Author: Laura Conrad

Medway announcements from Bruce

Hello, everyone!

MEDWAY REHEARSALS

There will be two rehearsals for the Medway March 6 church service –
Thursday, Feb. 24 and Wednesday, March 2. They’ll be at 7:30 at the
Medway church (directions forthcoming, probably early next week).

Please come to at least one; if you’re free both nights, it would be
great if you can come to both.

I want to spend some time actually rehearsing all the music, including
some simple orchestration for some tunes (nothing more complex than
“voices only,” “voices and winds,” and so forth), and make sure we all
know what verses to do (as soon as I decide). Besides going over the
music, I want to make sure we have proper seating arrangements worked
out

If you can’t come to either rehearsal, please let me know. Maybe I can
schedule another rehearsal, although I’m not sure where or when. We
need more days in the week.

IF YOU NEED A RIDE to either rehearsal or to the service, send a
message to this list (at wg@serpent.laymusic.org) and hopefully
someone who’s going past your area can pick you up.

THE SONG LIST:

This is not the actual order, but these are the tunes we’ll do. Except
for Psalm 23, these are old familiar ones which most of you probably
know well.

  • PRELUDE:

    • Psalm 122
  • HYMNS & PSALMS:

    • Cranbrook (with congregation)

    • Zadock (after reading about King David)
    • Psalm 23 (after reading of the same)
    • Allendale or Frome, maybe, if we need another.

  • SERMON – one verse each, to illustrate the talk:

    • Lyngham

    • Birmingham
    • Stocks
    • Gibraltar
    • An Hymn for Easter Day
    • Otford
  • COMMUNION:

    • Gwehelog Grace
    • Lydia, if we need another.
  • OFFERTORY:

    • Corfe Castle
  • POSTLUDE:

    • Pentonville

There are some major butt-kickers on this list, but we will be about
24 in number, so as long as we all know our words and notes, we can
stay relaxed for most of it.

Please let me know if you have any questions. And stay tuned to this
channel for up-to-the-minute news bulletins!

Thanks,

Bruce

Cantabile Renaissance Band meeting reminder

The next meeting will be tomorrow, Tuesday, February 15, at 7:45 PM at
my place.

The next Dowland, “Go nightly cares”, is one we’ve done before, so
I may transcribe the one after that. In addition, we’ll try to
finalize the candidates for the river music set. The one we’re
thinking of that we haven’t done recently is the Vecchi “Il Bianco e
dolce cigno”. One of the two soprano parts is higher than any of us
likes singing, and the bass isn’t especially low, so we’ll try it
transposed this time.

We have performances coming up on Saturday, April 2 and Sunday,
May 1. (I have the official Walk For Hunger invitation, and have
replied to it, but have not yet received the official time and
location.) So I’d like to know as soon as possible who wants to play
these performances.

Since we aren’t really a performance group, we have in the past
performed with some people who don’t play with us regularly but like
performing. I would like to keep this to a minimum this year. So if
you haven’t been coming regularly and would like to play at either of
these gigs, let me know, and we’ll try to figure out a rehearsal
schedule that lets you get to at least a couple of rehearsals.

If we keep to our every other week schedule, we’ll be conflicting with
Roaring Jelly in April, so I’m suggesting the following schedule:

  • February 15
  • March 1
  • March 15
  • March 29 (this will probably be limited to and compulsory for the
    people playing the April 2 gig.)
  • April 5 (previously had said April 3)
  • April 19
  • April 26 (ideally limited to and compulsory for the people doing
    the Walk for Hunger.) This is probably a conflict with Roaring Jelly,
    and if that’s a problem for people who want to play May 1, we can talk
    about it.

I’ll be getting better set listings with links to all the music in
the next week or so. But the big picture is that we’ll do three sets
at the Walk for Hunger:

  • May music
  • River Music
  • Drinking songs

We will do either the River Music or the Drinking songs on April
2. If the schedule on May 1 is the way it’s been the last couple
years, we’ll do a 45 minute program twice, with some other group
performing in between.

No static webpages yet

I attempted to generate the static webpages on the main site, but
instead of writing .html files, it just spewed html out to stdout.

The documentation has something cryptic about needing the correct
passwords if your host isn’t honoring some convention, but no
information about how to give blosxom the password.

I wrote a query to the blosxom mailing list, which initially
bounced because yahoogroups decided to sulk because one mail message
bounced. It may be sulking in general, because I’ve gotten very
little yahoogroups mail this morning. However, I supposedly
reinstated my account, and have gotten some mail from them since then,
and the message I sent is on the website but hasn’t been answered.

It’s surprising that people as technically savvy as the blosxom people
must be are using yahoogroups instead of a mailing list that actually
works and can be fixed when it doesn’t.

Making progress with the Zaurus

Yesterday I reflashed Openzaurus 3.5.2 with the 56-8 Zimage. I
decided not to pivot_root to the sd card, but to reformat it as ext3
so that I could install most stuff to there.

I have opie-reader with the FixedMonofonts.

Justreader seemed to break the terminal, so I removed it.

The irk and the terminal in sideways work fine.

I figured out the mystery of how to install konqueror-embedded.
The answer is that you install libstdc++6 from the devel feed,
libpcre0 from the updates feed, and then install konqueror-embedded
with the -force-depends option.

Wireless seems to work, although I don’t have an open channel at
home any more. opie-wellenreiter installed with no problem, and
wasn’t finding anything either.

Sound

Audio is still a problem. xmms-embedded seems to play mp3’s. (I
only tested one; apparently there are some that don’t work, but the
one I tried was ok). Opie-recorder still says it can’t write to a
file, and opie-vmemo doesn’t seem to do anything at all. I can’t find
the command line program that I couldn’t use last time because
Justreader had already busted the console.

I did find a site
about how to develop sound on the Zaurus, and all the command line
stuff there works in a fashion. The record command line seems to be
writing a raw sound file without a header about the sampling rate, so
the play command line plays the file at a different speed depending on
what xmms has been doing. The first time I played it, it was too slow
so it sounded like I was speaking some slavic language very pompously,
and then I played the mp3 on xmms and then I sounded like a munchkin.

Nothing I’ve tried on the desktop computer seems to be able ot
decode the raw file.

So I will look harder to find a command line app, or see if tkcvox
can run under the compatibility mode, or something.

Compatibility

I attempted to install oz-compat and run my opera .ipk under it, and
was unsuccessful. I’m not sure that’s the right .ipk though.

Irish tenor serpent

The tenor serpent has decided that he’s the next John McCormick.
So I’ve been learning “How are things in Gloccamora?” and letting it
loose on “I’ll take you home again Kathleen” and such.

It’s much better at staying on pitch than it used to be, and when
it doesn’t spend a lot of time above middle C, it’s usually pretty
close to on when I check it.

So the right way to be practicing it would be with chant or
something and a drone, but it want to sing the McCormick repertoire.

More work on the website(s)

I wasn’t up to tackling the lilypond scripts, so I sent the test css
page url to a bunch of people, and put favicons on both laymusic and
brs.

The way I found to get a favicon was to use display to generate a
square image of the right size, and then use png2ico to get the icon.
I gave it both 16×16 and 32×32 icons. The serpent is OK, but the
recorder is only recognizable if you already know what it is.

Planning the site redesign

There are two main things I’m going to work on in the next week or
two about the site. One is improving the format, hopefully so that
those pesky IE5.0 on Mac OSX people can read it, and also because the
current design with all the site links in the right column is starting
to be unwieldy, now that I have the google ads (which might be
producing useful checks some day). So I’m going to try out some
three-column designs, and see what happens.

The other big problem is the lilypond version problem. I have
written out a lot of my thoughts on this problem in an email to the
lilypond
user list. I’m hoping to work on fixing and redesigning the
db2htm.py script over the weekend.

Corrections based on Feb. 8 rehearsal

Heurteur, Grace et vertu

My oversimplification of the alternative endings was too simplified to
be playable, so I have unsimplified it but not to the extent the AR
edition does.

Also, there was a typo in the words, which has been fixed.

Barney is convinced there should be an indication of the elision,
but I don’t do that anywhere else. But I have asked the Lilypond user
list whether it’s possible.

Update: 02/10/05
I wrote the lilypond
user list with the question
about how to do this, and didn’t get anything useful back.

There was a dotted rest in the cantus part, which I transcribed
from the AR edition, but my typesetting standards don’t allow dotted
rests, so I have taken it out.

Campian, Babylon Streams

There was an underlay problem in verse 5, which is now fixed.

If
one were really going to sing all 9 verses, one would want to do
something like italicize the even numbered ones.

Arcadelt, Il bianco e dolce cigno

The lyrics were missing lots of hyphens. I forget where I got that
from — I probably didn’t enter the lyrics directly. Fixed now. Let
me know if I overdid it. I’m pretty sure “sconsolato” is one word,
but I suppose it could be “scon solato”.

Report on the February 8 A List rehearsal

We mostly worked on the river music set, which is really two sets — the Psalm 137 set and the Silver Swan set.

  • Bop duets
  • Silver Swan Round
  • Grace et vertu
  • Bruce’s Wordsworth setting
  • Campian, Babylon Streams
  • Estans assis
  • Billings, Lamentation over Boston
  • Arcadelt, Il bianco e dolce cigno
  • Dowland, Me, me and none but me

I think the conclusion was that the Arcadelt really belongs with
the other Silver Swan ones, but the round doesn’t. The Campian is ok,
but probably not interesting enough as is for 9 verses. It would of
course be better in a setting where people were singing along.

So our river music set(s) are shaping up to be:

  • Campian
  • Estans Assis
  • Billings
  • Gibbons
  • Dowland
  • Arcadelt

Comments, additions, deletions, order changes?

Schedule

Next week (February 15) is a regular rehearsal, to which we hope Bruce
and Stuart will come. Anne will be in Spain.

So the next possible A-list rehearsal is February 22. Note that
this is not a definite schedule until I send out the email invitation.

Blogmania

Bonnie was asking whether it was necessary to check the blog as
well as read the email.

My policy is that anything that affects scheduling will be sent out
by email.

However, I’m putting a lot of stuff that people here might be
interested in in the blogs. For instance, this morning I did the
corrections to the music that we found last night, and described them
in
the publishing blog

In other words, there isn’t going to be a rehearsal you’ll miss by
not reading the blogs, but if you want to know what I’m up to, you may
want to check both my personal blog

my
personal blog (which this is part of)

and

the www.laymusic.org site blog.

Money

I have signed up for Google ads on my site, and it looks like a small
number of clicks actually makes a noticeable amount of money. So when
you’re checking the site, if you have nothing better to do, click on
some of the ads. I get paid just for people clicking on them — you
don’t have to buy anything.

February 8th A list rehearsal

Tuesday, February 8, usual time and place. As usual, please let me
know whether you can come as soon as possible.

Good news is that Bruce Randall will be able to play April 2 at the
Central Square Library.

We’ll have to start deciding what to play as soon as we know who can
come. I’m thinking of either as much of the river set as fits in the
time and works with the personnel (e.g. if we don’t have 5 people we
won’t do Silver Swan), or a drinking songs set.

So the sooner you decide whether you can make it on April 2, the
better.

I’m hoping to have the Heurteur that we liked a couple of weeks ago
transcribed, and print out some of the less familiar stuff from the
setlist at
so we
can try it out.