Author: Laura Conrad

Report on the November 30, 2010 meeting

We played:

Schedule

We’ll be meeting as usual on Tuesdays at 7:45 PM at my place,
unless we decide to discuss the Tuesday before Christmas.

Party

The party will be on December 19, starting at 5:30 PM.
Consider starting earlier than that at the concert at the
Loring-Greenough house.

I have designed two invitations:

All the graphics are by Dürer. The tagline at the top of the
foldable invitation is from To Drive the Cold Winter Away.

Report on the November 23, 2010, meeting

We played:

  • Gervaise, 14 Bransles de Champagne
  • Morley:
    • Blow, shepherds, blow
    • Deep Lamenting
    • Farewell, disdainful
    • Lady if I through grief
  • Cavendish, Come gentle swains
  • Morley, Arise, awake you silly shepherds sleeping
  • Mundy, Lightly she whipped oer the dales
  • Berg, Let us drink and be merry

Schedule

We’ll be meeting as usual on Tuesdays at 7:45 PM at my place.
There might be some modification to this around Christmas, but not
before that.

Party

This year, the only Sunday in December I could possibly have a party is
December 19. This is the day the Delight Consort, Judith Conrad,
director, with Paul Ukleja on cornetto is playing at the Loring
Greenough house, and I’d like to see it, and I suppose other
people may want to as well. The description is:

Sunday, December 19, at 3:00 pm. at the historic
Loring-Greenough House, 12 South Street, Jamaica Plain.

Judith Conrad with the Delight Consort performing music
ranging from the Spanish Renaissance to 18th century England, including
Christmas music by Tomas Luis da Victoria, Michel Richard de Lalande and
Samuel Wesley and music of Turlough O’Carolan and Baroque Londoners William
Williams and Johann Christian Bach. There will be a number of jolly holiday
songs in which the audience will be encouraged to join.

So we couldn’t get started until 5:30 or 6.

Saturday, December 18 and Saturday December 11 are also free on
my calendar. We tried a Saturday party once, and several people
got parking tickets although I had requested “consideration” on the
residents-only parking restrictions. I think everyone who
disputed the ticket didn’t have to pay, but it was a bit of a
nuisance.

So if you’d like to come, tell me which of those three days you
prefer, and which you wouldn’t be able to come on. I’ll make an
executive decision in the next week or so. If there isn’t enough
enthusiasm for a weekend party, we can just bring our Christmas
baking to a regular Tuesday meeting.

Report on the October 26, 2010, meeting

We played:

Schedule

The meeting next week will be in the usual time and place,
Tuesday, November 2, at 7:45 PM, at my place. Bea
has the key and will open up, and I’ll join you in progress if
closing up the polling place goes smoothly, and for a
much-deserved beer if it doesn’t.

After that, there will be normal dropin meetings for the
forseeable future.

Report on the October 19, 2010, meeting

We played:

Schedule

Next week will be a regular dropin meeting; the following week
is election day, but it sounds like there will be a meeting,
either at the usual place or at Stuart’s. After that I don’t know
why there wouldn’t be regular dropin meetings for a while.

The regular dropin meetings are on Tuesdays, starting at 7:45
PM, at my place.

Report on the October 12, 2010, meeting

We played:

Schedule

I don’t know of any reason why we won’t have our regular dropin
meetings on Tuesdays at 7:45 PM at my place
through the month of October.

On November 2, election day, I’ll be working as Warden of precinct 10-3 in
Cambridge, so someone else will have to run a meeting if you want
to have one.

Speaking of election day, people who aren’t registered to vote where they live should
register today, if they want to vote where they live in November.
Most offices are open until 8 PM.

Coco Chanel and Igor Stravinsky

This
movie makes me feel a lot better about the ability of
cinematic costume designers to show us good clothes than the last
movie about Coco Chanel I saw. The dress he seduces her out
of is just brilliant.

There are two other reasons the movie is worth watching. One is
the piano
lesson he gives her, where he has her play:

[first piano lesson exercise]

and then improvises on it underneath her. If piano lessons
were like that, I’d have stuck with them. But there’s no
evidence that she did.

The other is that the whole first 20 minutes is the original production
of The Rite of Spring that incited the riot. I’ve
never understood before why that music would have incited a riot
— it isn’t that different from what Debussy and other people
were doing at the time. But if you see the costumes and the
dancing, and realize, as Diaghilev remarks in the movie, “They
wanted to see Swan Lake,” the riot makes more sense.

http://rcm.amazon.com/e/cm?t=laymusicorg-20&o=1&p=8&l=as1&asins=B003L20III&fc1=000000&IS2=1&lt1=_blank&m=amazon&lc1=0000FF&bc1=000000&bg1=FFFFFF&f=ifr

Report on the October 5, 2010, meeting

we played:

Schedule

I don’t know of any reason why we won’t have our regular dropin
meetings on Tuesdays at 7:45 PM at my place
through the month of October.

Knitting project — chair seat covers

One of the reasons there haven’t been many posts lately is that
I spent August and most of September battling pneumonia. Battling
in this case means spending a lot of time watching television,
which is boring even when you’re as sick as I was, so I made some
progress on my latest knitting project.

When I moved into my current condominium, I was thinking harder
than usual about interior decorating, and one of the things I
noticed was that all the chairs people were using to reserve the
spaces they’d shoveled the snow out of were nicer looking than the
1960-vintage dinette chairs I was using in my new dining room. One
of my friends was making furniture, so I asked him if he wanted to
make me some chairs.

They came out really nice, and we upholstered the seats with
some red high-quality cotton duck upholstery fabric. After my cat died, I
decided it was time to replace the seats which he had considered
very high-class scratching pads, and I bought some upholstery
fabric, which turned out to not be as high quality as what my
friend bought, so it’s now well past time to be replacing them again.

[Chair with new seat cover]

Chair with new seat cover

I realized that the chair seat is roughly the size of the front
or back of a sweater, and most of the fun of knitting a sweater is
the first front or back you do, so I’m knitting 6 sweater fronts
to replace the seat pad covers. I’m also replacing the foam
rubber, which is making them both better looking and more
comfortable.

I did a prototype with stash yarn that didn’t turn out to be a
very good piece of intarsia knitting, so I won’t show it to you.
The first real cover is from the Water Lily jacket in Alice
Starmore’s Book of Fair Isle Knitting.

[new seat cover]

new seat cover
[Central pattern]

central pattern
[Edge pattern]

Edge pattern


http://rcm.amazon.com/e/cm?t=laymusicorg-20&o=1&p=8&l=as1&asins=0486472183&fc1=000000&IS2=1&lt1=_blank&m=amazon&lc1=0000FF&bc1=000000&bg1=FFFFFF&f=ifr

Report on the September 28, 2010, meeting

We played:

Schedule

I don’t know of any reason why we won’t have our regular dropin
meetings on Tuesdays at 7:45 PM at my place
through the month of October.

Cantabile on youtube

Ishmael put up one of the pieces we sang on September 19. You
can see it in my blog
entry or at the main Cantabile page.