Author: Laura Conrad

It was a pretty busy week, and I only had the little camera, so
I couldn’t do the butterflies, and I was usually carrying too much
to make it easy to stop and take pictures. But here’s what I
got.

Marker putti

This statue was how to identify the building a lot of the
classes were in:

Putti at Connecticutt College

Plaque identifying Putti

Two serpent players

One of the cornetto players had always wanted to play serpent,
so he spent some time with mine, and we took pictures of each
other.

Me playing my serpent

Michael Yelland playing my serpent

I didn’t wrap up the Amherst experience because I was busy
writing the evaluation form. And by the time I was through with
that there were other things I wanted to think about.

But I did promise to let you know how it turned out. You’ll be
glad to know that the Saturday concert was really good, and lots
of people (including world class faculty members who didn’t even
know me) came up to me at the party and told me how good the
serpent playing was.

I’m not going to give you the parts from the evaluation about
individuals, but here’s something I wrote about the workshop in
general:

Beginners

This is from the section that asked for comments about the
daily schedule and kinds of classes. I wrote:

I was concerned that there didn’t seem to be any classes in anything
suitable for beginners. I don’t mean beginners in the sense that they
don’t know the fingering of a soprano recorder, but people who haven’t
previously had the opportunity for the kind of ensemble experience
that Amherst offers. I notice a lot of the people who were beginners when
I first came 20 years ago are now populating the advanced classes.
But we’re all going to die sometime, and if you don’t do beginner
classes now, where will the advanced classes come from 20 years from
now?

I would think the faculty should be more aware of this problem, since
presumably most of them make a substantial portion of their income
from teaching, and if there aren’t places where people who want to
learn something can meet the teachers, where will they get their
students?

Those questions come from someone who doesn’t have an association with
a university. I’m aware that if you know as a teenager that music is
something you want to study, and you go to the right kind of high
school (I didn’t) and college (I did, but of course nowhere was that
good forty years ago for early music), you can get a lot of what I’m talking about from
your academic experience. But one of the strengths of Amherst, and
the early music movement in general, used to be that people who
hadn’t had that experience in school could take it up later in life.
It’s not clear that that’s still happening.

And of course if there’d been brass ensemble classes for beginners,
there would have been a place for a low-level cornetto player, even if
nobody wanted to touch a serpent. My cornetto playing isn’t
performance quality, but if you had a beginning loud wind ensemble
with people who couldn’t count, it would have been easier to teach
with me in it.

I don’t want you to think that all we do here at Amherst is
take classes in the daytime and complain about them at night.
Every night there’s some kind of performance, with opportunities
for playing or singing or dancing before and after.

Yesterday it was a concert by the faculty of the Baroque
Academy. It was billed as Welcome to the Ball: An Evening
of Dance Music from Versailles.

I’m sure everything on the program had come kind of
relationship to dance music, but for some things the relationship
seemed pretty misty to me. I suspect that when Charpentier called
something a sonata he meant that the performers should take the
dances in the movement titles as performance instructions, but not
that a dancer should necessarily be able to dance the dance to the
movement. And certainly a vocal cantata about the parting of the
Red Sea isn’t intended to be danced to.

The playing was uniformly elegant and professional. There were
a few cases where I thought the mood could have been captured
better. For instance, three viol players plus continuo seemed
quite solemn when playing a movement called “Caprice” from a
Marais Suite. The person sitting next to me pointed out that
caprice doesn’t necessarily mean capricious or playful — it means
“what you feel like” and maybe the viol players were feeling
solemn.

Notes on the Continuo

Ever since I heard a baroque wind band perform with a continuo
consisting of both Bernard Fourtet on serpent and
Marilyn Boenau on baroque bassoon, I’ve felt that Baroque chamber
music should be performed with a louder continuo than the usual
harpsichord/cello or viol configuration. The Boston Early Music Festival opera
orchestra always uses multiple configurations of bowed and plucked
strings, but as a wind player I never find that as interesting as
if they used serpents and bassoons too.

The performers last night were doing the right kind of
experiments with that, and in the final number with an ensemble
consisting of two violins, two oboes, two recorders, two baroque
flutes, cello, viol, baroque bassoon, and two harpsichords, they
achieved a wonderful variety of very supportive continuo
playing.

I suspect with more rehearsal time, they could have carried
that over to all the other pieces, too. But for the Cantata about
the parting of the Red Sea, they decided to use the cello/bassoon
configuration throughout, and I felt it was an obtrusively
unblended sound that didn’t work well with Julianne Baird’s limpid
soprano vocal lines.

Of the instrumental pieces, the most remarked on one was the
piece for two harpsichords by a later, more obscure Couperin
(Armand Louis (1727-1789). A long, drawn-out cadence in the
middle seemed to put Peter Sykes to sleep until Arthur Haas leaned
over to poke him so that he could wake up and play the bravura
fireworks of the ending. I found myself wondering how fast the
allegro of that Symphonie must be if that was the
Moderato.

They reorganized all the loud wind classes on Monday night, and
threw me (and a number of other people) out of them.

I shouldn’t have been surprised — I know someone who flew from
Massachusetts to San Francisco to take a cornetto class and they
cancelled it without telling her because not enough people signed
up.

This seems to have been the reverse — they had an unusual
number of brass players sign up, so they hired an extra coach, but
his mother-in-law was dying in Toronto, so he didn’t come. So
instead of making the other brass coaches coach more students, or
finding someone to fill in at the last moment, they just threw
some people out of the classes.

In my case they put me in two recorder classes. One of them
was billed as a Camarata class, so I’m going and playing serpent
and cornetto there, because I assume the people who signed up for
that knew they’d be playing with mixed instruments. It’s not the
best class for me, both because I would learn more about brass
playing from a class with other brass players, coached by a brass
player, and also because the coach is my recorder teacher, and it’s
silly to come to a place full of world-class musicians and work
with someone who lives a mile away from you and gives you a
recorder lesson every week.

The other was billed as a recorder class, and when they posted
the new class assignments, the wrote “Laura Conrad (rec)” with the
rec in red lettering. So I decided I could get more out of taking
third period off and catching up on this blog, and napping and
practicing. I made a point of telling the teacher (also from the
Boston area) that it was nothing personal and I was sure it was a
fine recorder class, except that I didn’t come here for recorder
classes. He was quite sympathetic, and said the students in the
class had been quite excited about having a serpent, and we agreed
I could come try it if I wanted it to, but I’ve decided not
to.

I’ve usually just put up with decisions I didn’t like, and
complained about them to the other students, but this time I
decided to be a squeaky wheel and see if I got any grease.

The person who used to be in charge of class assignments was
sitting at the table when I was explaining my problem to the
current class assignment person, and she told me she thought I’d
given a very good, clear explanation of the problem, but that it
might make sense to also give that kind of explanation directly to the
brass faculty, and eliminate the middleperson. So at afternoon
coffee break I found the cornetto teacher and explained the
problem. He was sympathetic, but not really helpful, but he did
agree that he should be putting some ensemble playing into the
morning cornetto class. I asked him if he thought it made sense to
talk to Wim Becu, and he didn’t say no, but he didn’t say anything
that convinces me the answer is, “Yes”, either. But maybe some
time Wim won’t be surrounded by 10 trombone players and I can ask
him if he knows of a workshop where someone like me could get
brass ensemble experience.

If this had happened on Monday, I would have been frustrated
and disappointed, but not the kind of upset I was with it
happening after the Monday classes. A number of people tried
really hard to make me feel better. The most successful one was a
student who had been in both Monday afternoon classes. He said he
thought both classes with me on Monday afternoon had been really
good, and the class with Wim is still pretty good, but the class
with Steve is much worse without me, and with the new people they
moved into it.

Good things are still happening. The Tuesday night lecture was
a humorous survey of the history of French music, with
illustrations. The viol coach who’s coaching the loud winds in
the “Mass” (long story that I don’t know all of yet, but I may
tell you later) was at a loss for what to do for a loud band
piece, so I suggested the Estocart Psalm CXXXVII that’s on SerpentPublications.org
and he printed it out and printed several other things, so we’ll
probably play some of that.