diary – Page 8 – LayMusic.org

Review of Il ritorno d’Ulisse in patria

Fuse has published a review of the first BEMF opera performance.

Looking forward to BEMF 2015

This is the start of the fifth biennial “Blogging from BEMF”
event.

As in previous years, the actual blogging during the week will
be erratic. Blogging isn’t really compatible with going to
concerts at all hours of the day and night, and I really couldn’t
report on what’s happening if I didn’t do that.

Also, I have several comp tickets in return for writing up
events for the American
Recorder Magazine. So I won’t post in great detail about
those events at least until after the magazine has appeared.

But as usual, I will try to point to any interesting coverage,
and follow the exhibition and some of the fringe events better
than the mainstream press does.

Festival Concerts

In addition to their usual paucity of reed and brass playing,
this year there’s very little renaissance music at all in the main
concerts. So I have:

Jordi
Savall doing music from Mexico and South America, in addition to Spanish
Renaissance composers Diego Ortiz and Pedro Guerrero. (Monday
evening concert.)
Monteverdi’s
Vespers of 1610, which my college music history courses
considered as the beginning of the Baroque, but a lot of the
solo playing is still very like what they did in the
renaissance. (Thursday evening concert.)
Norbert
Rodenkirchen playing medieval flutes. (Thursday 11pm concert.)
Musica
Pacifica on the grounds that I often like hearing
what professional concert musicians do with dance music. (Or
if not, I like figuring out why not and criticizing it.) (Friday
11pm concert.)
Orfeo.
This is the one of the three operas that has the wind band, so
it’s the one I got. (Saturday evening opera)
Inventions of
Delight: Dance music from the courts of the early 17th
century. See above; also this concert will include the wind
ensemble that’s playing the Vespers and Orfeo. Also, the
Saturday 11pm concert is very consistently enjoyable and high
4 energy. These are the people who’ve been playing together all
week in the opera orchestra, and it’s almost over, and they get
to do what they have fun with. (Saturday 11pm concert.)
Michael
Form and Friends. The last few years, they’ve gotten a good
recorder soloist or group to do the Sunday afternoon concert,
and to teach a masterclass on Saturday. So this is where to go
to hobnob with all the other recorder players.

Masterclasses

You should check out the Masterclass
for any instrument you’re particularly interested in. Even if the
eminent performer who teaches it doesn’t turn out to have anything
interesting to say (rare in my experience), you’ll get to see some
of the up-and-coming young players and what they’re working
on.

I’ll be going to the Saturday 11am recorder masterclass with
Michael Form. If schedule permits, I’d like to get to the lute
song one on Saturday at 4:30 with Ellen Hargis, Paul Odette and Stephen Stubbs. They
do it every festival, and I’ve always enjoyed it when I’ve been
able to go.

Exhibition

Long-time readers of this blog will of course not be under the
common misapprehension that BEMF is about holding concerts by major
recording artists and selling their CD’s.

Like other long-time institutions of the early music
movement, BEMF is built on the collaboration between professional
performers, instrument makers, musicologists, and the amateur
performers who are the most enthusiastic supporters of (and providers
of income stream to) the other pillars of the movement.

And the best place at BEMF to appreciate this is to go to the
exhibition.

This year’s List of
Exhibitors looks unusually interesting, with Adriana Breukink, an
innovative recorder maker, Leslie Ross, who makes
bassoons and dulcians, and Turners’ Quay who do
clarinets and cornetti.

Fringe Concerts

Here are some of the fringe concerts I want to call attention
to. Please note that failing to mention someone here doesn’t
mean I don’t think it will be a good concert. I’m mainly
mentioning the ones I mention either because they’re doing
Renaissance music or because I know them personally.

Friends of Tom Zajac, 6pm, Monday, First Lutheran Church.
Tom is a very well liked player and coach of recorders, sackbut,
bagpipes, percussion, and probably other things. He has been
having recurring medical problems. Insurance takes care of the
medical bills, but not the lost income when he can’t work. So a
bunch of his friends, also very fine players, have organized a
benefit concert.
Renaissonics, Noon, Tuesday, Brown Hall, New England
Conservatory. Some of the cornerstones of Renaissance music
were improvisation and dance music, and Renaissonics does this
better than most currently active groups.
Long and Away, noon, Wednesday, Hunnewell Chapel at
Arlington Street Church. Songs from the Spanish Netherlands
written between 1568 and 1648.
The Duke Vespers Ensemble et al., 1:30pm, Wednesday, Church
of the Covenant. Seventeenth century Roman
Church music on a variety of instruments including brass.
Judith Conrad on triple-fretted clavichord, 2pm, Wednesday,
Paulist Center Library. Music of Samuel Scheidt published in
1628.
Jean Maillard Singers, 3pm, Thursday, Beacon Hill Friends
House. Music of Jean Maillard (c. 1515 – after 1570).
Recorder Relay, 9:15am Friday, Church of Saint John the
Evangelist. I’m particularly looking forward to the last group,
scheduled for 11:20,
which is several of the local professional recorder players
playing Renaissance music on matched Renaissance recorders.
Convivium Musicum, Saturday, noon, First Lutheran Church.
Their Sweelinck concert drew rave reviews when they sang it last
Spring.
Vox Lucens, 4:30pm, Saturday, Goethe Institute.

O Christmas Tree

[decorated Possibilitree] — decorated Possibilitree

For the last 20 years or so, I’ve been buying a tree, taking it home, lugging it up the stairs, standing on ladders to get the decorations down from the top shelf of the closet, standing on ladders to get the decorations on the tree, spilling water and knocking off ornaments when I watered it, vacuuming up the needles, and when the season is over, doing all of that in reverse.

I never looked forward to any of the lugging or standing on ladders. Additionally, a friend who has something like the same kind of asthma that I do has been raving about how much better her Christmases are now that she has an artificial tree. I didn’t know that mine would be, but I thought it might be worth trying.

I never wanted a green artificial tree, but I did spend some time thinking about a silver one. But really, they look tacky.

Then I was listening to the local PBS station noontime talk show discuss artificial trees, and someone called in and said that they were just putting up their Possibilitree. It sounded just like what I had been looking for — light, easy to store, and not aggressively artifical.

There should be an intermediate size between the three foot one and the five foot one you have to suspend from the ceiling, but the three foot one is certainly light and easy to store and decorate.

I spent some time figuring out how to light it, and decided on two spotlights with color-changing bulbs. Here’s what it looked like before I added decorations.

[bare Possibilitree, green] — Christmas Possibilitree out of box, green

[pink possibilitree] — Christmas Possibilitree, Pink

In addition to the colors on the tree itself, it made interesting colored shadows on the ceiling.

[Possibilitree shadows on ceiling] — Possibilitree shadows on ceiling

I’m thinking of putting it up again with eggs on it at Easter.

Welcome Maia

I just adopted Maia from Buddy Dog no-kill shelter in Sudbury.”
She’s 1-2 years old. They say she’s a beagle-boxer mix, but after I was hooked they mentioned that someone might think she had some pit bull somewhere.
She and her sister belonged to a homeless person, who couldn’t take care of them and left them somewhere, where Animal Control picked them up and brought them to Buddy Dog.
She was Mia at the shelter, but I modified it to Maia, because her cousin Orion is a constellation (as well as a mighty hunter), and Maia was one of the Pleiades. Also the mother of Hermes and the foster-mother of another of Zeus’ children, whose own mother Hera turned into a bear.

So far, so good. She was good in the car, and hasn’t destroyed anything, and liked the quick tour of the dog park (with no other dogs) I gave her on the way home from the shelter.

Two pieces of science fiction criticism

I mentioned a few months
ago how difficult I found it to write well about Science
Fiction, although I enjoy reading it.

I realized this morning that this week I’ve read two really
good pieces of criticism that were science fiction related, so I
thought I’d pass them on to you.

Here’s the
piece Jo
Walton wrote about Mary Renault. You should read it for
its description of why trying to sell her work as genre Romance
is a doomed strategy:

Romance makes assumptions about the value and nature of love that are very different from the assumptions Renault is using. Romances are set in a universe that works with the belief that love is a good thing that conquers all, that deserves to conquer all. Renault is starting from an axiomatic position that love is a struggle, an agon or contest—a contest between the two people as to who is going to lose by loving the other more, which certainly isn’t going to lead to inevitable happiness.
Here’s an interview
with Peter
Watts where he explains why there’s so much torture in
contemporary science fiction:

Need to deliver a three-page neurophilosophical infodump at the climax of your first-contact novel? You could always have Spock and McCoy trading debating points in the med lab. Or you can have your protagonist assaulted so violently that his very consciousness shatters into profound autism, that he perceives all external input as a deafening disembodied voice from the heavens. (That was Blindsight.) Pretty much any infodump becomes more – immediate – when you sheath it in pain and jeopardy.

The Prado

We had only three days in Madrid, so we planned to spend a big chunk of one of them at the Prado. Of course, it’s a big museum, so even in a whole day it’s impossible to see everything. For some reason, as I walked into the first gallery, I decided to limit my viewing to only pictures with dogs in them.

Of course, I wasn’t dogmatic about it, but it did seem to be a good thing to do. I walked into a room, looked at the bottoms of all the pictures, and went over and looked carefully at the ones with a dog. Of course, sometimes I ended up looking at one with a sheep instead. There were a lot of Adorations of the Shepherds, and a lot of hunting scenes, but my favorites turned out to be:

The Entry of the Animals into Noah’s Ark

The Entry of the Animals into Noah’s Ark by Jacopo Bassano, ca 1570

There are two pairs of dogs here. Three of them are looking at the pair of ducks as if they are thinking of them more as dinner than as fellow passengers, but one has gotten tired of waiting in line for the ark and has curled up to take a nap.
Easily the most disturbing dog in the museum is, unsurprisingly, Goya’s Half-submerged Dog.

Half-submerged dog by Goya, 1820-1823

This was especially upsetting to us because of how much the dog looks like my sister’s current dog, Monte.

Monte, June 2009

I can’t find links, but there were actually several other Goya paintings of dogs — he apparently was a dog-owner, and we have lots of letters to his friends discussing his dogs.
I can’t find a link, but there was also a very nice Last Supper with a dog and cat fighting under the table.

Valencia Botanic Gardens

I’ll be writing more posts about this trip to Spain, but I’m putting this one up first, because I got the most pictures here.

This was Tuesday, August 12, my last full day in Spain and the day on my own in Valencia. I had considered going to the cathedral, or taking the bus to the beach and saying hello to the Mediteranean Sea. But I had seen several cathedrals and museums, and decided that a walk to the river and a stroll around the was the right thing to do.

[mother, with carnivores] — My mother, in the last year of her life, at an exhibition of carnivorous plants.

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It was unexpectedly sad — my mother, who died last year, would have really loved it. It was the best cactus collection I've ever seen, and she loved cactuses. There was also a very nice greenhouse, which reminded me of the one at Kew Gardens which I spent a lot of time in with her in 1984.

So since I can't show her my pictures, you have to look at them instead. Here they are:

2014 Hugo Award votes

Novel

This category was difficult this year — they nominated the 14
volume sequence “The Wheel of Time” in it’s entirety. It’s about
6 times the length of War and Peace. I only had time to read 2
times the length of War and Peace between when they sent out the
voter packet and when I had to vote.

It’s possible that when (if, but I’m sort of enjoying it) I
finish it, I will be bowled over and wish I had voted for it over
the three I ranked ahead of it, but really, if anyone had ever
said anything about it that made me want to read it, I would have
read some of it by now. The first volume was imitation Tolkein
by someone with a tin ear for language. I’m sort of glad I pushed
on — it improves pretty fast after that. But I’m not finding
reading the online summaries is anything like reading the books,
so I’m going to just continue reading them in order.

So my choices are:

Neptune’s Brood by Charles Stross
Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie
Parasite by Mira Grant
The Wheel of Time by Robert Jordan and Brandon
Sanderson
Warbound, Book III of the Grimnoir Chronicles

The first three of those are what I consider “normal” science
fiction — examinations of the impact of some kind of technology
on the lives of the characters. The Stross got first place
because I thought both the technology idea (how do you do banking
over interstellar distances?) and the characters were a bit more
interesting than the Leckie and the Grant.

I voted for “The Wheel of Time” over “Warbound” because if it
does turn out to be a good fantasy series, it will be much more
the kind of thing I want to read than the “Grimnoir Chronicles”.
(I should mention that in addition to the 14 volume series
nominated as a whole, the publishers of Warbound also gave us all
three volumes of this series, and I’m not sure I’d have wanted to
read Volume III on its own.) It seems to be SF for the video
games generation, and in spite of some good writing in between the
action scenes, I found it difficult to slog through.

I considered voting for “No Award” ahead of “Warbound”, but I
decided that it was well enough written to justify an award if
that’s the kind of SF the voters really want.

Novella

“Equoid” by Charles Stross
Six-Gun Snow White by Catherynne M. Valente
“Wakulla Springs” by Andy Duncan and Ellen Klages
“The Chaplain’s Legacy” by Brad Torgersen
The Butcher of Khardov by Dan Wells

The top three of these are all excellent stories. The other
two lack characterization. I voted for the Stross over the
Valente and the Duncan because I thought the Science Fiction (a
proposed life cycle for the Unicorn) was better. “Wakulla
Springs” is a well-written story, but really not SF at
all. “Six-Gun Snow White” is brilliant in spots, but doesn’t
really hang together at the end.

Novelette

“The Truth of Fact, the Truth of Feeling” by Ted Chiang
“The Waiting Stars” by Aliette de Bodard
“The Lady Astronaut of Mars” by Mary Robinette Kowal
“The Exchange Officers” by Brad Torgersen
“Opera Vita Aeterna” by Vox Day

Again, any of the top three would be a good award winner. I
didn’t remember until I’d filled out my ballot that the Vox Day
was controversial, but I figure it doesn’t matter because I didn’t
like it without any political motivations.

Short Story

“The Water That Falls on You from Nowhere” by John Chu
“Selkie Stories Are for Losers” by Sofia Samatar
“If You Were a Dinosaur, My Love” by Rachel Swirsky
“The Ink Readers of Doi Saket” by Thomas Olde Heuvelt

Here, I do feel strongly that my number one vote is better than
the others, although I certainly won’t be surprised if something
else wins. I don’t feel strongly about the ranking of two and
three.

Classes are going well

I haven’t had time to post — or at least, when I have had
time, I”ve been tired. When there isn’t a class or a meal or
dancing or a dropin session, it feels like time for bed.

But on Wednesday, they take a much-needed break from the
concerts and the evening is pretty free, so I decided to catch you
up on what’s happening.

Cornetto Class with Doug Kirk

We did more playing the first day than we did all week when I
took the class 4 years ago. A lot of the advice I’ve gotten is
goingn to be long-term beneficial rather than making me sound
better instantly, but I feel like this class is a success.

I was initially a little disappointed that I ended up playing
serpent in the ensembles instead of cornetto, but it really does
make for better ensembles to have lots of sizes. The piece we’ll
probably play on the student concert is a six part piece with me
on serpent, two tenor cornettos, one alto cornetto (in F) and two
regular cornettos on top. I was having to work very hard to get
the low F’s centered and in tune, and then today Doug said, “I
wonder if this piece would sound better a step up.” And it did.
Apparently the sixteenth century people were always doing that —
if they were playing an instrument that liked sharps better than
flats, they transposed it.

Collegium

This year there are nine people in the loud wind section — two
cornettos, 2 sackbuts (alto and tenor), 1 tenor and 2 bass
dulcians, me on serpent, and a guy who switches between tenor
serpent and tenor dulcian. I think it’s going to be fun.

The conductor made parts for the major piece on the program
from the score with partify, and didn’t give the parts other than
the top line the measure numbers, but keeps telling people what
measure number he wants to start on. And I can’t always follow
his beat on mensuration chages. But he picked good music and is
enthusiastic about performing it with a cast of thousands.

Afternoon: Gombert and others with Marilyn Boenau and
Pervernage with Dan Stillman

This year, there weren’t any famous brass players on the
faculty, but there is a famous dulcian player, and the
not-so-famous dulcian players have been recruiting new people
faster than the brass or other reeds have. So although they
didn’t want me in any of the advanced loud wind classes, they have
classes for the less-experienced dulcian players that don’t mind
me playing with them.

I was expecting to mostly play cornetto, since I can play
cornetto a bit higher than anyone plays dulcian. But it turns out
they like the serpent, too.

Marilyn even let me play the tenor serpent on a top line that
would have been low on the cornetto, but was the right kind of
soaring on theh tenor serpent. It turns out I sound pretty good
if I hear good pitches to play with and am warmed up on
cornetto.

Dan has been experimenting. Monday, I played cornetto higher
than the dulcians could play. Then yesterday, he had me play
serpent lower for longer than he’d expect a dulcian to play. It
turned out not to be such a good idea on the serpent, either. But
it was educational.

Today he found a 7 part piece with a top line he’s playing on
alto dulcian, and a bottom line that’s fine for a bass dulcian.
So he has me playing a baritone line. 7 parts in that range is
pretty close harmony, and sometimes sounds pretty wierd, with the
less experienced dulcian players playing notes their fingers or
their reeds don’t know what to do with. But it’s a good class of
people working really hard at something they really want to do.

Dancing with the New London Assembly

I frittered away a lot of the free time I had today on napping
and eating. I did manage a pretty full practice session, where I
played parts to some of the music we’ll be doing in the
Collegium.

And at the reception after the orientation session, I
introduced myself to the collegium director and told him how much
I was looking forward to playing serpent with the group. He turns
out to have spent an afternoon drinking with Christopher Monk, so
he says he’s looking forward to having a serpent. The director of
the collegium loud winds looked right through me and walked away
when I tried to introduce myself, though, so I can’t tell whether
he’s as serpent-hostile as some of the other loud wind coaches.

Dancing

So the only workshop-specific thing to do was the English
Country Dance after the reception. I was a little dubious about
it, since they billed it as being for experienced
dancers. (They’re having a dance program this year, so there are a
lot of experienced dancers.) And
the demonstration they gave at the orientation certainly did less
teaching and calling than I’m used to.

But I went anyway. The caller certainly did less than at other
dances I’ve been to, but the other dancers are quite good at
filling in if you need it. There was one dance with a
particularly unfamiliar “hey”, where you had to either count
something I didn’t know how to count, or know where you were
supposed to end up by some algorithm I hadn’t absorbed. Luckily,
my partner knew what she was doing. I was starting to get it, and
thinking it must be about time to end since even I had figured it
out, but it went on for two more times.

Unfortunately, my brain isn’t up to learning patterns and
listening to music at the same time. So I can’t tell you how
wonderful the music by Emily O’Brien, Shira Kamen, and Jacqueline
Schwab was, even though they’re all very good and I’m sure it was.