Category: Cantabile

There was no meeting. Maia was sick and I had to spend time taking her to the vet and giving her pills, and other people decided not to have it.

We’ll be meeting tomorrow, June 22, at Wendy Grey’s house in Newton Corner. Let both me and Wendy know if you’re coming.

She was obviously listless and had discharge from her eyes, and was walking really slow. The only numeric abnormality the vet found was a very low platelet count. Which could mean lots of things, the most likely of which are either an infection or an auto-immune disorder.

So she’s been taking antibiotic and immunosuppressant pills and immediately started feeling much better. The next day her platelet count was up about 20%.

She seems pretty normal now. I’m taking her back to the vet today.

We played:

• Rhau, Dulces Exuviae
• Morley, Blow, shepherds, blow
• Josquin, Mille regrets

This week we will be back in Somerville at Stuart’s. Tuesday, June 13, at 7:45 pm. Let me and Stuart know if you’re coming.

We played:

• Gibbons, For Deliverance from a public Sickness
• Morley: Whither away so fast
• Lassus, In me transierunt irae tuae
• Wise, When the plague was in town

We meet on Tuesdays at 7:45 pm. Our regular host, Stuart, has another commitment this week, so the Tuesday, June 8, meeting will be at Wendy Grey’s in Newton Corner.

Please let both me and Wendy know if you’re coming.

We played:

• Isaac, Innsbruck
• Morley: Good morrow, fair ladies of the May, Hold out my heart
• Senfl: Wohl kumbt der Mai, Im Meyen
• Gibbons, For Deliverance from a public Sickness
• Arcadelt, Il bianco e dolce cigno

For the time being, we will be meeting at Stuart’s in Somerville on Tuesday evenings at 7:45 pm.

Please let both me and Stuart know if you are planning to come.

We played:

• Campian, The peaceful western wind
• Morley: Hold out my heart
• Arcadelt, Dormend’un giorno
• Ruffo, Dormend’un giorno
• Byrd: Upon a summer’s day
• Ravenscroft: He that will an alehouse keep

For the time being, we will be meeting at Stuart’s in Somerville on Tuesday evenings at 7:45 pm.

Please let both me and Stuart know if you are planning to come.

We played:

• Campian, The peaceful western wind
• Morley: Ladie, those eyes, Cruel you pull away too soon
• Arcadelt, Dormend’un giorno
• Ruffo, Dormend’un giorno
• Ravenscroft: Hey ho, to the greenwood, Banbury ale
• Purcell, ‘Tis Women

For the time being, we will be meeting at Stuart’s in Somerville on Tuesday evenings at 7:45 pm.

Please let both me and Stuart know if you are planning to come.

We played:

• Rhau, Dulces Exuviae
• Morley: Cruel you pull away too soon, See see myne own sweet jewel
• Campian, The peaceful western wind
• Arcadelt, Dormend’un giorno
• Du lenze gut
• Berg, Let us drink and be merry
• Purcell, Five reasonsSearch
  
• Ravenscroft, He that will an Alehouse keep

We are meeting regularly at Stuart’s place in Somerville. Let both me and Stuart know if you are planning on coming.

We played:

• Rhau, Dulces Exuviae
• Morley:April is in my Mistress’ Face; Joy, joy doth so arise; See, see mine own sweet jewel
• Dowland: Fine knacks for ladies, A Shepherd in a shade
• Gibbons, For deliverance from a publick sickness
• Arcadelt, Il bianco e dolce Cigno
• Wise, When the plague was in town
• Ravenscroft, He that will an Alehouse keep

We will be meeting weekly, generally at Stuart’s place in Somerville. But Wendy Grey has offered her home in Newton Corner as a backup if the Somerville location doesn’t work some week. So the next meeting will be at Stuart’s on May 4 at 7:45 pm.

Note that for a number of reasons, most notably that the giant notebooks with all the music we’ve played for the last two decades are in storage, we can’t be a dropin group these days. You can still come to one meeting without committing to coming to any other meetings, but you do have to let me (and Stuart, see below) know that you’re coming. And not coming after saying you will is also a faux pas.

I need to know who is coming because I have to plan music and get it printed. Stuart needs to know because he wrangles parking and seating. So copy him when you send email about whether you’re coming.

Printing is being more of a problem than I would have expected. So if you’re planning to come, and have a good printer, I would appreciate if you would let me know so I can have you do some of the printing for that meeting.

When I first thought about having these meetings without my giant notebooks, I thought one solution would be to have them in a place with good WIFI and have every bring a tablet or a laptop computer. If you had the site http://serpent.serpentpublications.org/drupal7/?q=pieces-by-parts you would have a list of all the pieces for the number of parts we were thinking about.

But nobody seemed very enthusiastic about that solution. If anyone has an idea for how to get people more enthusiastic, it would save a lot of printing trouble.

I have reasonable confidence that I will be back in my home with my notebooks and instruments 2-4 months after our contractor gets a building permit. The current roadblock seems to be the structural engineer, who hasn’t completed the work that would enable putting in the application. After that there are potential roadblocks while the city and the insurance company work out whether the application should be approved or modified. I do not know (nor does the contractor) why this hasn’t happened yet, so I can’t give you even an approximate estimate for when we can go back to our usual place.

We played:

• Gibbons, For deliverance from a public Sickness
• Wise, When the plague was in town
• Morley: Now is the month of Maying, April is in my mistress’ face, Joy, joy doth so arise
• Rore, Cantai mentre c’i’ arsi del mio foco

We were all really happy to be back together, so when I said, “Do it again next week?”, there was a unanimous chorus of, “Yes.”

So we’ll be meeting at Stuart’s place again on April 27 at 7:45 pm.

Many people seem to have never thought about the organizational difficulties of having a drop in group, and even if you thought about it when we were meeting at my place with all the notebooks of all the pieces we’ve played for the last two decades, they are worse if we’re meeting somewhere else.

So you have to let me know you’re coming, and you have to show up if you’ve said you’re coming.

I was fully vaccinated as of April 15. I believe this article means that vaccinated people who aren’t in close contact with high-risk unvaccinated people can meet indoors in small groups. We may want to still wear masks when we sing.

I know some of the other people in the group are also vaccinated or about to be so, and presumably in a small number of months most of us will be.

I don’t have a firm date about when I can move back to my place. I can imagine inviting people to come over when there’s plumbing and electricity, even if I don’t have furniture or music, but I don’t have a good date for that, either. Things are finally happening (see picture of my new living room floor, above) so it might be sooner than you might expect from how long it’s taken for anything to happen. I wouldn’t expect it before May, though.

Stuart has volunteered to invite vaccinated people to his house in Somerville. So let’s try for a first meeting on Tuesday, April 20 at 7:45 pm.

It’s been Tuesdays for close to two decades now, so I’d need a good reason to change, but that doesn’t mean it couldn’t happen. If you’re serious about wanting to come, and Tuesday doesn’t work for you, let me know what days would work and we’ll see what we can do.

Let me know if you want to come Tuesday, and I’ll send you Stuart’s address. I would suggest bringing a laptop or tablet, but Stuart says he can print out some parts.

If we want to have beer and food, we should bring some.