The Cantabile Renaissance Band
The July 18th meeting is restricted to the players on the July 22 performance. Everyone else is welcome to join us next week, July 25, when we resume our regularly scheduled dropin meetings.
Last meeting
At our last meeting, we played:
The meeting will be mostly a rehearsal for the July 22 performance. We may have time for a little bit of other stuff (I like singing La Marseillaise this time of year, and I’ve improved the Browning we did last week), but basically, we’re going to get the Ingalls route decided on and run it a couple of times. So if you aren’t performing, you’re welcome to come, but I don’t know that I’d bother if I had to go any distance.
Last meeting
We did:
The next meeting of the Cantabile Renaissance Band will take place on Thursday, July 6, at 7:45 PM at my place.
Note the unusual day of the week. We decided it was easier to deal with that than with the unusual traffic patterns here on July 4, or with an unusual meeting location (which would still have required some of us to deal with the traffic patterns).
This meeting, and the following one on July 11, will have the first section devoted to rehearsing the Ingalls program for July 22. Those who are performing on that program should make an effort to arrive on time. The meeting on July 18 will be entirely devoted to the Ingalls program, and will be limited to those performing on July 22.
We played:
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.
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:
There are several options for dealing with this problem:
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.
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:
The program of our segment of the concert that I sent Tom Malone a couple of weeks ago says:
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.
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.
We played:
The next dropin meeting will be on June 27. Until then, meetings
are restricted to people playing the June 21 gig.
Then we will meet as usual on Tuesdays at 7:45 PM, except that the July 18 meeting will be
restricted to people playing the July 22 gig.
This is the last dropin meeting before we start working exclusively on the June 21 program. So if there’s something not on that program that you’ll miss if you don’t get to do it for a month, let me know, and we’ll do it. We might do some May music, since it’s the last meeting in May.
Our regular dropin meetings will resume on June 27.
I timed the playlist on the wiki, and it’s only 35 minutes. It can certainly be expanded and stretched out to fill an hour, but there’s also room for solos and duets if people have anything they want to play that would be suitable. So let me know. I would think 2-3 minute pieces would be the easiest to accommodate.
If you want me to print you out a notebook, let me know.
If you have a copy of All ye whom love or fortune hath betraid from before last Friday, please get a new one, either from the website or from me at rehearsal. I had indeed fixed up the tenor repeat, but not all the fixes had found their way into the PDF file.
I’ve converted my blog to wordpress. I’m planning to eventually convert the whole laymusic.org site, so let me know if you have any problems with the layout or navigation or anything. If you subscribed by RSS feed, you have to resubscribe to the new feed.
Plans for May 23 meeting
Once we start working on a new program, the dropin people seem to
abandon us even when we say we’re happy to have their help.
This is a problem, because not all the people who want to
perform start coming all the time. So last week we had a couple
of recorder pieces we would have liked to try, but we didn’t
have 4 recorder players to try them with.
So here’s the schedule from now to the next performance. All
rehearsals start at 7:45.
For the performers’ rehearsals,
everyone should arrive in time to set up so that the actual
rehearsal can start at 7:45. For most people this seems to mean
about 7:30. If people are actually arriving ready to start at
7:45, we could start off with a vocal warmup, which I think
would improve both our sound and our comfort level on pieces
that are at the edge of our ranges.
One of the performer’s rehearsals is likely to be coached by John
Tyson.
There are directions to the performance venue and links to public transportation information
on the Conference site.
So far, we have 4 people officially signed up for the June 21
performance. I need to know who’s playing by the end of this
week, so that we can start assigning parts and constructing a
real playlist.
We did much better on taking the Walk for Hunger seriously than
we’ve done the previous few performances. But there’s still
room for improvement, even on the easy part of arriving at
rehearsals and performances on time and ready to play. We’ve
scheduled more unfamiliar music for this one than usual, so
please don’t sign up unless you plan to make most of the
rehearsals between now and then and to make the performers’
rehearsals and the performance on time.
One of the encouraging things about the Walk for Hunger performance
was how much better the performance was than the last
rehearsal. This means that when people want to, they can work
on their own to improve the weaknesses in their individual
parts. Now let’s see if we can do that work before the final
rehearsals, so that we can start working seriously on what we
sound like when we all know what’s coming next.
I’ve been recording most of my planning in the wiki. If you’re
playing, you’re welcome to help.
I have a script that will print a notebook of all the music in the
wiki playlist. If you want me to run it for you, let me know. I don’t promise that we won’t do a lot of adding, subtracting, and rearranging this notebook, though.
This week, Stuart won’t be able to come, so I thought it would be a
good week to work out some recorder arrangements. One piece
that might be fun to play with is Susato’s
Ronde V, which I transposed for Aldo’s Junior High band into
parts for Bb, Eb, F, and G transposing instruments. This way,
we can stick people on instruments with fingerings they haven’t
learned.
If you look at the playlist, you will see that there are several
Dowlands that we haven’t done very often, so we really do have
to run those again and see which we think we can play in public
in less than a month.
Last modified: Mon May 22 11:36:30 EDT 2006
Plans for the May 16 meeting
This is a drop-in meeting, although we will be doing some
exploration of pieces that we might play on the June 21
program. You can edit the tentative list at the
wiki playlist. Here’s the current version:
We have two Jenkins Pavanes that Bonnie set for us, which she
thinks will go well on the large recorders.
We’ll be meeting every Tuesday for the forseeable future. The
meetings start promptly at 7:45, and are at my place, 233
Broadway, Cambridge.
The May
meetings will probably all be dropin and the first three June meetings will
probably be limited to people playing the June 21 gig. Please
feel free (encouraged, pressured…) to come to the dropin
meetings if you’re thinking of playing the gig, and also free
(encouraged…) if you aren’t thinking of playing it but would
be interested in the music.
I’m trying out a new Wiki technology on the plans for this gig. This
one is a real Wiki, that anyone can edit. It’s at http://www.laymusic.org/dreams06/.
I especially need to know who’s thinking of playing on this
program. You aren’t making a hard and fast commitment yet, but
obviously we can’t program 5-part pieces if only 3 people are even
thinking of doing the gig.
We played:
Last modified: Tue May 16 10:45:27 EDT 2006
Plans for the May 9 meeting
We resume our regularly scheduled drop in meetings tonight. There are
a number of things we’d like to accomplish; I’m sure we’ll manage at
least some of them:
It was fun, and I think we played well. There are a few pictures
in our gallery, and I think we’ll
get some more later. Thanks to everyone who played, or helped
rehearse, or supported us in any way.
We’ll be dropin for the rest of May, and probably limited to the
people playing June 21 for June. As far as I know, we’ll be meeting
at the usual time and place every Tuesday.
Last modified: Mon May 1 14:59:44 EDT 2006
Set up a google calendar
I’ve just started using google
calendar for my appointments, so I put the Cantabile ones on
their own calendar and exported it.
So you can go to the Cantabile
google calendar and include it in your own google
calendar, or import it into whatever ics or xml based calendar
you use.1
Last modified: Mon May 1 14:59:44 EDT 2006
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