Author: Laura Conrad

News of the week of May 31, 2011

Rehearsal Report

We played:

  • Gervais, 8 bransles do Poictou
  • Morley, What ayles my darling
  • Lots of Holborne
  • Sermisy, Quand je bois

Next week

Next week we expect to finish playing through both the Holborn
(about 5 more) and the Morley Canzonets for three voices (2
more). If you have a copy of Holborne and are coming, please
remember to bring it. I am attempting to print another guest copy
(last week we needed two and had one, although there were no real
guests), but I may not manage it.

After that

The following week, June 14, will be the Boston Early Music Festival. I’ll
be going to the King’s
Singers Concert, so we won’t be rehearsing.

After that, I don’t know of any reason to not have regular
dropin rehearsals for a while on Tuesdays at 7:45 PM at my place.

There’s a performance opportunity at the Boston Wort Processors Pig Roast on
Sunday, June 26. The festivities start at 1 or 2 PM, so we’d
probably play mid to late afternoon. Let me know if you want to
come — I’ll have to sign you up as my guest a few days before the
event.

We’ve talked about having a party some time after BEMF, so we
can advertise it on the back of the flyer. I haven’t heard a lot
of people say they want to do this, or tell me when they can. If
I still haven’t heard more enthusiasm by the end of this week, I
won’t bother scheduling it.

Garden Pictures from May 27, 2011

http://www.flickr.com/apps/slideshow/show.swf?v=71649

I’ve been nursing a geriatric German shepherd through some
intestinal problems, so I haven’t had lots of energy for
gardening. For instance, I didn’t prune the rosebush at all. The
one on the corner of the front yard that was growing into the walk
to the back yard got pruned accidentally by the Newfoundland
downstairs, but the one in my plot has some branches that are
really in my way. But at this point, I’ll wait and cut them off
when they have flowers on them.

As you can see, the alliums are in full bloom. The sedge is
blooming, less spectacularly. The rhubarb is more enthusiastic
than it’s been in the past, and less chewed on. And we have an
unusual number of snails this year.

Cave of Forgotten Dreams

I actually went to see this
movie in a theater yesterday. Mostly because it’s the first
3D movie I’ve heard of that I really cared about seeing. I did
watch Avatar,
because it was on the Hugo awards ballot, but I
certainly didn’t expect to like it $15 worth.

Since the incremental cost of most of the movies I see is $0,
since I get them on my Netflix subscription, I’m
usually just telling you whether I think the movie is interesting
enough to be worth the
time you spend watching it. In this case, however, I will also address
whether it’s worth the time, money, and trouble to go to the movie
theater and see it in 3-D, instead of just getting it on Netflix
when it comes out.

Well, first, if you’re interested in any of archeology,
anthropology, film-making, or Werner Herzog, you do want to see
the movie. It isn’t as tightly put together as the best of the
Herzog documentaries (e.g., Grizzly
Man), but you aren’t going to be able to actually see that
cave, and you do want to.

I went with a bunch of friends, and one of the first things we
talked about after the movie was all the topics that could have
been covered in more detail. For instance, one of the friends is an
anthropology professor, and he had been hoping to use the film in
his class about the origins of religion. The people who have been
researching the cave are in fact working on the light these
discoveries shed on that topic, but the movie has only a 5 or 10
minute segment about it. Another friend wanted to know more about
the actual process of making the paintings than we saw.

Of course, there’s only so much you can cover in 90 minutes,
but it surprised me how random the topics covered seemed to be.
Another of the friends, a rock musician who has made movies, said
that he was sure the sequence with the albino crocodiles at the
end only happened because there was this film crew that could only
spend four hours a day in the cave, so they had time to see the
tourist attractions in the area, and they saw the crocodiles and
said, “Wow! We have to put these in the movie.”

That was probably the most gratuitous insertion, but there was
a lot of stuff about German archeologists working on similar
periods that didn’t really relate to this particular cave at all.
It was fun to hear the bone flute played, though.

Now for the 3-D. I’m glad I saw it. There were some
absolutely spectacular shots, which would still be beautiful in
2-D, but not as impressive. On the other hand, when you’re
interviewing a talking head in front of a window onto a scene of
snow-covered trees, it’s a little distracting to be able to see
the trees that well. And although the camera lingered lovingly on
the cave paintings, there were still times when you wanted the
coffee table book so that you could look at what you wanted to see
in the lighting you wanted to use.

On the whole, you can probably get a lot of what I got out of
the movie without the 3-D, but if it’s not a terrible
inconvenience or a major expense, it’s worth seeing.

http://rcm.amazon.com/e/cm?t=laymusicorg-20&o=1&p=8&l=as1&asins=B004UXUXGE&ref=tf_til&fc1=000000&IS2=1&lt1=_blank&m=amazon&lc1=0000FF&bc1=000000&bg1=FFFFFF&f=ifr
http://rcm.amazon.com/e/cm?t=laymusicorg-20&o=1&p=8&l=as1&asins=B002VPE1AW&ref=tf_til&fc1=000000&IS2=1&lt1=_blank&m=amazon&lc1=0000FF&bc1=000000&bg1=FFFFFF&f=ifr
http://rcm.amazon.com/e/cm?t=laymusicorg-20&o=1&p=8&l=as1&asins=B000BMY2NS&ref=tf_til&fc1=000000&IS2=1&lt1=_blank&m=amazon&lc1=0000FF&bc1=000000&bg1=FFFFFF&f=ifr

News of the week of May 24, 2011

Meeting report

We played:

  • Morley, Where
    art thou, wanton?
  • Hoffman, The Gilgamesh Cantata, Part IV
  • Lots of Holborne
  • Stefanov, Laura’s Band
  • Purcell, Cakes and Ale

Schedule

As far as I know, we’ll be having dropin meetings on Tuesdays
as usual (7:45 PM, my place) until the week of BEMF (June 14), when we will not be
meeting.

Plans for the near future

We have finished with the Hoffman for the time being.

We have only about 8 more Holbornes to read through, and 2 or
three Morleys. So we may well finish the “helping Laura publish”
mission for this Spring, and be able to get back to playing
whatever we want. Although I’ll soon be doing more transcribing
for John Tyson’s improv class, which we’ll want to play.

News of the week of May 17

Meeting report

We played:

  • Curt Hoffman’s Gilgamesh Cantata, based on the Jung Red Book
    and the Gilgamesh epic.
  • Lots of Holborne

Schedule

As far as I know, we’ll be having dropin meetings on Tuesdays
as usual (7:45 PM, my place) until the week of BEMF (June 14), when we will not be
meeting.

Plans for next week

We didn’t get far enough to make a recording last night in 45
minutes, so we will have another session on the Gilgamesh
Cantata. Let me know if you’re interested in coming and I can send you
your part, and a pointer to the recording of what we did last
night.

We still have lots of Holborne we haven’t played yet, so we
will be doing some of that, too.

Other events

On Saturday, May 21, the John Tyson student recital will happen
at 2 PM in Lindsay Chapel, First
Church of Cambridge,, 11 Garden St. I’m going to be
playing ricercadas by Diego
Ortiz, accompanied by internationally reknowned clavichord
player Judith
Conrad on Baby.

Several people have recommended the Convivium Musicum concert,
which will be this Saturday, May 21, at 8 PM at the Cambridge
Friends Meeting House, or on Sunday in Salem.

BEMF

I will again be blogging from the Boston Early Music Festival.
Last time, one of the most popular posts
was one I did before the festival, listing concert dates and
times of the fringe events our friends were playing in.

So please send me information about any event you think the
people on this list should know about. It’s a fair amount of
work putting together a post like this, so it helps me if you
send a brief description including all of who, what, when,
where, why, and links to anywhere more information is available,
such as the website of the group, or directions to the venu.

Update on the site hacking

It turned out to be the config file that was being trashed.
This is a major hole in wordpress security, because it never gets
changed in an update.

There turned out to be two problems — the one that almost
certainly led to the hack was that it was world-readable, which
shouldn’t have happened, and if it did, an update should have
fixed it.

Googling about the problem also led to reading about the secret
keys which should be included in your config file, but weren’t
in mine because I’ve been automatically upgrading since before
that feature was implemented.

Both of these problems seem to me to be design flaws in the
wordpress system. I am investigating Drupal as an alternative, but
it’s unlikely to become the site’s underlying technology for at
least a few months. I’m still interested in hearing about
people’s experiences moving a wordpress site to something else.

News of the week of May 10, 2011

We played:

  • Billings, Lamentation over Boston
  • Lots of Susato
  • Rore, Signor mio caro and Caritá di signore
  • Gibbons, The Silver Swan
  • Guidiccione, Il bianco e dolce cigno
  • Arcadelt, Il bianco e dolce cigno
  • Ravenscroft, As I me walked

Schedule

As far as I know, we’ll be having dropin meetings on Tuesdays
as usual (7:45 PM, my place) until the week of BEMF (June 14), when we will not be
meeting.

Plans for next week

Curt Hoffman is writing a cantata for unaccompanied chorus
based on The Epic of Gilgamesh. We’ve agreed to sing a movement of
it next Tuesday, for an informal recording to be played at a
conference next month. This means that if you don’t like singing,
you’ll have to sit out the actual recording, although we may as
usual use instruments while we’re sightreading the piece.

If you think you’d enjoy this more if you had a chance to look
at the piece beforehand, I have parts I can send you by email in
PDF form.

Holborne Orgy

I have so far been unable to convince 5 people who are solid
enough readers to hold down a part to commit to a party on
Memorial Day weekend. I don’t know what they think could possibly
be more exciting than a Holborne party, but they are clearly
waiting for a better offer.

So unless this situation changes, I will attempt to finish the
proofreading of the Holborne book over the course of the next four
Tuesdays. I’d appreciate it if the people who can sightread
Holborne would make an extra effort to attend these meetings, and
to arrive at something like the scheduled start time (7:45
pm).

News of the week of May 1

Cantabile Band, May 1, 2011
Left to right: Ishmael Stefanov, Bea McClain, Norah Burch, Barney Gage, Anne Kazlauskas, Bruce Randall, Laura Conrad, John Maloney. Photo by Ishmael Stefanov

Walk for Hunger

I think we all had fun. All the Ravenscroft rehearsing we
did for NEFFA made it a lot more relaxed than usual, even though
we were also playing difficult Holborne on difficult
instruments.

The new venue for afterwards, the Deluxe Town
Diner in Watertown was good, too.

May 3 meeting

We played:

Schedule

As far as I know, we’ll be having dropin meetings on Tuesdays
as usual (7:45 PM, my place) until the week of BEMF, when we will not be
meeting.

Social events

Holborne Orgy

I’d like to get the complete Holborne book up for sale before
BEMF, and I’d like to get it all well proofread before I do
that. I was thinking one way to do this would be to throw a
party with lots of people, some of whom could play from
facsimile and some from the Serpent Publications Edition.

It would be like the Christmas party, except with Holborne
instead of Christmas music. And if the weather were to get good
between now and then,
we could do some of the eating and drinking outside.

The
only obvious time before BEMF to schedule this party would be
Memorial Day weekend (May 28, 29, or 30). Of course, this won’t
work if everybody who would want to come will be out of town.
So if this sounds like fun, let me know whether you could come
that weekend, and which days are better for you.

Post-BEMF party

Two years ago, we included a party invitation on the back of
the flyers we passed out at BEMF. We didn’t actually get anyone
we didn’t already know to come to that party, but I think it did
cause the flyer to give a better idea of what kind of group we
are, and a couple of people did join on the basis of that
flyer. So if you’d like to come to a Cantabile party after BEMF, please
let me know which weekend days in late June and early July would
be best for you.