Author: Laura Conrad

Report on the January 12, 2010, meeting

We played:

Schedule

Enough people said they’d like to meet next week that there will be a meeting at the usual time (7:45 PM) and place, although I won’t be able to join you much before beer time.

Most of what I do, there are other people in the group that can do at least as well as I can, but I am better than anyone else at finding the music in my house. So if there’s something special you want to do, either print it yourself off the Serpent Publications site, or let me know and I’ll make sure to leave it where someone can find it.

After that, I don’t know of any reason to modify our usual schedule of dropin meetings until we start working on the Walk for Hunger program, probably in April or late March.

But of course, who knows how many more special elections there will be.

Publishing on the web

I’ve been sending a lot of email lately to people who
transcribe music the way I do and are wondering whether and how to put it on
the web.

Putting other people’s transcriptions on my site is addressed briefly in the SerpentPublications.org
FAQ, but of course there are lots more details than a two
paragraph answer can deal with.

One person who’s also a student of my recorder teacher
transcribes in Sibelius. She gives printouts to anyone who
asks, but seems to have decided putting it on the web is
impossibly complicated. My teacher has been really excited
about being able to point workshop students to the music he’s
going to be using on the web, so that they can look at it
beforehand, and has been encouraging her to get hers up, too. She discussed it with the Sibelius
support people, but her eyes glazed over when they said “install
a PDF writer”. Apparently she has an old wreck of a computer
that breaks when you install pretty much anything. So if she
hadn’t figured out how to do it in 2003, that computer is never
going to be able to do it, and she doesn’t like computers enough
to want to spend $200 on a better one.

Another person is doing transcriptions from Petrucci’s
Odhecaton. He’s quite capable of putting his own site up, and
had decided to use a wordpress
blog for his transcriptions. We have an ongoing
conversation about how to provide the kinds of transcriptions
various kinds of players want. I thought about the blog
solution when I was setting up the Serpent Publications
site, but was having too much trouble using the WordPress
media stuff, and I already had the database set up. I suspect
that when he has a few dozen transcriptions, he’ll find the blog
solution clumsy, but it should work fine until then. I would
probably have used if it had been available when I was starting
out.

A third person has essentially transcribed all of Dowland’s
part songs, including the lute tablature, and converted the lute
tablature to notation suitable for guitar players. This would
actually be a really good supplement to the Dowland
that’s on my site, and I’d be happy to have it, but he hasn’t yet
done any thinking about licensing, so I pointed him to some
reading matter, and haven’t heard from him since. There is a
lot of stuff to think about. I also suggested lulu.com if what he really
wants to do is sell his work.

It’s quite exciting to be in touch with so many people
doing the kind of thing I do. I hope they all get what they
want out of doing it.

Family History Sagas

One thing I kept thinking about while reading Cryptonomicon
is that the model Neal Stephenson is using for family history is really
different from the standard model in mass-market
fiction.

The standard model is that you write one book describing three
generations:

  • The Grandparent Generation makes a major life decision
    (immigrating to America, starting a business…) and makes it
    work.
  • The Parent Generation is constrained in its choices by the
    expectations of the Grandparent Generation, and ends up a bit
    colorless.
  • The Child generation has lots of choices, because of the
    success of the preceding two generations. The plot can either
    have them striking out in a different direction entirely, or
    ending up taking over the original business with new energy and
    insights.

So this model says that your personality is determined by your
circumstances, which may be very different from those of your
parents and grandparents.

Stephenson’s model is that your personality is determined by
your heredity, so if your grandfather was the sort who was a good
sergeant (the Shaftoes), you’ll likely end up as a sergeant or
in a similar role in some non-military enterprise,
too. If your grandfather (or great-great-great grandfather) was a
scientific researcher, you’ll fall into some kind of research
activity, too.

Probably neither model works very well in real life, and both
models can produce good fiction. But I have to say that for
analyzing the dynamics in my own family, I more often find the
mass-market fiction model useful.

Cryptonomicon

I assumed when I started reading this
book that it was a sequel to The
Baroque Cycle, but it turns out that it was
actually published four years before Quicksilver,
the first volume of the Cycle.

Stephenson says about the project:

The series will incorporate many characters and
stories, tied together by a few common threads. For example,
certain family names keep popping up. Crypto, money, and
computers seem to find their way into all of the
storylines.

I was sure I enjoyed Cryptonomicon more for
having read it after Baroque Cycle, but then I
reread the first chapter of Quicksilver because it
was provided free at the end of the Cryptonomicon
ebook, and I realized that I’d probably have enjoyed it more if
I’d already met Enoch Root and Daniel Waterhouse’s descendants,
too.

So if you want to read long novels with topics to do with
history and science and technology, start wherever you like.
Probably the best guide is which period you’re more interested
in the history of: the 17th and 18th centuries or the 20th
century.

I was amused that a book about the wonders of modern
cryptography would have the boilerplate DRM at the end:

By payment of the required fees, you have been granted
the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the
text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be
reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse
engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information
storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means,
whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter
invented, without the express written permission of
PerfectBound.

I’m running late today, so I’ll reserve the right to discuss
this book more later, but consider this a recommendation.

http://rcm.amazon.com/e/cm?t=laymusicorg-20&o=1&p=8&l=as1&asins=0060512806&fc1=000000&IS2=1&lt1=_blank&m=amazon&lc1=0000FF&bc1=000000&bg1=FFFFFF&f=ifr

Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead

I read Tom Stoppard’s play in college, and had never had a
chance to see it, so I put this
movie on my Netflix Watch Now queue when I noticed it. It’s
directed by Stoppard himself, and has a cast with some notable
stars in it.

It was one of the high points of that course in college — we
read a lot of good literature but most of it was stuff I’d read
already — this was an example of something I wouldn’t have read
on my own but really enjoyed.

The memorable scenes are all really good. There’s some less
memorable stuff that doesn’t get too tedious in between. As you
would expect, the parts that Shakespeare wrote are pretty
conventionally acted, except for bringing out the conceit that
nobody, including the two characters themselves, can remember
which is which. I gave it 3 stars.

If you don’t know the play and want to know whether you want
to, here are the parts I remembered fondly from reading it:

  • R. and G. play a game of “Questions”, where you have to
    always ask a question and it can’t be a non-sequitur or a
    rhetorical question. Then after their first encounter with
    Hamlet they score it by those rules.
  • They try to decide whether Hamlet is mad today based on his
    “when the wind is southerly I know a hawk from a handsaw,”
    speech, and fail to determine the direction of the wind, where
    North is, or the time of day.
  • The statement that toenails never grow.

You can see some of these quotes out of context at imdb.com,
but it really isn’t one-liner humor.

http://rcm.amazon.com/e/cm?t=laymusicorg-20&o=1&p=8&l=as1&asins=B000777I88&fc1=000000&IS2=1&lt1=_blank&m=amazon&lc1=0000FF&bc1=000000&bg1=FFFFFF&f=ifr

Kombucha


[kombucha]

I talked to someone yesterday who’s been brewing Kombucha. I’d
heard of it but never tasted any, so I picked up a bottle at the
grocery store last night.

I just had some, and enjoyed it. It’s a pleasantly sour
taste. The bottle I bought is a bit sweeter than I would aim for
if I were brewing my own.

So I might just try brewing some. Brewing beer is really a bit
strenuous and space intensive for my current way of life, but I do
like having living things to watch in my kitchen.

Lohengrin at Bayreuth

I enjoyed this
DVD quite a lot, although it’s probably a bit long to be a
good introduction to Wagner if you don’t already know you want
to watch him.

With my memory refreshed on my previous viewing of the opera by
my post
last Monday, I could see that the Bayreuth organization
and Werner Herzog (who did the stage direction) had to struggle
with many of the same problems that the Met touring company so
flagrantly failed to overcome.

Of course, the DVD had electronic means of overcoming any
imbalance between the singers and the orchestra, but probably
they hire singers to sing live at Bayreuth who have the right
vocal equipment. This is less rare than the right vocal
equipment for Hynes Auditorium, since Wagner designed his
theater very carefully for exactly that kind of production,
whereas Hynes Auditorium was designed for something else. (I’m
not really sure what, but it wasn’t Wagnerian opera.)

They coped with the problem of opera singers not always
grabbing the right end of the sword in the heat of all the other
things they have to think about by giving them “swords” that were
like wiggly light-sabers, which could be held anywhere along the
length of the weapon. The sword fights weren’t particularly
elaborately staged, but they did always seem to attack with the
“point”. The light-sabre conceit made some good lighting
effects possible.

The Swan was a stuffed Swan head and wings on the actor playing
the non-singing
role of Gottfried. And lots of lighting. As I remember the
Hynes Auditorium production, it wasn’t at all clear where the
dopy looking boy came from at the end. In this production, you
wonder why you can see the boy with the stuffed swan on his head
when none of the characters can. It’s one of the places where
I’m sure Wagner would have loved Hollywood special effects.

I thought all the singing was quite good. The acting was a
little more variable — Elsa was very good; Ortrud was
monochromatically angry; the men all verged on being a bit
wooden, with Lohengrin the best of the bunch. In general,
we shouldn’t expect opera singers who have been trained to act so that the
third balcony can see what they’re feeling to suddenly be subtle
in a film closeup. And I’m not sure we have the cultural
training to reproduce 19th century depictions of ancient
cultural figures in their public personas. We might well have
thought King Henry was wooden when he was addressing his
people if we had seen the real thing.

The scenery, lighting, and camera work were all quite good,
which you’d expect with a famous film director in charge. The
costumes were what I’ve seen in other Bayreuth-produced DVD’s —
nightgowns in attractive colors. This is one of the areas where
the production ignores explicit text in the libretto —
Lohengrin should have been wearing shining armor instead of a
vaguely steel-colored nightgown.

In general, I don’t believe people staging an opera from a
century and a half ago should feel compelled to follow all the
stage directions, or even all the staging explicitly called for
in the libretto. But I do wonder why they don’t change the
libretto when they’re changing the staging. Another place where
this production ignored Wagner’s writing was in the final scene when Lohengrin is
leaving his Sword, his Horn and his Ring for Gottfried when he
comes back. He does leave the light-sabre, but his costume
doesn’t have a horn, so he just sings about it without actually
putting anything down. This isn’t as irritating as when Brünhilde
is calling for her horse, and then talking to it for several
minutes and there isn’t anything remotely resembling a horse on
stage. But I do think they should address the problem when they
change something.

I spent a good part of the third act thinking what lousy wife
material Elsa was, aside from being able to deliver the Duchy of
Brabant. Before the wedding, she goes on and on about falling at
his feet and worshipping him. Then as soon as the ceremony is
over, she starts nagging him about telling her his name, which
is the one thing he’s asked her not to do. The marital
relationship between Ortrud and Friedrich is actually fairly
well-drawn, but virtuous women weren’t really Wagner’s strong
point.

There are other reviews: of this DVD at wagneropera.net,
and of the production as seen live (with a different cast) in The
New York Times. I don’t disagree with much that they say,
but I think the wagneropera.net reviewer was a little harsh on
the acting.

http://rcm.amazon.com/e/cm?t=laymusicorg-20&o=1&p=8&l=as1&asins=B000YD7S2Q&fc1=000000&IS2=1&lt1=_blank&m=amazon&lc1=0000FF&bc1=000000&bg1=FFFFFF&f=ifr

Semolina and Fennel bread

I originally got this recipe from the Cuisinart Bread Machine
cookbook. The bread machine died, but the cookbook is much
better than the one that came with the cheaper machine I
replaced it with.

I made it last night for the band, and everyone really liked
it. I’m including the original proportions, but last night I
only had 2 cups of Semolina flower (so I used an extra cup of
bread flour), and I used dried cranberries
instead of golden raisins.

Water, room temperature 1 2/3 cups
Sea salt 2 teaspoons
Fennel seed 2 teaspoons
Granulated sugar 1 teaspoon
Semolina flour 3 cups
Bread flour 1 cup
Yeast 2 teaspoons
Golden raisins 3/4 cup

Place water, salt, fennel seed, sugar, semolina flour, bread flour and yeast, in order
listed, in the bread pan.
When the mix-in tone sounds, add the
raisins.

http://rcm.amazon.com/e/cm?t=laymusicorg-20&o=1&p=8&l=as1&asins=B0009VELTQ&fc1=000000&IS2=1&lt1=_blank&m=amazon&lc1=0000FF&bc1=000000&bg1=FFFFFF&f=ifr

Report on the January 5, 2009, meeting

We played:

Schedule

We will meet as usual next week, January 12, at 7:45 PM at my place.

On Tuesday, January 19, I will be officiating at the election,
so we either won’t meet, or we’ll have to make some different arrangement.

The Lost Chord

Sunny and I walked by The Lost Sock Laundromat
this morning, and I started thinking about Arthur Sullivan’s
The
Lost Chord.

Of course, I first started composing a parody about a lost
sock, but I didn’t get very far, and I think if I had
managed to get something to scan properly it wouldn’t have been a
very good parody.

But then I started thinking about the frequently expressed
criticism that a “Great Amen” is two chords, not one.

My guess is that Arthur Sullivan, who was one of the best-known
composers of his era, knew at least as much music theory as these
critics, and if he found that the poem spoke to him anyway, we
should at least give it a chance to speak to us.

Certainly we’ve all had the experience of remembering having
been inspired by an idea, but not remembering the idea. I have
it several times a week with this blog — I sit down and
remember that I’d had a really good idea on last night’s walk,
but not what the idea was. I don’t personally feel particularly
inspired by the idea that the angel of death will bring back all
my lost blog post ideas on my deathbed. But of course, my blog
post ideas may well be less inspiring than Arthur Sullivan’s
organ improvisations, or even Adelaide Proctor’s.

It’s not a particularly easy song to sing, even with the music
in front of you and an accompaniment, but Sunny and I managed to
remember most of the words and stumble through some approximation
of the notes in the half mile walk home. It’s really not a bad song at all.

There’s an arrangement (I think by Clifford Bevan) for Serpent
Ensemble. If you have serpent players who can possibly do
something like tuning the chords, it’s probably fun to play,
although like most serpent ensemble arrangements, it probably
involves the top voice squeaking too high and the bottom voice
grumbling too low and only the middle two voices actually have the
kind of
fun that people go into playing serpent for.