diary – Page 12 – LayMusic.org

A limerick

I don’t write them very often — the one I
like best I posted here in 2005. But Garrison Keeler was on
the radio yesterday, and he pointed out that when he discovers a
rhyme it makes his brain light up and he needs to do something
with it, and I realized I used to be that way but I let it lapse.
So I swore that the next time I discovered a rhyme, I would write
a limerick. So I noticed one walking the dog this morning and
here’s the limerick:

Priscilla, a grey furry rat,
Had friends who thought she was too fat.
    So she ran down the street
    And tripped over her feet
And ended up totally flat.

Flat and rat isn’t a great rhyme like the ones Ira Gershwin and
Cole Porter used, but limericks don’t need a lot more than that.
I had rat and fat and street and feet by the time I got home.

My first reaction to the flat rat on Cherry Street was,
“Another flat squirrel!” because we’d seen one of those on Windsor
Street last night, but then I noticed the tail, and then I had the
rhyme.

The New York Continuo Collective

Continuing to bring you my reporting from the 2013 Boston Early Music Festival. The
American Recorder editor cut this one
even worse than most of what I sent her, because it wasn’t really
a recorder concert at all.

The New York Continuo Collective

L’amour et La Folie

Love and Madness in the Air de Cour

Thursday, June 13, 2013, Noon

Gordon Chapel, Old South Church

645 Boylston ST., Boston

The New York Continuo Collective is mostly a bunch of plucked string
players accompanying singers. There’s one bass viol (Virginia
Kaycoff), and they get instrumental solos (aside from lutes playing the
tunes) by having a couple of people play recorders (Grant Herreid and Paul
Shipper).

Every “semester” they study a different repertory of 17th century
song, and this Spring it was the French Air de Cour. The program was
based around a collection of songs with lute tablature published in
1614 by Gabriel Bataille, which seem to be from a ballet depicting a
quarrel between Amour and La Folie.

The program was semi-staged and variously costumed — some characters
only wearing a hat to indicate their character, but Venus (Kirsten
Kane) wearing a golden gown that was definitely not street wear. La
Folie (Brittany Fowler) wore street wear, but mixed patterns and
stripes in a charmingly disturbing way.

The plot involved Amour attempting to prove that he enhances human
happiness, in the face of La Folie’s claim that love only leads to
misery. So there are lots of songs sung by characters labeled
“quarreling lovers”, “rude lover”, or “angry lover”. So with the
dance interludes and the various moods of the lovers, it was a very
diverse program. The ornamentation, both improvised and written out
by the director (Grant Herried) also added variety.

One of the problems of running an early music group in contemporary
American musical culture is that the guitar and lute players often
become very skilled on their instruments without getting the ensemble
experience that wind and bowed string instrument players have
routinely. The Continuo Collective is a brilliant response to this
problem, while also producing a very enjoyable show.

BRS started last night

Four years ago, I posted a very
critical description of what the Boston Recorder
Society was doing at that time.

I started going again last year, because they decided to
start a loud wind class, and hired one of the better loud wind
coaches in the area (Marilyn Boenau) to coach it.

I’m really glad I did support that effort, because although
last year the
group had serious problems as a music making organization (it
worked fine as a way to give my brass chops a good workout once a
month), enough people were enthusiastic enough about the idea that
this year it’s even bigger and better.

We lost two people from the group we had last year. One of
them is a very good crumhorn player, who also plays shawms, but
there really are problems with playing both crumhorns and shawms
with the other instruments in the group. The other was a sackbut player
without a lot of experience playing Renaissance music, and he was
struggling with both the music and his instrument. It’s a better
group for people who are struggling with fewer things than he was,
and he lives pretty far away and had to miss several meetings.

We gained a crumhorn player who is open to the idea of trying
to play dulcian and has decades of experience playing recorder
very well, and two beginning dulcian players with lots of recorder
playing experience. Also the dulcian player who was mostly
playing bass dulcian last year has acquired alto and tenor
dulcians, and is playing them well, and one of the crumhorn
players who also owns a tenor dulcian has gotten better on the
dulcian. And I was complaining about having to play too much
cornetto for my chops last year, and this year I seem to have a
little more stamina. Also the coach seems to have been convinced
that she has to find at least one piece a meeting that someone
else can play the top line on, so I can play serpent.

As you would expect, not all the instruments and reeds people
pulled out of their closets were in wonderful shape.
The new crumhorn player’s only crumhorn
turned out to have serious tuning problems (not as in she couldn’t
play a meantone low third, but as in she couldn’t play a note that
was recognizable as a G), so she borrowed one
from someone else, and one of the other group members is going to
look at tuning her instrument for her. One of the dulcian players
has been learning to make reeds and loaned some of his reeds to
the new players to see if it helped them.

But we really ended up sounding pretty good. We played a 5
part instrumental piece with some dancy sections and some fanfare
sections, and it sounded really good. Then we played a seven-part
Gabrielli, that took some time to put together but will be really
wonderful. I got to play serpent in a fairly high tenor range on
that one, and I think it worked pretty well with sackbut, four
dulcians, and two crumhorns.

So to all ensemble musicians, Happy New Year, and I hope you
have something to be as optimistic about as I do.

I met an electric car yesterday

And spent some time jamming with the owner because it wasn’t
charged yet when the cookout was over.

This confirmed my impression that the range isn’t yet where it
needs to be for my purposes. It actually is where it needs to be
for my friend — his wife drives a gas-powered car, and when he
goes far enough that the range of the Nissan Leaf is questionable, the plan was that
he’d use her car, but it’s a shiny new toy (2013 model, purchased
less than a month ago) and he wanted to try it
out.

So he emailed my sister that he needed there to be a modern
outlet less than 20 feet from where he could park. Her front door
is farther than that from the road, and she doesn’t have one in
the garage that was built in 1949, but she talked to a neighbor
whose house is closer to the street than hers and he was excited
about being a charging station, so Harold drove the Nissan Leaf
instead of the gas-guzzler.

He lives about 50 miles from my sister’s house, and when it was
time to leave the party, the charger only showed 36 miles worth of
juice. There is a charging station 3 miles from my sister’s
house, but he doesn’t have the right card to use it, so he got
directions to the nearest Nissan dealer and went there.

Half an hour later, he was back — the dealership had been
completely locked up (this was about 9 on Saturday night) with no way to get at a charger, so he was
plugged back in to the neighbor’s. He’s a composer and
agile on the keyboard, so we jammed on folk tunes for a while, and
then I left to get back to the lonely, starving dog, and he and my
sister were playing a piano four-hands arrangement of the fifth
Brandenburg concerto.

He wrote this morning:

I rested a few minutes in the car after our 4-hands evening, and then
left ca. 11:45 with 54 miles of charge shown.
I drove about 45 mph the whole way home, with extreme efficiency of
braking etc.

I started to see that 1 odometer mile was equaling less than 1 charge
mile after just 15 min, or so, and this generally stayed true.
However, when I exited 93/95 to 1A north, I was merely down to 20
miles of charge capacity, and 18 by the time I was home –
so I likely could’ve left back earlier in the evening with the 49
miles of capacity shown at no empty battery risk, especially if I
drove similar to just now.

I do know the metering is adaptive to your driving, but ultimately,
while relieved I had excess charge upon arrival,
I felt a bit cheated to see that so many miles were yet available.

I’ve always assumed that driving an electric car to Fall River would
be like that. The majority of my trips are within Route 128, and
there are lots of charging stations in Cambridge, so for those
trips I’m sure an electric car would be fine. But the majority of
the miles I put on the car are driving the 60 miles to Fall River
and then back again, so if you need to stay in Fall River longer than I would
want to to get your car charged, then it isn’t yet the right
technology for me.

Options for a cookout

I promised you more about how I’m cooking from the farm share
this year. I thought I’d start by giving you the email I sent my
sister yesterday about what I might be able to bring to her
cookout today.

I have enormous amounts of cooking I could do, and will
undoubtably do less than I could, so if there’s something on this list
that you particularly do or don’t want, let me know.

Green salad. There’s not only lettuce but also arugula and mustard
greens, and tomatoes, peppers and radishes for standard additions.
Ratatouille. (This will be from the two bell eggplants in the
box a week ago.)
Baba Ganoush (This is from the extra box of eggplants 2 or 3
weeks ago, which is already roasted but not yet flavored.)
Salsa Verde. I made some two weeks ago that I liked, and they gave
me another bag of tomatillos this week.
Potato salad (There is a little bag of dill, and two bags of potatoes.)
Rosemary cake (This is really good timing on the part of the
folks at Picadilly Farm. Last spring I found a recipe for a rosemary cake
that uses up 8 eggs (I have an egg share, too) and gives you dessert and/or breakfast for a
week, and everyone I fed it to liked it and several of them asked
for the recipe. I was feeling like making it again, and trying
to figure out how to organise or buy the fresh rosemary, when a
bunch appeared in the farm share on Thursday.

My sister replied that she had an eggplant dish planned and
someone else was bringing salad, so the best thing would be the
rosemary cake, so that’s what I’m doing. I may also make a salad
— there’s nothing wrong with several salads at a cookout, and the
leftovers are good for breakfast.

The Pope’s interview

I read the whole
thing. You can get everything you want to know about the
contraception and birth control and gay marriage thing from the press
coverage.

But what struck me most was this paragraph:

In my experience as superior in the Society, to be honest, I have not always behaved in that way—that is, I did not always do the necessary consultation. And this was not a good thing. My style of government as a Jesuit at the beginning had many faults. That was a difficult time for the Society: an entire generation of Jesuits had disappeared. Because of this I found myself provincial when I was still very young. I was only 36 years old. That was crazy. I had to deal with difficult situations, and I made my decisions abruptly and by myself. Yes, but I must add one thing: when I entrust something to someone, I totally trust that person. He or she must make a really big mistake before I rebuke that person. But despite this, eventually people get tired of authoritarianism.

It’s pretty common for Church dignitaries to talk about the
crisis of vocations, but I don’t remember ever hearing one talk
about the missing generation. Pope Francis was born in 1936, so
he would have been 36 in 1972. This was exactly the period when I
was going home to Fall River and hearing that all the dynamic
young nuns and priests I’d known in high school (I graduated from
high school in 1968) had left.

Andrew Greeley and others have documented what a problem it is
to find good bishops if you restrict yourself to the minority of
priests who agree with the official position of the church on
contraception. But I hadn’t before thought about the problem of
finding people to promote when everyone you would normally be
thinking about promoting was leaving the priesthood.

Monday at BEMF 2013

I promised you some of what I should have been blogging at the
The Boston Early Music Festival.
The easy way to do this is to give you what I actually wrote not
too long afterwards, but didn’t blog because I was writing it for
a magazine (the
magazine of The American Recorder Society). Now that the magazine has come out, and a large part
of what I wrote has been edited out for length, I don’t see
anything wrong with giving it to you.

The first article was about two fringe concerts on Monday, June
10.

Ensemble 1729

Ensemble 1729: Il Proteo o sià il Mondo al Rovascio

Italian and German Chamber Concertos

10 June, 2013 at 16:00

First Lutheran Church

299 Berkeley St., Boston

Because I live in the Boston area, the editor of this magazine often
asks me to review several concerts early in the Boston Early Music
Festival, because a lot of her out-of-town reviewers haven’t arrived
yet. At the last festival, I saw two local groups at the top of their
game on Monday afternoon.

This year, I got a crash course in the perils of rolling into town on
Sunday and playing a concert on Monday afternoon, even for superb
musicians with decades of experience playing concerts.

Ensemble 1729 is a group of young musicians who met while studying at
McGill University in Montreal. Their publicity emphasizes their
“stylish wit, sensitivity, and quicksilver changes of mood and
color”. Their program started with the Vivaldi concerto which gave
the concert its name. The whole group, consisting of two
harpsichords, recorder (Vincent Lauzer), traverso and string quartet,
was playing. Vivaldi displays the mutability of Proteus by shifting
the tune between all voices, and the different textures certainly made
for an interesting set of sounds.

The middle of the concert was taken up with two pieces (Pasquini
Sonata #10 in c minor for two bassi continue, and Bach Concerto in C
major for two harpsichords) for two harpsichords. This was
problematic for this reviewer, seated at about the middle of the hall,
because the similar sounding harpsichords were nested at center stage, and there was no
way I could tell which harpsichord was playing which notes. People
closer to the front, or even off to one side, had less of a problem
with this, but for me, the dueling improvisations of the Pasquini were
completely lost.

The First Lutheran Church is beloved of _a capella_ vocal groups
because the high, vaulted ceiling takes the sound and bounces it
around until it sounds blended even if the voices are not in fact as
even as one might wish. Unfortunately, this isn’t really what you
want for chamber music.

The concert concluded with the Telemann Concerto in e minor for
recorder and flute. This wasn’t as problematic as the two
harpsichords, because the flute and the recorder do have different
timbres, and you could see which was playing in solo passages. But
other times I’ve seen this concerto performed, but soloists were at
oppposite side of the stage, where here the two wind players stood
next to each other, giving no stereo separation between the sounds.

I was relieved, however, that where most of the concert seemed to have
been aiming for “stylish and elegant”, the final presto of the
Telemann was performed as though the people dancing it might have had
boots on.

Der Getreue Music-Meister

Masters of German baroque music

Performed by the Early Music faculty of the University of North Texas

Monday, June 10, 2013, 6:30 pm

Church of the Covenant

67 Newbury St., Boston

The University of North Texas faculty weren’t making any rookie
mistakes about placement of the performers. And Paul Leenhouts’
recorder playing took aggressive advantage of the recorder’s wider
range of articulations than the oboe (played by Kathryn Montoya) in
the Telemann Concerto in G major (TWV 43-G6). So I was surprised when
Paul made the announcement that Petra Somlai wasn’t going to play her
planned Haydn Sonata, because the harpsichord was missing keys on both
the top and the bottom. It was also small for the large church it was
playing in. As a continuo instrument, it was fine when it was being
supported by the cello (Allen Whear), but seemed more like background
music when it was playing solo, obviously with the cello sonata
(Telemann Sonata in D major, TWV41:D6), but also in a violin sonata
(Bach, BWV 1017, played by Cynthia Roberts).

The rest of the concert (a solo oboe Sonata by Kirnbirger and a Trio
sonata for recorder and violin by Telemann) was admirable baroque
chamber music, with continuo driving the rhythm while the soloists
produce beautiful lines.

Trouble by Fay Weldon

If you remember, the last book I
read was heavy going, so I said I’d read something more fun next.

I picked up this
book because I used to enjoy reading Fay Weldon, who
in the 80’s was writing light fluffy comedies. She also has the
writing credit for Upstairs, Downstairs, which PBS
is still trying to recreate the success of, but without
understanding what was good about it.

I should have read the Wikipedia article linked above, which says:

During her marriage to Ron Weldon, the couple visited
therapists regularly. They divorced in 1994, after he left her for
his astrological therapist who had told him that the couple’s
astrological signs were incompatible.

This book was written in 1993.

It’s about a couple whose marriage is in trouble after the
husband starts visiting an astrological therapist. Most of the
book is the arguments of the troubled couple. It’s not completely
unfunny, but it certainly isn’t the light reading I promised
myself after Transition.

So I’m rereading Pride and Prejudice next.

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A history of the New Testament

I actually had more religious education than a lot of the
people I know, and I’m pretty sure that at one time I knew why
there were wars fought over whether the Holy Ghost proceded from
the Father and the Son or from the Father
through the Son.

It isn’t a problem that usually impacts my current life, but
I was delighted when my reading of RSS feeds led me to this
article about the making of the New Testament. It’s a pretty
long post, so here’s a brief excerpt, which should show you
whether you want to read more of it:

Among the books that Eusebius of Caesarea was considering were the Apocalypse of Peter and the Apocalypse of John. He had to have an apocalypse, the end of the world, because he’d started with the Gospel of John at “In Principio.” Nice symmetrical bookending. But he had several Apocalypses in his Disputed list and none in his Accepted list. What to do?

He had many objections to the Apocalypse of John, starting with What Was He Smoking, and moving on to Too Many Contemporary Political References and I’m Not 100% Sure John Was The Guy Who Wrote This. Eusebius preferred the Apocalypse of Peter, where Jesus takes Peter on a long tour of Heaven and Hell. And after Christ explains all the tortures of the damned, according to category (quite Dantesque), Peter says, “Hey, Josh. You and me go way back, went fishing together, been out drinking, talking philosophy ‘til dawn, and the whole time You’ve been all peace and love and forgiveness and mercy. Isn’t this a little dark for You?” And Jesus replies, “Yeah, Pete. I know. I’ve got to have a hell because it’s a logical necessity, but I never liked the place. Let me tell you a secret, just between you and me: I’m not going to actually put anyone in here. I’m going to save everyone.”

So Eusebius of Caesarea thought about this and said to himself, “If everyone gets saved why will anyone bother believing in Christ and being good and doing good works and loving their neighbor?” so he went with the Apocalypse of John with the seven seals and the great beast and 666 and all that instead.

Someone came and smashed my car

[damaged bumper] — Damage caused by hit-and-run driver about 9 PM on September 14, 2013.

I was reading email and thinking about having supper and
watching TV last night, when there was a loud knock on my door and
the doorbell also rang. (They use the
Winnie-the-Pooh method.)

It turned out to be two policemen, who apologized for
disturbing me, but someone had hit my car, which was parked in
front of my building. They had an eye-witness report of the
hit-and-run driver, including license place number. The witness
stated that the car had attempted a u-turn, and managed to hit
parked vehicles on both sides of the street. I have a small car,
and I can make a u-turn (carefully) with a car parked on one side
of the street, but even my Honda Civic needs a 3-point turn if
there are cars on both sides.

I said it sounded to me like that person shouldn’t have been
driving, and they agreed that it sounded that way to them,
too.

I called the insurance company and made the claim this morning,
and they were very sympathetic, and said that if the police have
turned up the other driver there shouldn’t be any problem getting
the other insurance company to pay the deductible.

The visible damage is pretty much just the driver side of the
front bumper, but I don’t think I’ve ever had body work done that
takes less than a week, so I have to find a week when I don’t need
the car. The body shop I’ve used the last couple of times is
walking distance and fairly good to deal with, so it won’t be
terrible, but it’s a nuisance. I hope they do something
appropriate about the driver.

The picture I managed to get of the damage isn’t very good
(using my phone at all in the sunlight is difficult, and I was too
lazy to get out the real camera and upload pictures from it), so
I’m also giving you a picture of the sunset we had two days ago,
right after a thunderstorm blew through.

[sunset] — Sunset at Green-Rose Park, Cambridge, MA, USA on September 13, 2013.