Author: Laura Conrad

[publishing] Additions, July 23, 2005

Dowland

The newest from the Pilgrim’s Solace is “My heart and tongue were
twins.” It’s a really nice one, and not as difficult as some of the
other recent ones.

We did it a fourth down from the original key.

Isaac

We’ve been doing these as relaxing things for the end of a hard
rehearsal for quite a while, but for some reason they didn’t make it
to the web until today.

“Innsbruck, ich muss dich lassen” is well-known to most church
musicians as a hymn tune; here’s Isaac’s original setting, and a
double canon version.

Gervaise

We enjoyed the Bransles de Champaigne so much that I did “Dix
Bransles Gays” from the same book.

Sermisy

This is another one that I did some years ago, and just got around
ot putting up on the web now. John Tyson uses the tune to “Tant que Vivrai” with his
students for ornamentation practice. So I’d entered it so that I
could use the MIDI file to practice with, but never fixed up the word
underlay to upload it.

More lilypond testing

I decided it was taking too much mental energy thinking about whether
to convert to 2.6 from 2.0, and I should just decide to do it or not
do it.

So I picked two pieces, one vocal, and the other a dance, both
unbarred parts.

The dance piece converts without problems, but looks close to
identical in both versions. You can see if you agree, but I don’t see
any compelling reason to do a lot of work to go from this
to
this.

For the vocal piece, using abc2ly directly on the ABC works pretty
well, except that some of the lilypond snippets I have in %%ly
directives in the ABC need to be changed. However, I immediately
found a major problem with printing a second verse if you use
convert-ly on the lily 2.0 abc2ly output. So it isn’t really an
option to just switch to 2.6 and convert the previous pieces in a
large book. When I reported this as a bug, I was told something close
to that convert-ly doesn’t convert lyrics between 2.0 and 2.6.
(Actual email from Eric Sandberg: addlyrics (2.0) is converted to oldaddlyrics, which is strongly deprecated,
and pretty unsupported. It is known that it sometimes doesn’t work.

There is no good automated way to convert from oldaddlyrics to lyricsto, so
I’m afraid you’ll have to fix it manually.)

The thread has continued; see the
mailing list archives for further discussion.

This suggests that the Dowlands and Morleys are probably never
going to make it to 2.6. Maybe the next big project. But it does
mean that I have to keep a 2.0 environment working.

So I would say that the only obvious advantage to me of 2.6 over
2.0 is the unicode support, which is only important if I do more
Polish music, which I don’t really have any plans for. The default
font for printing lyrics has changed, and I suppose I could get used
to it, but I can’t say it bowls me over with its elegance. You can
see the difference if you look at
the
2.0 output
and
the
2.6 output.

There have been major changes to the underlying technology between 2.0
and 2.6. TeX is no longer the underlying layout engine, and lily is
producing its own postscript. So given this, it’s actually pretty
amazing that more things haven’t broken. But since I have TeX
installed and working well on my system, that isn’t really a reason
for me to change. Previously I’ve been motivated to do all the work
that converting both the lilypond source and the scripts that produce
the lilypond source by the promise of better looking music at the end
of the tunnel, but I don’t see that I have that in this case.

So until someone shows me a compelling reason to do otherwise, the
Serpent
Publications production environment is going to remain on 2.0.

I do have a script that allows me to test the current CVS version
of lilypond. When I’m feeling virtuous about contributing to open
source software, I will continue to smoketest the abc2ly and
convert-ly scripts to make sure they aren’t obviously broken. And
maybe this will show me that there are benefits to some future version
of lilypond that justify the conversion pain.

[cantabile] Plans for July 17 meeting

We’ll be meeting at the usual time (7:45) and place on Tuesday,
July 19.

Remember that on Tuesday, July 26, we will not be meeting, since a
number of us want to go to the West Gallery Workshop with Francis
Rhodes.

We’ll have a new Dowland, “Up merry mates”, and a new set of
Gervaise Bransles Gays. It’s also the day we sing all the
verses to “La Marseillaise”.

Aside from that, we take requests, and adjust
the repertoire to be suitable for whoever shows up.

[cantabile] Report on the July 19th meeting

We did:

  • Gervaise, Dix bransles Gays
  • Susato, Rondes, plus a few more
  • Drinking songs
    • Vive la Serpe
    • Slaves are they that heap up mountains
    • Cakes and ale
  • Dowland
    • Come, heavy sleep
    • Come again
    • Now, o now

Remember that we don’t meet on July 26, and everybody should go to
the West Gallery Quire
workshop with Francis Roads in Newton instead. So our next meeting is
August 2 at the usual time and place.

[cantabile] Report on July 5 meeting (with July schedule)

We played:

  • Morley, Cruel you pull away too soon
  • Dowland, My heart and tongue were twinnes
  • Vive la Serpe
  • Slaves are they that heap up mountains
  • Washington Post March
  • Il Bianco e dolce Cigno, Arcadelt and Vecchi

We decided to not meet on Tuesday, July 12, as several people had
other commitments, and those who don’t can see some of the people who
do if they want to by going to the MIT contra dance.

We will also not be meeting on Tuesday, July 26, because of the
West Gallery workshop with Francis Roads.

So the next meetings will be July 19 and August 2, at 7:45 PM at
the usual place.

[cantabile] Report on June 28th meeting

We played:

  • Gervaise, Dix Bransles de Champaigne
  • Morley, Farewell, disdainful
  • Dowland, Where Sinne sore wounding
  • Slaves are they that heap up mountains
  • Arcadelt, Il bianco e dolce Cigno
  • Vecchi, Il bianco e dolce Cigno
  • Let us drink and be merry

The discussion about how to get copies of “finished” works took
place after several people had left. But Anne would prefer xeroxing
to paying for xeroxing, and can get it free if she supplies paper.
So she has a ream of my paper, and will be doing 5 or 6 copies of the
latest Drinking Songs over the next couple of weeks. I will be
checking and correcting the Dowland Third Book over that time, and
will then look for a volunteer to xerox that. Those who feel they
should be contributing more to the group should consider how they could
assist that effort. Unlike many groups, this group doesn’t require a
financial contribution very often, but like all groups, it does need
everyone to be aware of the work that goes into making it work, and to
contribute to the work as well as they can.

It occurred to me while compiling the list of pieces we did that
someone raised a question about finding the pitches on the
“More…Fill…More…Fill” section of “Slaves are they” which we
didn’t answer, so we’ll try to work on that better the next time.

Another issue that’s come up recently is whether we should be doing
more dance music. It works better for background music gigs, and
Ishmael thinks that with some work on the style we could even get gigs
playing for real dancers. But of course if people are more interested
in the vocal music, it doesn’t make sense to take time from that. So
let me know what you think.