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.

Moved Blog to WordPress

I have moved the blog from blosxom to wordpress. Blosxom is good software for what it does, but I need features that work out of the box on WordPress, and to use them in blosxom, I would need to write or debug perl code, and that isn’t what I want to be working on.

I intend to eventually move the whole site to wordpress, so give me your comments on the format.

I have imported the old blog entries into the new wordpress blog, so you should be able to read, search, and comment on them.

Plans for May 23 meeting

Plans for May 23 meeting

[cantabile] Plans for the May 23 meeting

Schedule

Once we start working on a new program, the dropin people seem to
abandon us even when we say we’re happy to have their help.
This is a problem, because not all the people who want to
perform start coming all the time. So last week we had a couple
of recorder pieces we would have liked to try, but we didn’t
have 4 recorder players to try them with.

So here’s the schedule from now to the next performance. All
rehearsals start at 7:45.

  • May 23, dropins welcome but mostly working on music for June
    21.
  • May 30, dropins welcome but mostly working on music for June
    21.
  • June 6, rehearsal for June 21 performers
  • June 13, rehearsal for June 21 performers
  • June 20, rehearsal for June 21 performers
  • Wednesday, June 21, Performance. We will be playing from 7:30 until
    9. I’m requesting that all performers arrive at the site at 7
    PM. There will be a break in the middle of the performance for
    the presentation of some awards, so we’ll only be playing for an
    hour or so.

For the performers’ rehearsals,
everyone should arrive in time to set up so that the actual
rehearsal can start at 7:45. For most people this seems to mean
about 7:30. If people are actually arriving ready to start at
7:45, we could start off with a vocal warmup, which I think
would improve both our sound and our comfort level on pieces
that are at the edge of our ranges.

One of the performer’s rehearsals is likely to be coached by John
Tyson.

There are directions to the performance venue and links to public transportation information
on the Conference site.

Performer signup

So far, we have 4 people officially signed up for the June 21
performance. I need to know who’s playing by the end of this
week, so that we can start assigning parts and constructing a
real playlist.

We did much better on taking the Walk for Hunger seriously than
we’ve done the previous few performances. But there’s still
room for improvement, even on the easy part of arriving at
rehearsals and performances on time and ready to play. We’ve
scheduled more unfamiliar music for this one than usual, so
please don’t sign up unless you plan to make most of the
rehearsals between now and then and to make the performers’
rehearsals and the performance on time.

One of the encouraging things about the Walk for Hunger performance
was how much better the performance was than the last
rehearsal. This means that when people want to, they can work
on their own to improve the weaknesses in their individual
parts. Now let’s see if we can do that work before the final
rehearsals, so that we can start working seriously on what we
sound like when we all know what’s coming next.

Music planning

I’ve been recording most of my planning in the wiki. If you’re
playing, you’re welcome to help.

I have a script that will print a notebook of all the music in the
wiki playlist. If you want me to run it for you, let me know. I don’t promise that we won’t do a lot of adding, subtracting, and rearranging this notebook, though.

This week, Stuart won’t be able to come, so I thought it would be a
good week to work out some recorder arrangements. One piece
that might be fun to play with is Susato’s
Ronde V
, which I transposed for Aldo’s Junior High band into
parts for Bb, Eb, F, and G transposing instruments. This way,
we can stick people on instruments with fingerings they haven’t
learned.

If you look at the playlist, you will see that there are several
Dowlands that we haven’t done very often, so we really do have
to run those again and see which we think we can play in public
in less than a month.


Laura Conrad



Last modified: Mon May 22 11:36:30 EDT 2006

Plans for the May 16 meeting

Plans for the May 16 meeting

[cantabile] Plans for the May 16 meeting

This is a drop-in meeting, although we will be doing some
exploration of pieces that we might play on the June 21
program. You can edit the tentative list at the
wiki playlist
. Here’s the current version:

  • Ingalls, Night Thought
  • Instrumental fantasias, solos, and duets
  • Ravenscroft, My fearful dreams
  • Dowland Set
    • Come, Heavy Sleep
    • Come again
    • Thinkst thou then by thy fayning
    • Rest awhile, you cruel cares
    • Sleep, wayward thoughts
    • Awake sweet love

We have two Jenkins Pavanes that Bonnie set for us, which she
thinks will go well on the large recorders.

Schedule

We’ll be meeting every Tuesday for the forseeable future. The
meetings start promptly at 7:45, and are at my place, 233
Broadway, Cambridge.

The May
meetings will probably all be dropin and the first three June meetings will
probably be limited to people playing the June 21 gig. Please
feel free (encouraged, pressured…) to come to the dropin
meetings if you’re thinking of playing the gig, and also free
(encouraged…) if you aren’t thinking of playing it but would
be interested in the music.

June 21 plans

I’m trying out a new Wiki technology on the plans for this gig. This
one is a real Wiki, that anyone can edit. It’s at http://www.laymusic.org/dreams06/.
I especially need to know who’s thinking of playing on this
program. You aren’t making a hard and fast commitment yet, but
obviously we can’t program 5-part pieces if only 3 people are even
thinking of doing the gig.

Last meeting

We played:

  • Susato
  • Purcell Fantasia 7
  • Vive la serpe
  • More Susato

Laura Conrad



Last modified: Tue May 16 10:45:27 EDT 2006

Plans for the May 9 meeting

Plans for the May 9 meeting

[cantabile] Plans for the May 9 meeting

We resume our regularly scheduled drop in meetings tonight. There are
a number of things we’d like to accomplish; I’m sure we’ll manage at
least some of them:

  • Some of us are playing Susato for Needham Hospital Nurses’
    Appreciation Day tomorrow, and there’s been some feeling that people
    would like to go over that even though the organizer of the event
    didn’t think it was necessary.
  • We’ve had those big recorders around for a while and not been able
    tu use them because we didn’t want to take them to the River on
    Sunday, so I want to try out some recorder pieces at 8 foot pitch.
  • We need to start trying out repertoire for our June 21 gig. My
    current plan is to start with Ingalls “Night Thought” and end with a
    Dowland set, and in between to do some instrumentals and maybe some
    solos and duets.
  • I really like that Gibbons May piece that Bonnie found for us, and
    would like to work on it some more.

Walk for Hunger report

It was fun, and I think we played well. There are a few pictures
in our gallery, and I think we’ll
get some more later. Thanks to everyone who played, or helped
rehearse, or supported us in any way.

Schedule

We’ll be dropin for the rest of May, and probably limited to the
people playing June 21 for June. As far as I know, we’ll be meeting
at the usual time and place every Tuesday.


Laura Conrad



Last modified: Mon May 1 14:59:44 EDT 2006