Author: Laura Conrad

News of the week of February 16, 2016

Meeting report

We played:

Schedule

We continue to meet on Tuesdays at 7:45pm at 233 Broadway
Cambridge. This is assuming that enough people have told me by
Monday night that they would like to come.

There will not be a meeting on March 1.

So what was the turnout?

[voter]

I’ve been listening to lots of coverage of the New Hampshire
primary results, and nobody has mentioned the turnout. If Trump
and Sanders won by getting people to the polls who would normally
have stayed home, it means a lot more for the rest of the country
than if they won in a small, unrepresentative state by convincing
the normal voters to vote for them.

News of the week of February 2, 2016

[cricket]

Meeting report

We played:

Schedule

We continue to meet on Tuesdays at 7:45 pm at 233 Broadway,
Cambridge.

There will be no meeting on March 1.

We don’t really have critical mass for a dropin group any more,
so please let me know if you’re planning to come on Tuesday by
Monday night.

A good dog that didn’t make the exhibition

[ice skating]

I was at the Boston Museum of Fine
Arts exhibition
about Dutch Painting in the Age of Rembrandt and Vermeer. I
wasn’t really using my Prado
algorithm for seeing too much art, where I look carefully only
at the pictures with dogs in them. But I couldn’t help noticing
the dogs. There weren’t many in the formal portraits, but the
family pictures and landscapes mostly did have dogs.

There was an album
of watercolors, which was of course open only to whatever page
the curator had picked, but it had a sign that you could see more
on the website. So when I looked, my favorite dog was the one above.

News of the week of January 12, 2016

[duet]

Meeting report

We played:

Schedule

We continue to meet on Tuesdays at 7:45pm, at 233 Broadway,
Cambridge.

Why and how to transcribe Renaissance music

[Petrucci, Odhecaton]

This article
by Luigi Lera
about how to transcribe early polyphonic music makes a lot of very
good points. Some of them are from a (to me) odd point of view,
for instance:

Our amateur choristers often do not shy away even from the St Gallen neumes of Gregorian chants or the obscurity of some twentieth-century writing. Is Renaissance notation really so different from ours as to justify transliteration into another system?

I don’t know those amateur choristers who read neumes or
obscure twentieth-century writing. And my impression is that the
motivation for putting barlines in where the composer didn’t is
different from what Mr. Lera states when he says:

In polyphonic arrangements, you often find a sort of
subtle premise where the editor has distanced himself from the
measures that he himself has used, trying to push all the
responsibility for any poor outcome onto the singers; it clearly
states that the bars had been added only to aid the singers and
that it really must not influence the rhythm of the piece. Aiding
the singers: could this be a good justification in support of all
the transcriptions into bars?

I don’t think editors add bars to directly aid the singers —
they add them so that conductors can aid the singers.

But a lot of what he says is exactly why I do what I do on the Serpent Publications
site, so I recommend you read it if you’re at all interested
in the subject.