Author: Laura Conrad

News of the week of February 26

Meeting Report

We played:

Schedule

We will be meeting regularly on
Tuesday nights at 7:45 PM at

my place

.

Walk for Hunger

I have accepted our invitation to play the

Walk for Hunger

at the
same time and place as the last several years.

There seems to be no enthusiasm for working up a program for this, as
we have done for the last several years, so we won’t do that. The
March and April rehearsals will continue as usual to be dropin
rehearsals with a mix of sightreading new pieces and learning the
polyphonic music of the Renaissance.

If I hear from people with enthusiasm for working up a program before
tomorrow’s rehearsal, we can change this, but I really have canvassed
all the usual suspects, and they sound like they’d just as soon not
commit to major rehearsal time for the next two months. And I would
prefer not to commit to rehearse a large program with a group of
people who don’t want to commit to rehearsing.

So this year, the the afternoon of the Walk for Hunger will be similar
to what the morning has been for the last several years. People who
want to play solos or duets should let me know when they plan to get
there, and I’ll set up a schedule. I’m hoping that there will be
enough good dance musicians that in between the solos and duets we’ll
have a band that can play Playford and maybe Susato and Gervaise. It
isn’t necessary to make a commitment to doing that at this point, but
I’ll want people to say whether they’re coming by some time in April,
so that I can get you t-shirts and parking permits.

News of the week of February 19

Meeting report February 19

We played:

Schedule

We will be meeting regularly on
Tuesday nights at 7:45 PM at

my place

. In March and April, the
meetings will concentrate on the music we will be planning for the
Walk for Hunger, but except for the last two rehearsals in April,
others are welcome to come. But see below about rehearsal discipline.

Walk for Hunger

I have accepted our invitation to play the

Walk for Hunger

at the
same time and place as the last several years.

I will need to know by the March 5 rehearsal who is planning to play.
I have so far been unable to do serious thinking about repertoire
because hardly anyone has signed up.

As for the last couple of years, only the last two
rehearsals before the walk are compulsory, but you will need to come
to enough of the other rehearsals in March and April to learn the
music.

Basically the commitment is:

  • To learn the music we decide on in March and April.
  • To come to the final two rehearsals in April. This means a regular
    rehearsal on Tuesday April 23, and one some time in the week or April 28.
    Because I will be working at the election on April 30, we may try
    to schedule the final rehearsal at some other time, and possibly
    even some other place, since rehearsing indoors for an outdoor
    performance is sub-optimal. We will schedule this rehearsal when
    we know who needs to come.
  • To play two 1-hour sets, with at least a half hour break between
    them on Sunday, May 5, at the beautiful site on the banks of the
    Charles River, some time between 10 AM and 3 PM. This has usually
    meant being at the site between 11:30 AM and 3 PM, but this time
    can be modified slightly for the convenience of the performers. If
    you don’t have at least three and a half hours free on May 5, this
    is the wrong performance to sign up for.

In addition, rehearsal discipline is a bit tighter when we’re being a
performing group than when we’re being a dropin group. Performers should
expect to show up for rehearsals on time, to let me know whether
they’re coming or not, and to bring the music and instruments they
will be performing on.

There’s also a possibility of scheduling a second performance of the music
we learn for the Walk, but that’s another thing we schedule when we
know more about who is doing what.

News of the weeks of February 5 and February 12, 2013

Meeting report February 5

We played:

Meeting report February 12

We played:

Schedule

We will be meeting regularly on
Tuesday nights at 7:45 PM at

my place

.

Walk for Hunger

I now have our official invitation to play the

Walk for Hunger

at the
same time and place as the last several years.

I will need to know by the March 5 rehearsal who is planning to play.
As for the last couple of years, only the last two
rehearsals before the walk are compulsory, but you will need to come
to enough of the other rehearsals in March and April to learn the
music.

As anyone who has planned events knows, I can’t tell you the details
of what we’ll be doing until I know who’s going to be doing it.
Basically the commitment is:

  • To learn the music we decide on in March and April.
  • To come to the final two rehearsals in April. This means a regular
    rehearsal on Tuesday April 23, and one some time in the week or April 28.
    Because I will be working at the election on April 30, we may try
    to schedule the final rehearsal at some other time, and possibly
    even some other place, since rehearsing indoors for an outdoor
    performance is sub-optimal. We will schedule this rehearsal when
    we know who needs to come.
  • To play two 1-hour sets, with at least a half hour break between
    them on Sunday, May 5, at the beautiful site on the banks of the
    Charles River, some time between 10 AM and 3 PM. This has usually
    meant being at the site between 11:30 AM and 3 PM, but this time
    can be modified slightly for the convenience of the performers. If
    you don’t have at least three and a half hours free on May 5, this
    is the wrong performance to sign up for.

In addition, rehearsal discipline is a bit tighter when we’re being a
performing group than when we’re being a dropin group. Performers should
expect to show up for rehearsals on time, to let me know whether
they’re coming or not, and to bring the music and instruments they
will be performing on.

There’s also a possibility of scheduling a second performance of the music
we learn for the Walk, but that’s another thing we schedule when we
know more about who is doing what.

News of the weeks of January 22, 2013 and January 29, 2013

Meeting Report, January 22

We played:

  • Harrington, Give me the sweet delights of love
  • Sermisy, harm. Bach, Was mein Gott will
  • Sullivan, Bishopgarth
  • Rore, Ancor che col partire
  • Dowland, Flow not so fast ye fountains
  • Ravenscroft, To Portsmouth

Meeting Report, January 29

We played:

Schedule

We will be meeting regularly on
Tuesday nights at 7:45 PM at

my place

.

I expect our Spring schedule to be similar to what it’s been the last
few years, so we spend March and April working on music for the Walk
for Hunger, which this year is on May 5. So for the next few weeks,
we’ll be doing some trying out of pieces that might be fun to do at
the Walk. Come with your ideas.

I will need to know by the March 5 rehearsal who is planning to play
the Walk for Hunger. As for the last couple of years, only the last two
rehearsals before the walk are compulsory, but you will need to come
to enough of the other rehearsals in March and April to learn the
music.

The Secretary of State of Massachusetts has thrown a monkey-wrench
into our normal schedule, and scheduled an election for April 30,
which is the Tuesday before the Walk for Hunger. So we may have to
schedule that rehearsal for some other time, or possibly just start it
a bit later than usual.

When we know our program and personnel for the Walk, we may also want
to discuss performing it in some informal venue.

News of the week of January 15, 2013

Meeting Report

We played:

Schedule

We will be meeting regularly on
Tuesday nights at 7:45 PM at

my place

.

I expect our Spring schedule to be similar to what it’s been the last
few years, so we spend March and April working on music for the Walk
for Hunger, which this year is on May 5. So for the next few weeks,
we’ll be doing some trying out of pieces that might be fun to do at
the Walk. Come with your ideas.

Recorder Society

The

Boston Recorder Society

loud wind ensemble will continue for the
second semester under Steve Lundahl.
Marilyn Boenau, who coached last semester, writes:

Happy new year! As I mentioned in December I won’t be able to be at
some of the upcoming meetings. I’m so sorry not to be there!

Steve Lundahl has kindly agreed to work with you, starting this
Sunday. In case you don’t already know Steve, he is a fine sackbut and
recorder player. He plays some cornetto and serpent.

Steve and I talked about what we have done in the group so far this
year, specifically some of the North German repertoire with Psalm
tunes in the tenor. I mentioned that you asked to work in depth on a
couple of pieces.

The first meeting of the semester is this Sunday, January 20th, 6:30 –
9:00 PM. You can sign up for the group at the website, or just show up and pay
the dropin rate, if you’d rather not make a 5 class commitment. They
like it if you tell them you’re coming beforehand.

Other Event

Music for Viols and Friends will be playing a concert of English
renaissance music on Friday, January 25 at 8 pm in Lindsay Chapel,
First Church in Cambridge, 11 Garden St. and also on Sunday, January
24, at 3 pm at the Somerville Museum. The concert will include works
by Gibbons, Tomkins, Weelkes, Morley, Ward, Cavendish and others,
performed by Michael Collver, countertenor and cornetto, and the El
Dorado Ensemble (Carol Lewis, Janet Haas, Paul Johnson, Mai-Lan
Broekman and Alice Mroszcyk on viols and Olav Chris Henriksen on lute
and cittern).

News of the week of January 8, 2013

Meeting Report

We played:

Schedule

We will be meeting regularly on
Tuesday nights at 7:45 PM at

my place

.

I expect our Spring schedule to be similar to what it’s been the last
few years, so we spend March and April working on music for the Walk
for Hunger, which this year is on May 5. So for the next few weeks,
we’ll be doing some trying out of pieces that might be fun to do at
the Walk. Come with your ideas.

Books I read in December (and a bit of November)

2012-11-25 Sun Firefly Summer by Maeve Binchy. From the
library. Well-written best-seller about two families in a small Irish
town.

http://rcm.amazon.com/e/cm?t=laymusicorg-20&o=1&p=8&l=as1&asins=0385341717&ref=qf_sp_asin_til&fc1=000000&IS2=1&lt1=_blank&m=amazon&lc1=0000FF&bc1=000000&bg1=FFFFFF&f=ifr

2012-11-26 Mon Norah Ephron Imaginary Friends, play about Mary
McCarthy and Lillian Hellman. Probably better in the theater. From
the library – just after Ephron died they got a whole bunch of stuff
by her.

http://rcm.amazon.com/e/cm?t=laymusicorg-20&o=1&p=8&l=as1&asins=1400034221&ref=qf_sp_asin_til&fc1=000000&IS2=1&lt1=_blank&m=amazon&lc1=0000FF&bc1=000000&bg1=FFFFFF&f=ifr

2012-12-08 Sat Captain Vorpatril’s Alliance, the latest in the
Barrayaran series by Lois McMaster Bujold. (bought from Baen) Brilliant – the last
Miles plot seemed to be mining a very exhausted vein, but this one
builds on the best of the earlier ones, and has both coming of age and
dealing with middle-age aspects.

http://rcm.amazon.com/e/cm?t=laymusicorg-20&o=1&p=8&l=as1&asins=1451638450&ref=qf_sp_asin_til&fc1=000000&IS2=1&lt1=_blank&m=amazon&lc1=0000FF&bc1=000000&bg1=FFFFFF&f=ifr

2012-12-10 Mon Heart and Soul by Maeve Binchy. From the library.
More warm-hearted middle-aged to elderly females fixing the world’s
problems for the well-meaning young.

http://rcm.amazon.com/e/cm?t=laymusicorg-20&o=1&p=8&l=as1&asins=0307742830&ref=qf_sp_asin_til&fc1=000000&IS2=1&lt1=_blank&m=amazon&lc1=0000FF&bc1=000000&bg1=FFFFFF&f=ifr

2012-12-13 Thu The Last Policeman by Ben H. Winters. Got on sale
from Amazon after recommendation by Cory Doctorow (I think). Police
procedural set against the impending crash into earth of an asteroid.
Good but not gripping.

http://rcm.amazon.com/e/cm?t=laymusicorg-20&o=1&p=8&l=as1&asins=1594745765&ref=qf_sp_asin_til&fc1=000000&IS2=1&lt1=_blank&m=amazon&lc1=0000FF&bc1=000000&bg1=FFFFFF&f=ifr

I took most of an afternoon to revive my procedure for stripping DRM
from Kindle books. Most of it was because of how decrepit my
Thinkpad is. The answer turned out to be that you need current
versions of Kindle for PC, Calibre, the drm removing tools, and the
python library the tools depend on. Then you have to realize that for
that format of Kindle, Calibre can read it, and convert it, but the
ebook viewer can’t display it. So you should convert it to epub and
read that. Or ignore big sales on Kindle books.

2012-12-24 Mon Hallucinations by Oliver Sacks, from the
library. Some of the methodology reminds me of the story about how
much senility increased in the UK after Margaret Thatcher’s
resignation as Prime Minister. One of their methods of determining
whether someone was senile was to ask them who the Prime Minister
was. Obviously, more people knew when it had been the same person for
15 years than when it had only been a few months. There are a couple of
hallucination stories that seem to be similar to that. There’s a man
whose cat had to go to the vets for a few days. While the cat was
gone, the man would hallucinate that he saw it walking across the
living room. Sacks says that the hallucination stopped when the cat
got home, but how does he know? Some of the cats walking across the
living room might have been hallucinations, but you wouldn’t
investigate that if your cat was at home and might perfectly well have
been going to the litter box.

A common form of auditory hallucination is to hear something that
sounds like a radio left on in another room. If you live in a
single-family home on a quiet street, you get up and go to all the
rooms with radios to see which one was left on and to turn it off.
But if you live in an apartment building on a noisy street, you hear
other people’s radios all the time. Some of them might be
hallucinations, but how would you tell?

My methodology quibble aside, I think it’s a good book. One
stated purpose is to make people more comfortable thinking about
(and maybe talking about) their neurological idiosyncrasies, and I
think it achieves that. I discussed it at dinner with two friends,
and it turned out that two of us have the visual hallucinations
before going to sleep and the third had no idea what we were
talking about.

http://rcm.amazon.com/e/cm?t=laymusicorg-20&o=1&p=8&l=as1&asins=0307957241&ref=qf_sp_asin_til&fc1=000000&IS2=1&lt1=_blank&m=amazon&lc1=0000FF&bc1=000000&bg1=FFFFFF&f=ifr

2012-12-25 Tue Crome Yellow by Aldous Huxley. I think it was his
first novel. I read it in high school, or possibly college, and
haven’t looked at it since, so I was surprised how vividly I
remembered some of the better bits. There are good reasons why I
haven’t reread it – the stuff between the good bits is very talky,
and mostly about issues that don’t concern me much, although certainly
it’s of historic interest how casually people in a Huxley novel
published in 1922 advocated ideas that we would label fascist.

http://rcm.amazon.com/e/cm?t=laymusicorg-20&o=1&p=8&l=as1&asins=1466285397&ref=qf_sp_asin_til&fc1=000000&IS2=1&lt1=_blank&m=amazon&lc1=0000FF&bc1=000000&bg1=FFFFFF&f=ifr

2012-12-25 Tue Finished Turing’s Cathedral by George Dyson. I’ve
been reading this off and on between a lot of the above – it works
best a chapter at a time. It’s fascinating but a little bit
disappointing. We really don’t think about how much of late 20th
century technological change was fueled by World War II. He leaves
out the antibiotics, but everything easily related to computers is
mentioned. (bombs, weather prediction, stellar evolution, biological
evolution…)

But with a better editor or co-author, it could have been a better
book. Dyson doesn’t really explain anything they way the great
popular science books of the mid-twentieth century did. If you don’t
already know a lot about any of these subjects, you will come away
from the book with a vague idea about how general-purpose computers
helped develop them, and some interesting facts about the biographies
of the people who did the developing, but you still won’t know much
about the subject.

http://rcm.amazon.com/e/cm?t=laymusicorg-20&o=1&p=8&l=as1&asins=1400075998&ref=qf_sp_asin_til&fc1=000000&IS2=1&lt1=_blank&m=amazon&lc1=0000FF&bc1=000000&bg1=FFFFFF&f=ifr

2012-12-28 Fri Ford Maddox Ford, The Good Soldier. I think I got
this from Gutenberg because someone wrote an essay about it in the NY
Times Book Review. You can see why someone who studies how people
write novels would find it interesting, that someone would have done
something that much like stream of consciousness in 1915. But it’s
really quite unpleasant. I thought about dropping it several times,
but somehow kept on to see how the throat-cutting came about.

http://rcm.amazon.com/e/cm?t=laymusicorg-20&o=1&p=8&l=as1&asins=1467964565&ref=qf_sp_asin_til&fc1=000000&IS2=1&lt1=_blank&m=amazon&lc1=0000FF&bc1=000000&bg1=FFFFFF&f=ifr

First post of the New Year

It’s not exactly a New Year’s Resolution, but I have been thinking
about how to revive the diary aspect of this blog.

I’ve been doing a little bit of that on my G+ account, and it has
advantages and disadvantages over the blog. The bit advantage is that
people do actually respond to what I write over there, much more than
they do here. The major disadvantage is that formatting is primitive
to non-existant on G+, and I can’t write without at least being able
to do headers and bullet lists.

One of my ideas is to keep a diary of books I’ve read and movies I’ve
seen. If there’s a brief comment about one that doesn’t seem to
warrant a full post, I’ll comment at G+, but monthly or so I’ll post
the list, with links to Amazon so that if you want to buy them I get a
little money, and links to any blog or G+ posts I’ve been inspired to
write.

So I’m not promising any specific number of posts, but you will be
seeing some more about life in general here this year than you did
last year.

News of the weeks of December 18 and 25, 2012, and January 1, 2013

Meeting Report

We played:

Schedule

Tomorrow, January 1, we will be having our annual holiday party, which
this year is on New Year’s Day, since there wasn’t a good weekend day
in December to schedule it. So if you show up at the usual time,
there will be people to play with and things to eat and drink, but
since the party starts at 4, you might miss some of the best food, or
not be able to talk to people who have already left.

After this, we will return to our regularly scheduled meetings on
Tuesday nights at 7:45 PM at

my place

.

Party

There are invitations in two formats:

foldable into quarter-page,

and

two-sided, with a Cantabile Band flyer on the back

.

Print them out and give them to all your friends who might be
interested. We need to do some rebuilding this year, since we’ve at
least temporarily lost a couple of good people, and this is a good way
for people who might be interested in playing with us to get their
feet wet.

Let me know if you intend to come, especially if
you’re bringing something useful, but also feel free to drop in.

They seem to have fixed the bug where 2012 was hard-coded in the
Parking Consideration Application, so I have submitted it. (Probably
by hard-coding 2013.) I suspect
it doesn’t matter and they will be treating New Year’s Day as an
honorary Sunday, where permit parking restrictions don’t apply. I
will have two visitor permits, and can probably borrow some more, so
if the consideration doesn’t come through and you’re worried, we can
probably get you a permit. If the permit does come through, I think
there will be something I can print so you can put it on your
windshield. If you have RSVP’d and live outside of Cambridge, I can
email you the thing to print out.

Other Event

If you haven’t sung the Messiah in too long, or you would like to play
it, there will be a SING IT YOURSELF MESSIAH on Sunday, January 6,
2013 at 3:00 p.m. directed from the piano by Judy Conrad.

Lutheran Church of the Good Shepherd
383 Old North Road
Kingston, Rhode Island

Instrumentalists welcome

We will sing most of Part One plus Hallelujah and Amen;

All arias will be sung by sections; other arias and choruses will be included by request.

A Simple Soup Supper follows the event.

Admission free but donations, which will benefit Welcome House, are
encouraged. Scores and instrumental parts will be provided, or bring
your own.

News of the week of December 11, 2012

Meeting Report

We played:

Schedule

We will be having dropin meetings as usual on Tuesdays
at 7:45pm at

my place

. Christmas, December 25 will be an exception, and the
January 1 meeting will be replaced by a party.

Party

There are invitations in two formats:

foldable into quarter-page,

and

two-sided, with a Cantabile Band flyer on the back

.

Print them out and give them to all your friends who might be
interested.

Let me know if you intend to come, especially if
you’re bringing something useful, but also feel free to drop in.

I will apply for parking consideration, if I can find a browser/os
combination that knows how to run the online application form. (It
looks like it isn’t the browser or the os – there’s just a bug in the
javascript that seems to have hard-coded 2012.) But I
suspect it isn’t necessary, and they just treat New Years Day as a
Sunday, the way the do Thanksgiving. There will be parking permits
around if you’re nervous about it.