Author: Laura Conrad

We had a good time.  We worked up a short program of about half of what we played last year, and in between did duets of various kinds.

We were much closer to the beginning of the route this year, and we were actually at an aid station, so we had a captive audience,  bathrooms, water and food vendors, and they put up a tent for us at the first sign of rain.  The walkers were coming thick and fast when we started at 10:30, but had pretty much stopped when we left a bit after 1.  So it was much less strenuous than usual.

Meeting Report

We played:

• Layolle, Les Bourguignons
• Verdonck,Prest
  est mon mal
• Josquin,
  Entré
  je suis en grant pensée
• Senfl,
  Ein
  meidlein zu dem brunnen ging, Wohl
  kumbt der Mai
• Obrecht,
  Meskin
  es hu
• Ich bin
  erfreut
• Isaac,
  Innsbruck,
  ich muss dich lassen
• Purcell,
  ‘Tis
  women

Schedule

Next week’s meeting, April 26, will be restricted to people who
want to play for the Walk for
Hunger. There’s still time to sign up to do that, if you can come
to Magazine Beach in Cambridge on Sunday, May 1 from 10:30 to
1:30.

After that, we resume our normal schedule of meeting on
Tuesdays at 7:45 pm, whenever a critical mass of people has told me
they want to come by Monday night.

Meeting Report

• Certon,
  Contentez vous
• Lassus, Benedictus
• C. Gibbons, Fantasia
• Selma y Salaverde, Canzon I
• Dances from Twenty-one Masque Dances, LPM EM2
• Lemlin, Converte nos
• Other pieces from Seven Canons of the sixteenth
  century for two equal voices or instruments, LPM TM1

Schedule

We would like to meet every Tuesday at 7:45 pm at 233
Broadway. But the meeting will only happen if a critical mass of
people say they want it by Monday night.

More site relocation news

Websites

I’ve been getting fan mail about the new Serpent Publications
site. Check it out if you haven’t seen it.

I have also moved the Laymusic
site. It should look almost the same, although the typography
is a little different and there was a small amount of PHP code
that I can’t use in the new place. But if you think you’ve missed
one of these emails, that’s where to go to get the information —
I post it there simultaneously with sending it to the list. It
also goes to Facebook and Google+, and someone told me nobody
would read it there if I didn’t have pictures, so when I’m not in
a rush, I go to Google images and find a picture.

Mailing lists

If you’re getting this in your email, it’s because I moved the mailing lists
to my new host. It turned out that I needed to change things a
little, so if you want to write this group, it’s renband@serpentpublications.org,
not renband@lists.serpentpublications.org.

If you have mail splitting set up, you may have to modify
it.

Also, the listinfo
page has changed.

Mail

The next step is to move the mail for laymusic.org. I’m hoping it won’t change in any sender-visible way, but
while I’m fiddling with moving it over, it’s likely that I will
make some mistakes, and even if I don’t, I’ll be changing the DNS,
so it will take time to propagate. So if you get an odd bounce message, or I
don’t seem to be responding, just wait a while, or send the mail
to my gmail address, or
use one of the other ways to contact
me.

Meeting is cancelled

One regular member lost her mother yesterday; the others have
not mentioned wanting to come. So we won’t be meeting.

Schedule

We would like to meet every Tuesday at 7:45 pm at 233
Broadway. But the meeting will only happen if a critical mass of
people say they want it by Monday night.

Web Site

The SerpentPublications.org wordpress site was hacked in August
of 2014, and has worked either badly or not at all since then.

Yesterday, I finally flipped the switch so that SerpentPublications.org
now points to the new site, redesigned in Drupal, and moved to a
new host.

Let me know what you think, especially if you’re having any
problems finding things.

Meeting Report

We played:

• Lemlin, Converte nos
• Other pieces from Seven Canons of the sixteenth
  century for two equal voices or instruments, LPM TM1
• O Maria mater pia,
• Josquin, Per illud ave prolatum,
• Lassus, Qui sequitur me, Justi tulerunt spolia impiorum,
  Sancti mei,
• Ravenscroft, Hey, ho, nobody at home

Schedule

We are theoretically meeting every Tuesday at 7:45 pm at 233
Broadway, Cambridge.

Please let me know by Monday night if you would like to come.

Other playing opportunities

If you want to go to the Boston Recorder
Society Spring
Workshop on April 2, you should register by March 28. This is
so that when the teeming hordes come, there will be enough
coaches, not to mention enough donuts.

Walk for Hunger

We have not been invited this year. The website shows no
evidence that anyone else has been invited, either. The place we
normally play is a construction site at the moment. It’s also
been increasingly difficult to get a critical mass of people to do
enough rehearsing to put on a program.

So my sense is we aren’t playing there this year. If there are
people who would like to get together somewhere along the route
and play impromptu music, let me know and I’ll see what I can
organize.

I feel that doing occasional performances has been an important
feature of this group, so if you’re interested in discussing other
possible ideas for performing (preferably in informal settings
involving food and drink rather than formal concerts), let me know.

Meeting report

We played:

• Byrd:
  Susannah
  Faire, The
  Nightingale, The
  Greedy Hawk, and Wounded
  I am
• Margot Labourez les vignes: Arcadelt
  and Lassus
• de
  l’Estocart, Psaume
  CXXXVII

Schedule

We expect to meet every Tuesday at 7:45 pm, at 233 Broadway,
Cambridge. We also expect everyone who wants to come to let me
know by Monday evening. This way, on Tuesday morning, I can
either cancel the meeting, if there aren’t enough people coming,
or transcribe a piece suitable for the people who are coming.

Site redesign

I am hoping to flip the switch soon, so that the
serpentpublications.org site is pointed at the new site,
instead of at the broken old site. I’m aware that I haven’t yet
implemented everything I want to, but if you find anything broken
that should be fixed, please let me know about it.

Meeting report

We played:

• Certon,
  Contentez
  vous
• Josquin, La plus des plus
• Byrd, When younglings first
• Josquin, Fama Malum
• Arcadelt,
  At trepida et cœptis immanibus effera Dido
• Guerrero, Canite tuba
• Cwm Rhonda, with time change words

Schedule

Remember, you should let me know by Monday night if you plan to
come on Tuesday.

This is for two reasons:

• If nobody says they’re coming, I will cancel the
  meeting.
• On Tuesday morning, I will transcribe a piece suitable for
  the people who’ve said they’re coming. So if you didn’t tell
  me, you might have to play a part in the wrong range, or double
  with someone when you’d rather play one-on-a-part.

But now that we’re all over the flu, and maybe not traveling so
much, we expect to meet on Tuesdays at 7:45 pm at 233 Broadway,
Cambridge.

Other playing events

The Boston
Recorder Society is having a Spring workshop
for recorders, strings and loud winds on Saturday,
April 2. Coaches will include Joan Kimball and Bob Wiemken of
Piffaro and Daphna Mor.

Other performances by members

David is also singing with the Cambridge Chamber Singers, who
will be featured on the WGBH program “Sing that Thing”, which will
be broadcast on:

• Friday April 15 8:30 PM Channel 2
• Saturday April 16 4 PM Channel 2
• Saturday April 16 11:30 PM Channel 44
• Sunday April 17 4 PM Channel 2

Website changes

If you click on the links to the pieces we played, you will
notice a difference. This is because you get to be the first
people to test out the newly redesigned Serpent
Publications website.

The reason for the redesign is that the old WordPress site was
hacked in the summer of 2014, and I’ve never managed to get it
working right since. I’m hoping this version is less vulnerable,
both to the hackers and to the customer “support” which is
designed to move me to a more expensive hosting plan.

The site is still incomplete, but if there’s a feature of the
old site that you really miss, let me know and I’ll make that a priority.

I really don’t want to have to do this every week. But we’ve
missed several meetings in a row, so people might have gotten used
to not having the Cantabile Band on Tuesday.

So this week it looks like we will have a critical mass, and
will be meeting on Tuesday, at the usual time (7:45pm) and place
(233 Broadway, Cambridge).

If you haven’t already told me you’re coming, do let me know by
Monday night, so that I can transcribe a new piece with the right
number of parts.