Category: Cantabile

The next meeting of the Cantabile Renaissance Band will be tomorrow,
Tuesday, August 2, at 7:45 PM at my place.

We will have a new Dowland, “Up merry mates”, which is clearly a
tune for a mask where a ship rolled onto the stage with a male chorus
singing this song.

It’s possible but not likely that we’ll have a keyboard
transcription of the Dowland lute part, which would be good because there’s an
extended tenor solo with no other accompaniment. But entering lute
transcriptions is tedious, and proofreading them is both tedious and
error-prone, and I only have 4 measures entered so far.

We will probably have a new set of Bransles. (This is over half
entered, and dance music with no words goes pretty fast.)

Otherwise, we’ll take requests, but I’d like to continue with the
drinking songs we’re trying to solidify, and if there are enough
people, the Vecchi “Il Bianco e Dolce Cigno”.

Publishing news

The Dowland project is winding down — we have two more songs from
Pilgrims’ Solace and 3 or four that are in “A Musical Banquet”.
There’s still lots of “Lacrimae” to transcribe, but lately that
hasn’t been suitable for the people showing up.

I have an offer from someone in New Zealand whose group uses my
stuff to help with converting the lilypond source to the latest
version of lilypond. So if you have strong feelings about
typesetting, you might want to read my discussion of why and why not
to do this in the publishing
blog.

And if you have opinions about a Renaissance composer you’d
like to do more of, let me know so that we can start acquiring music
to work on when we’ve finished doing a new Dowland every week.

Meeting information

Since putting the blog up, I haven’t been sending information about
our meetings every week to the entire list. I do send it to the
people who show up regularly, and I post it to the blog. And July was
unusual in having
two Tuesdays where we didn’t meet — in general it’s
pretty safe to just show up on Tuesday. But feel free to call or
email if you’re not sure whether to come or not.

We did:

• Gervaise, Dix bransles Gays
• Susato, Rondes, plus a few more
• Drinking songs
  • Vive la Serpe
  • Slaves are they that heap up mountains
  • Cakes and ale
• Dowland
  • Come, heavy sleep
  • Come again
  • Now, o now

Remember that we don’t meet on July 26, and everybody should go to
the West Gallery Quire
workshop with Francis Roads in Newton instead. So our next meeting is
August 2 at the usual time and place.

We’ll be meeting at the usual time (7:45) and place on Tuesday,
July 19.

Remember that on Tuesday, July 26, we will not be meeting, since a
number of us want to go to the West Gallery Workshop with Francis
Rhodes.

We’ll have a new Dowland, “Up merry mates”, and a new set of
Gervaise Bransles Gays. It’s also the day we sing all the
verses to “La Marseillaise”.

Aside from that, we take requests, and adjust
the repertoire to be suitable for whoever shows up.

We played:

• Morley, Cruel you pull away too soon
• Dowland, My heart and tongue were twinnes
• Vive la Serpe
• Slaves are they that heap up mountains
• Washington Post March
• Il Bianco e dolce Cigno, Arcadelt and Vecchi

We decided to not meet on Tuesday, July 12, as several people had
other commitments, and those who don’t can see some of the people who
do if they want to by going to the MIT contra dance.

We will also not be meeting on Tuesday, July 26, because of the
West Gallery workshop with Francis Roads.

So the next meetings will be July 19 and August 2, at 7:45 PM at
the usual place.

We’ll have a new Dowland (Where sinne sore wounding daily doth
oppresse me), and the people who missed the picnic (you missed a good
one, pictures) should
have a chance to play the Bransle set we did there. Maybe in a 4-foot
and 8-foot version if there are enough of us.

I’m feeling like it’s a good week for carousing in Bacchus’
fountains, so we’ll do “Slaves are they” even though it isn’t a good
week for heaping up mountains.

We need to discuss the problem of getting usable copies of
“finished” work again (see the
previous inconclusive discussion).

We played:

• Gervaise, Dix Bransles de Champaigne
• Morley, Farewell, disdainful
• Dowland, Where Sinne sore wounding
• Slaves are they that heap up mountains
• Arcadelt, Il bianco e dolce Cigno
• Vecchi, Il bianco e dolce Cigno
• Let us drink and be merry

The discussion about how to get copies of “finished” works took
place after several people had left. But Anne would prefer xeroxing
to paying for xeroxing, and can get it free if she supplies paper.
So she has a ream of my paper, and will be doing 5 or 6 copies of the
latest Drinking Songs over the next couple of weeks. I will be
checking and correcting the Dowland Third Book over that time, and
will then look for a volunteer to xerox that. Those who feel they
should be contributing more to the group should consider how they could
assist that effort. Unlike many groups, this group doesn’t require a
financial contribution very often, but like all groups, it does need
everyone to be aware of the work that goes into making it work, and to
contribute to the work as well as they can.

It occurred to me while compiling the list of pieces we did that
someone raised a question about finding the pitches on the
“More…Fill…More…Fill” section of “Slaves are they” which we
didn’t answer, so we’ll try to work on that better the next time.

Another issue that’s come up recently is whether we should be doing
more dance music. It works better for background music gigs, and
Ishmael thinks that with some work on the style we could even get gigs
playing for real dancers. But of course if people are more interested
in the vocal music, it doesn’t make sense to take time from that. So
let me know what you think.

It was restricted to people playing the Picnic on June 25, so it was
just Laura, Bonnie, and Barney.

We played:

• Flute duets, Opus 1, by Johan Mattheson.
• Dix
  Bransles de Champagne, by
  Claude
  Gervaise
• Americana Suite by Andrew Charlton

At the picnic, we may also play “Piper’s Fancy”, which is some trio
arrangements of Playford tunes, which we have played many times
before.

We’ll be having a regular rehearsal on Tuesday, June 14.
Unfortunately, it’s too early in the Boston Early Music Festival for
putting out flyers to bring in very many people, but I will
post an invitation to the relevant mailing lists. Please let anyone
who’s in town for the Festival know that they’re welcome to come play
with us.

Tuesday, June 21 will be limited to the people playing the Boston Wort Processors summer picnic on
Saturday, July 25.

After that, we resume our regularly scheduled drop-in sessions,
(almost) every Tuesday at 7:45 PM at 233 Broadway.

Publicity

I have rewritten the flyer, with help from
Ishmael, Anne, and Hope. Please take a look at it, print it out, and
bring it anywhere you think people would be interested. I’d still
like to find or manufacture a good graphic instead of the two serpents
that I used in desperation in June of 2000.

We have the third part of the three-part Dowland we’ve been working
on, so we’ll probably spend the bulk of the meeting trying to make the
whole thing sound like music. In addition we’ll continue working on
the two drinking songs we’re trying to get performable.

In addition, we have several things to decide:

• I have the first copy of the Cafepress edition of the Drinking
  Songs book Since I no longer
  have double-sided printing capability, we have to decide how we’re
  going to deal with acquiring multiple copies of “finished” books. The
  possibilities include:
  • Buying in bulk from Cafepress. In this case, they would cost in
    the vicinity of $6 each if I order a few, and can probably be brought
    under $5 if I order as many as 15. It’s close to $10 to order an
    individual copy with shipping.
  • Copying double-sided at Kinko’s or somewhere and me binding with
    my comb binding machine. I’m not sure how much this costs, but I
    think it’s comparable to the bulk pricing at Cafepress, which also
    includes a nice color cover.
  • Someone with “free” xeroxing copying double sided, and me binding
    with my comb binding machine. This is obviously the cheapest way to
    get new books, if there’s someone with a good setup for doing this.
  • For this book, we have almost up-to-date copies which we can paste
    in edited versions of the pages that have changed. This might be the
    right solution for this book, but won’t work for the Dowland third
    book or the Pilgrim’s Solace.
• Do we meet next week? I don’t have a conflict, and it might be
  fun to invite people who are in town for the early music festival to
  come join us. But I understand if people are overscheduled that week
  without this meeting.
• I want to put out a flyer describing our group on the flyers table
  at BEMF. I’m about to take a crack at editing the current flyer,
  which no longer really describes the group very well. But if anyone
  else has ideas, let me know. In any case, I’ll have a trial version
  for proofreading, editing, etc. tonight.
• I’ve sent information to at least some of you about the Wort
  Processors’ Summer picnic on June 25. We need to decide whether we’re
  playing, and if so, what. We might make the June 21
  meeting “performers only” if we decide to play.

I believe both Anne and Ishmael will be coming from another
commitment and will be a bit late, so maybe the official start time
for this one should be 8 PM.

We did:

• Morley:
  • Good Morrow, fair Ladies of the May
  • Whether away so fast
  • Hold out my heart

  Dowland:

  • When the poore Cripple
  • O mighty God
  • When Davids life by Saul was often sought
• Vive la Serpe
• Slaves are they that heap up mountains

Decisions

• We will meet next week, on Tuesday, June 14. Some people will
  have BEMF commitments, but there might be other people in town for the
  festival who would be fun to play with.
• Ishmael can do some double-sided printing for us, so we haven’t
  yet made an order for the drinking songs.
• Anne and Ishmael both have other commitments on the 25th. So I
  will check with Paul, and if he can’t come, maybe Bonnie, Barney, and
  I will resurrect some of the old recorder trio repertoire.
• I got some feedback on the new version of the flyer. Check out the
  current version and see what you think.