Schedule
This week
We’re finally back to our regular drop-in groups. Come when you feel like it and suggest any music you want to play.
We’ll be playing some Ingalls, but we’ll also get back to our more normal Renaissance stuff.
There’s another Jenkins Pavanne that Bonnie’s transcribed that we’d like to do.
One of the advantages of having learned All ye whom love or fortune hath betraid is that it fits in our dying swan set, so we might play that. We also want to learn the Vecchi setting some time.
I probably won’t get to it for this week, but I dug out the Josquin setting of Mille Regretz and I’d like to transcribe it for us to do soon.
Next week
We have a problem with the Tuesday rehearsal following this one — it’s the Fourth of July. Our usual venue is not suitable for a rehearsal from 7:45 to 10 PM on the Fourth of July:
- You can’t possibly park anywhere near here at 7:45.
- You can’t possibly leave here at 10:00. That is, you can leave, but it will take you an hour and a half to get a mile away.
- During the rehearsal time, it is unlikely that the percussion from the fireworks will be idiomatic or accurate for the music we’re playing.
There are several options for dealing with this problem:
- We can have a party here, starting at 3 or 4 in the afternoon and going until midnight or so, with the music-making part of the party happening before the fireworks start. Then people who wanted to watch fireworks could go watch them, and maybe we could do some more singing afterwards.
- We can skip the rehearsal that week. This is what we’ve done in the past, and if we didn’t have the Ingalls concert coming up, I’d be in favor of it.
- We can rehearse some other time that week. I’ve polled a few people about Sunday night, and a couple of them aren’t available, but one of those is away for the whole week and wouldn’t come on Tuesday, either.
- Someone who lives somewhere where there aren’t half a million people coming by to watch fireworks could offer to host this rehearsal.
After that
The July 11th meeting will still be open to dropins, although we will be spending time on the Ingalls program. The July 18 meeting is only for Ingalls performers. After that, we’re dropin for the forseeable future, unless we decide to do something crazy like make a demo tape.
Ingalls Concert
We will be working on the music for the Ingalls concert on July 22, but that’s three pieces of which we already know two pretty well, so it shouldn’t take up the whole meeting. We find the shape note stuff is a good warmup, so I’m going to plan to do the Ingalls first. This will accomplish several things:
- People who aren’t interested in the Ingalls but do like the other stuff we do can just come a little late.
- People who want to perform the Ingalls but need to get up early the next morning can rehearse without disrupting their schedule for several weeks.
- People who are chronically late for everything will not have rehearsed the Ingalls, and therefore won’t be performing the Ingalls, so we won’t have to be stressed out before the performance about whether we have all the performers.
The program of our segment of the concert that I sent Tom Malone a couple of weeks ago says:
- Millennium (instrumental followed by vocal)
- Friendship (instrumental followed by vocal)
- Millennium (instrumental)
- Night Thought
This is not by any means cast in concrete — specifically if there’s a piece besides Friendship that people would rather learn, we can do that instead.
I need to know by the end of next week (June 30) who is planning on doing the Ingalls concert, so that we can start working on orchestrations.
Dreams Concert
Many thanks to all the people who worked hard to pull off a complex program. We now have 6 people who know some very beautiful music, and who played it for a couple of hundred people, who seemed to be enjoying it very much.
We also know several things that we need to work on a bit harder for the next performance. Chief among them is getting started gracefully and with the tempo set by the starter. We will be doing drills on that over the next few weeks.
LayMusic.org 