Category: diary

Alto Sackbut Playing

There are two reasons why I’ve been working on learning alto sackbut.

  • I sing in that range, so in the Tuesday group, where we usually play and then sing, it’s useful to be able to play an instrument in the same range I sing in. Renaissance music was often sung by men singing falsetto, so there are a lot of parts that are by modern choral standards high for a tenor but low for an alto, and I’m someone who can sing them. My Tom Prescott Renaissance tenor is pretty good, but the notes above A are finicky and I need something that goes up to C or D. The tenor serpent would be good if I played it enough, but I don’t, and in any case, I’m coming to the conclusion that serpent family instruments aren’t well-designed for sight-reading groups.
  • The loud wind faculty at workshops would be more comfortable, and would come up with better parts for, an instrument they understood better than they do the serpent.

So right now I have access to two alto sackbuts. This one is cheap, durable, lightweight, a cheerful color, and I have been practicing it and am starting to sound pretty good.

[red plastic trombone]
mini Pbone

It might well be a good solution for the Tuesday problem, where people play plastic recorders and modern stringed instruments all the time. But I don’t think the loud wind coaches at early music workshops are going to like it.

So I also have this:


[Photographer: Ishmael Stefanov]

It was originally a Finke alto sackbut, but an early music enthusiast/instrument builder named Clifford Wheeler put two valves on it so that it would play in the range of a tenor and bass sackbut as well as alto, and also modified the mouthpiece receiver so that he could use his French horn mouthpiece.

I think the valves are cute, although I wouldn’t have added the weight of them myself, but I can’t make even slightly good-sounding noises out of the French horn mouthpiece. A professional sackbut player who was in the room with it the other day didn’t sound a lot better than I did.

So I’m currently investigating buying a good sackbut mouthpiece and getting someone to change the mouthpiece receiver so that I can use it. I’ll let you know how that goes.

Of course, the other problem is that while I’ve been practicing regularly for the last month or so, I have yet to convince anyone to play with me. So it could be that although I can read music in not too remote keys and convince myself I sound something like a trombone player, nobody else will believe that.

Garden pictures from May 22, 2016

[alliums]
Alliums coming into bloom.

The alliums do the best of all the bulbs I ordered the year after I bought the condo. I think the others all died out.
[pansies]
Pansies planted this year.

I’m hoping these seed and last forever.
[illies of the valley]
Lillies of the Valley

These my mother gave me a few years ago, and they like it here.
[grass]
grass in bloom

This is a volunteer grass, which is quite nice when it’s blooming, but I’m going to have to pull some out or it will crowd out the rhubarb.

So what was the turnout?

[voter]

I’ve been listening to lots of coverage of the New Hampshire
primary results, and nobody has mentioned the turnout. If Trump
and Sanders won by getting people to the polls who would normally
have stayed home, it means a lot more for the rest of the country
than if they won in a small, unrepresentative state by convincing
the normal voters to vote for them.

A good dog that didn’t make the exhibition

[ice skating]

I was at the Boston Museum of Fine
Arts exhibition
about Dutch Painting in the Age of Rembrandt and Vermeer. I
wasn’t really using my Prado
algorithm for seeing too much art, where I look carefully only
at the pictures with dogs in them. But I couldn’t help noticing
the dogs. There weren’t many in the formal portraits, but the
family pictures and landscapes mostly did have dogs.

There was an album
of watercolors, which was of course open only to whatever page
the curator had picked, but it had a sign that you could see more
on the website. So when I looked, my favorite dog was the one above.

Letter from an artist about economics

[Hollis Frampton]

Letters of Note
published this
letter from a film-maker to the Museum
of Modern Art about a proposed exhibition of his work, which
they wanted him to participate in “…for love and honor and no money is included at all…”.

It’s not an easiliy excerpted letter, but here’s the last
paragraph:

I hope we can come to some agreement, and soon. I hope so out of
love for my embattled art, and because I honor all those who
pursue it. But if we cannot, then I must say, regretfully, however
much I want it to take place, that there can be no retrospective
showing of my work at the Museum of Modern Art.

[Donald Richie]

5/20 in 1968

[Buckley and Vidal]

I watched Best of
Enemies last night.

The debate point that struck me as having changed the most
since 1968 was that Gore Vidal said, “The top five percent of the
population has 20 percent of the wealth and the bottom 20 percent
of the population has five percent of the wealth.”

This sounds like the income equality we only dream about now.

If you’re wondering about whether to see the movie, it’s been
pretty well described in the reviews. I don’t know that anyone
who didn’t watch the debates in 1968 would care much today, but if
like me you were fascinated by it then, you’ll enjoy watching it
again and seeing some of the backstage story.