Category: Publishing

A bit miscellaneous this week.

A couple of weeks ago the “Cantabile Renaissance Band”:http://www.laymusic.org/windband.html ran through 5 tenor lieder by Ludwig Senfl [1]. “Wohl kumbt der Mai II”:http://www.laymusic.org/music/sp/html/pieces/362.html is the one we liked best, so I transcribed it. Expect it to be on the program for next year’s Walk for Hunger.

“The new Gabrielli we’ve been learning”:http://www.laymusic.org/music/sp/html/pieces/361.html is in a key that puts the top lines out of the range of my brass playing, and pretty high up for anyone. There’s some evidence that they actually played things like that down a fourth, so I “transposed it that way.”:http://www.laymusic.org/music/sp/html/pieces/364.html. It probably isn’t an improvement for recorders, since the Alto part goes too low for an alto recorder, and the Tenor part goes pretty low for a tenor recorder. And recorder players who can handle the ornamentation in the top lines can play up to high B with no problem. But brass player’s lips will thank me.

I’m working on learning a Marcello sonata for recorder, whose last movement is similar to the Italian song “Danza, danza fanciulla gentile”:http://www.laymusic.org/music/sp/html/pieces/363.html. If I were to perform it, I’d want to also include the song, which is by “Francesco Durante”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francesco_Durante, who was acontemporary of Marcello. Also, I was puzzled by the phrasing my “recorder teacher”:http://www.renaissonics.com” wanted me to use. So I’ve transcribed it, and transposed it into a less remote key.

fn1. London Pro Musica EML 295

“This piece”:http://www.laymusic.org/music/sp/html/pieces/361.html is one we’ve been enjoying with a few more people than usual showing up at the meetings. We played it out of the London Pro Musica edition [1], before I transcribed it in this edition. We found it a lot easier without the barlines and with the rehearsal letters.

When I first started the Renaissance Band, I advertised that we were going to do “Gabrielli”:http://www.laymusic.org/music/sp/html/bycomposer.html#13 since I knew brass players like him, and then realized that I didn’t have any. I’ve since added a couple and we’ve always enjoyed playing them when we have the right people at the rehearsal. So there will be more coming.

[1] LPM GAB20

More of the backlog.  This was transcribed last winter by Kay Dekker, who was using the ABC export feature of Harmony Assistant.  She was interested in whether it would work smoothly with abc2ly — the answer was that it was pretty good but there were a few glitches in the ABC that had to be fixed by hand.

Anyway, she had been transcribing a lot of Dunstable, and the piece my group likes is O Rosa Bella, so she sent me that one.

I usually don’t put things up on the site before my group has played them, but I promised this to someone who might need it next week, and we can’t play it until the week after next, so here it is.  Let me know if there are any problems.
An In Nomine is a four or more part piece where one of the middle lines is playing the In Nomine chant tune in very long note values, and all the other parts are playing highly decorated and often rhythmically complex parts in short note values.
In Nomine‘s are great if you have a mixed group — if you have one person who can’t play as fast as the other people, they can play the In Nomine line, and if you have one very advanced person in the middle of a bunch of players who are high on being able to play rhythmically complex stuff, they can play the In Nomine  line and work on their breath control.  In our group, the serpent usually grabs that line.

Probably for at least some of those reasons, lots of great 16th and 17th century English composers wrote at least one; here’s one by Orlando Gibbons.

In honor of Bastille Day, I publish the version of La Marseillaise that we’ve been singing this time of year for several years. It’s just the tune, with all seven verses underlaid. The instrumentalists play from a four-part arrangement by Christian Mondrup.

Continuing to publish the backlog, today we have Lord in thy rage rebuke me not by William Byrd. Again, we’ve only done it once, since it doesn’t fit any of the gigs we’ve had the last couple of months, but we will surely get back to it. It’s good for a group with tenors and altos but no basses; the part called tenor is for a low alto and the part called bassus is for a tenor.

The transcription is another contribution by Bonnie Rogers.  The lilypond conversion is the new style, with the notes in a separate file from the styling commands.

Less publishing over the last week, because my flaky old computer died on July 4, and I’ve been having to get everything installed on a shiny new computer.

But I finally got to testing the publishing procedure, and the first thing to go up is Browning by Elway Bevin.  It’s a pretty challenging piece; we definitely used the rehearsal letters to get through it the first (and so far only) time we did it.  But even the less experienced players were able to join on the tune, which is one of the big hits of the late sixteenth century.

The Cantabile Renaissance Band has been doing a fair amount of shape note singing lately. Although the music dates from later than the period we concentrate on, it turns out to fit our abilities quite well, being polyphony written for amateurs to sing. While the tradition in this country is to sing it unaccompanied, we find having the instrumental support adds to our performances.

At our regular meetings, we normally do an “instrumental” versions of the vocal pieces, before we attempt to put both words and music together. The singers who don’t play instruments but do sing shape notes are enjoying having the shapes from lilypond 2.8 to sing.

What I put up today are three William Billings songs we enjoy:

• Africa, with the verses that Isaac Watts wrote that don’t get into the hymnals. We sang it in honor of Mothers’ Day.
• Lamentation over Boston. We sing this every year by the banks of the Charles River near Watertown for the Walk for Hunger.
• Easter Anthem. I sang this in the Robert Shaw edition with a church choir once; it works better with the renaissance band. This version is transcribed from the Norumbega Harmony book. which includes the extended section Billings wrote for a later printing of his book. It wasn’t in the Robert Shaw edition.

This is the first set of stuff using lilypond 2.8, the current stable version, to go up on the public web site. I’ve actually been using it for a while, so there will be more coming soon.

Bonnie Rogers transcribed two of her favorite Pavanes by John Jenkins.

• Pavane in D minor
  
• Pavan in E Minor

And here’s a Susato Ronde.

Finally getting started on the backlog of everything I and my friends have been transcribing the last few months

There’s a new Thomas Campian, Fain would I love a fair young man

A recorder playing friend who was playing with a lute player emailed me asking where he could get a copy, and I said he could borrow my facsimile, or he could wait until I transcribed it, and it turned out to be pretty easy to transcribe, so I did it before he could come borrow the facsimile.

Also, Bonnie Rogers is continuing to transcribe the Orlando Gibbons madrigals from his 1612 publication of The First Set of Madrigals and Mottets of 5 Parts. The latest one is Now each flowery bank of May, in both the original key
and transposed down a third to F# minor.