • Millennium (instrumental)
  • Night Thought

This is not by any means cast in concrete — specifically if there’s a piece besides Friendship that people would rather learn, we can do that instead.

I need to know by the end of next week (June 30) who is planning on doing the Ingalls concert, so that we can start working on orchestrations.

Dreams Concert

Many thanks to all the people who worked hard to pull off a complex program. We now have 6 people who know some very beautiful music, and who played it for a couple of hundred people, who seemed to be enjoying it very much.

We also know several things that we need to work on a bit harder for the next performance. Chief among them is getting started gracefully and with the tempo set by the starter. We will be doing drills on that over the next few weeks.

More Billings is up

The Cantabile Renaissance Band has been doing a fair amount of shape note singing lately. Although the music dates from later than the period we concentrate on, it turns out to fit our abilities quite well, being polyphony written for amateurs to sing. While the tradition in this country is to sing it unaccompanied, we find having the instrumental support adds to our performances.

At our regular meetings, we normally do an “instrumental” versions of the vocal pieces, before we attempt to put both words and music together. The singers who don’t play instruments but do sing shape notes are enjoying having the shapes from lilypond 2.8 to sing.

What I put up today are three William Billings songs we enjoy:

  • Africa, with the verses that Isaac Watts wrote that don’t get into the hymnals. We sang it in honor of Mothers’ Day.
  • Lamentation over Boston. We sing this every year by the banks of the Charles River near Watertown for the Walk for Hunger.
  • Easter Anthem. I sang this in the Robert Shaw edition with a church choir once; it works better with the renaissance band. This version is transcribed from the Norumbega Harmony book. which includes the extended section Billings wrote for a later printing of his book. It wasn’t in the Robert Shaw edition.

New pieces up

Finally getting started on the backlog of everything I and my friends have been transcribing the last few months

There’s a new Thomas Campian, Fain would I love a fair young man

A recorder playing friend who was playing with a lute player emailed me asking where he could get a copy, and I said he could borrow my facsimile, or he could wait until I transcribed it, and it turned out to be pretty easy to transcribe, so I did it before he could come borrow the facsimile.

Also, Bonnie Rogers is continuing to transcribe the Orlando Gibbons madrigals from his 1612 publication of The First Set of Madrigals and Mottets of 5 Parts. The latest one is Now each flowery bank of May, in both the original key
and transposed down a third to F# minor.

Report on the May 30 meeting

We played:

  • In nets of Golden Wyres
  • The Silver Swan
  • Arcadelt, Il Bianco e dolce Cigno
  • Dowland, All ye whom love or fortune hath betraid
  • Ravenscroft, O my fearful dreams
  • Ingalls, Night Thought
  • Dowland, Sleep, wayward thoughts

Schedule

The next dropin meeting will be on June 27. Until then, meetings
are restricted to people playing the June 21 gig.

Then we will meet as usual on Tuesdays at 7:45 PM, except that the July 18 meeting will be
restricted to people playing the July 22 gig.

Plans for the May 30 meeting

Schedule

This is the last dropin meeting before we start working exclusively on the June 21 program. So if there’s something not on that program that you’ll miss if you don’t get to do it for a month, let me know, and we’ll do it. We might do some May music, since it’s the last meeting in May.

Our regular dropin meetings will resume on June 27.

June 21 program

I timed the playlist on the wiki, and it’s only 35 minutes. It can certainly be expanded and stretched out to fill an hour, but there’s also room for solos and duets if people have anything they want to play that would be suitable. So let me know. I would think 2-3 minute pieces would be the easiest to accommodate.

If you want me to print you out a notebook, let me know.

If you have a copy of All ye whom love or fortune hath betraid from before last Friday, please get a new one, either from the website or from me at rehearsal. I had indeed fixed up the tenor repeat, but not all the fixes had found their way into the PDF file.

New Blog

I’ve converted my blog to wordpress. I’m planning to eventually convert the whole laymusic.org site, so let me know if you have any problems with the layout or navigation or anything. If you subscribed by RSS feed, you have to resubscribe to the new feed.