Category: Uncategorized

Performing schedule

The Fall schedule in general is starting to fill up, and there are
several performance-like items on it:

  • As usual, I’ll be playing serpent at the West Gallery Quire
    meetings. The next one has
    special leaders and some new songs    , and will be this Sunday,
    October 11. There will also be meetings on November 8 and
    December 13, and a Pub Sing on December 6. These are the best opportunities I know of to sing with a serpent playing for at least a few hundred miles.
  • I’m also planning to play recorder and serpent at the
    Harvard Square English Country Dance Open Band night on Friday,
    October 23. If you want to play, too, the rehearsal will start
    at 6:15, and if you just want to dance, it starts at 7:30. It’s
    at the Harvard-Epworth United Methodist Church, 1555 Mass Ave.,
    Cambridge.
  • On October 25, the Boston Wort
    Processors     will hold their annual Ciderfest.
    Some years I’ve organized some of my playing friends to come
    play with me. That doesn’t seem to be happening this year, but
    I usually stop drinking at least an hour before I drive home,
    and often play quite a bit of recorder music then.
  • A few of the more experienced members of The Cantabile
    Band     will be doing a concert for the Never too
    Late     group at the Boston Public Library. That’s the event
    that needs the Wiki.

I have a WIKI

I’m not really sure I want one. I actually like writing html
(with emacs psgml mode)
better than learning new markup languages. The big advantage of
the interface is that if you’re setting up a new site, links to
the pages
that aren’t written yet are in red, and when you click on them you
get put directly into edit mode for them. But all the stuff about
lists and links and blockquotes and sections, which I do effortlessly in html,
I have to learn a whole new bunch of funny punctuation to do in
wikimedia markup.

But the application is a good one for a WIKI. There are three
of us giving a concert in December, and there’s a lot of
information about the playlist and the rehearsal schedule and
where to download the music, and where are the recordings of the
rehearsals and the drafts of the program and the program notes that needs to be kept in a central place.

The last few concerts I’ve done that on an html page, but the
WIKI concept of easily linking in new pages and easily traversing
the tree of linked pages probably will make for better
readability. And of course, the other performers are more likely
by some very small amount to write on a WIKI than on an html
page.

So I’ll let you know how it works out. In combination with my
addmedia.py
program, it was pretty easy to put up PDF and MIDI files for a
piece that’s only partially transcribed so I wouldn’t want to put
it up at Serpent
Publications yet. It was more of a pain to put up the list of
performers as a list because I’d never written a mediawiki markup
list before, but maybe the second list will be easier.

Leaving a religion

There turned out to be two ex-quakers (people formerly involved
in the Society of Friends, but now members of other churches) at
the band rehearsal (and subsequent beer-drinking)
last night, so I reflected yet again that ex-quakers are much
more civilized about their disagreements or dissatisfactions
than ex-catholics are.

I should mention that in some technical sense, I’m also an
ex-quaker, since my parents were members when I was born, but
I’ve never personally been involved. By the time I can remember
going to church, they were Methodists, and shortly after that,
they returned to the Roman Catholic Church. So I’m a Birthright
Quaker, a Baptized Methodist, and a Baptized Catholic.

The only
church I’ve attended regularly as an adult was Saint Peter’s
Episcopal Church, where I sang in the choir, and contributed
money. When the Rector suggested that I should be confirmed,
I told him that I thought my confirmation as a Roman Catholic was
enough confirmation.

One person at the rehearsal said she’d decided that the Friends
were too serious about their personal responsibility to save the
world. The Unitarian Church she’s currently attending seems to
feel more of a *community* responsibility to save the world,
which she’s more comfortable with. The other person said when asked that he’d left basically
because of disagreements about how to save the world. There was
probably some bitterness and disappointment in both those
attitudes, but nothing like the rage you find with
ex-catholics.

Of all the different kinds of education I’ve had, I probably
find the technical and the political (in marxist reading groups)
the most useful, but the Catholic catechism might come in fairly
close to the humanist liberal arts one. So I describe myself as
a non-practicing Catholic, rather than an ex-catholic, largely
because I don’t want to be associated with the kind of
anti-catholic rage that’s prevalent in quite a number of the
circles I frequent.

Report on the October 7, 2009, meeting

We played:

Schedule

We will be having our usual dropin meetings on Tuesdays at
7:45 PM at my
place.

We will probably miss the meetings where there are elections,
i.e., November 3, December 8, and January 19, if the Cambridge
Election Committee continues to hire me to serve as an official.
I’ve been saying this for a number of weeks now, and still haven’t
gotten any indication that they do want me, so it may not be true. I
would expect to have a card at least for November by now. But I do
enjoy being an election official, so if I get the chance, I’ll take it.

We may also miss one or two more meetings in December. But for
September and October, assume there are regular dropin meetings.

Playing opportunity

The Boston Wort Processors
annual Ciderfest picnic in an apple orchard is on Sunday, October 25
this year. The details are on the
wiki. It’s the same place as it’s been the last couple of
years. We have often had a few people who wanted to go hang out and
eat and drink and play a little bit of music.

Let me know if you’d like to go, and I’ll sign you up.

Lute tablature

They’re having a discussion at the lilypond
users mailing list about how and whether to have a lilypond
mode for entering “ancient” lute tablatures.

Some people seemed to like the idea, but not to have much idea
what the place of lute tablature was in music history, so I
contributed a post. Someone else had written:

I am not at all familiar with these old tablatures, but they
look just amazing, so simply for typographic and aesthetical
reasons, these should be made possible with lilypond.

And I replied:

Actually, there are good musical reasons, too. In the 16th and maybe
most of the 17th, and in some places longer than that, the
dominant instrument which could play many notes at a time, at least in
the home, was the
lute, or various other plucked string instruments which could read the
same tablature.

So this means that lots of the kinds of music which would later be
published with keyboard accompaniment, which lilypond transcribes very
well, was published with lute tablature.


My edition of all the part songs of John Dowland (which
many people think of as lute songs, but most of them are really
accompanied madrigals) is really incomplete, because I’ve
only transcribed the vocal lines, and in general not the lute
tablature.

For a lot of them, the lute tablature is very little different from
just a transcription of the vocal lines, but in others there’s a lot
of decoration.

I’ve made some efforts to transcribe the tablature, but what I want
ideally is to transcribe what’s there, in an input form that doesn’t
require me to translate the tablature into notes, and then use that
transcription plus the tuning of the strings to produce both a
tablature that looks like the one in the facsimile and standard
notation that a modern keyboard player could deal with.

Lute players should note that I’m aware that tablature has different
information from notation: specifically that the beginning time of the
note is specified, but not the length of the note. However, I believe
that good keyboard players are just as capable as lute players of
making the decision about where to end the note; they just aren’t as
capable as players of 6-course fretted instruments of playing
tablature for 6-course fretted instruments.

There’s a red flag in there that I’ve been meaning to address for
some time — there are eminent musicologists who have studied
the period deeply who would disagree with my statement that “most of them are really
accompanied madrigals”. So I’ll tell you why I think that some other time.

I’m back, and what’s next

I seem to have returned to the land of the living — I woke up
this morning wanting to get out of bed and walk the dog. I then
did a reasonable imitation of my usual morning routine, and still
don’t feel like it’s quite time to go back to bed.

As far as what the diagnosis is, since it’s getting better and
not worse, I don’t see any need to burden the medical care system
with this problem, so you’re going to have to put up with my lay
diagnosis. I was running a fever for a good bit of Saturday and
most of Sunday, so I would normally call it flu, not a cold.

Because people have been worrying about flu lately, I’ve been
just saying it’s a cold. I’m not someone who’s ever had the kind
of cold a lot of people get where it slows them down for a week or
even longer, but they never run a fever or get into a state where
they should clearly be in bed. I suspect that this isn’t because
I’m immune to those viruses; I suspect it’s because the virus that
gives some poeple a stuffed up head but not much else for a week
gives me a fever and a stuffed up head for a couple of days.

But if it is flu, I had the regular flu vaccine 2 weeks ago.
So it’s either a regular flu virus that got in under the wire
before my immunity took hold (or even got a little bit of help
from the virus in the vaccine), or a flu strain that isn’t in the
regular virus. In which case, it’s entirely possible that it’s
H1N1. But if so, I don’t seem to be one of the people that H1N1
kills.

What I would have been doing if I hadn’t been in bed

I have to move the laymusic.org site from the old
ISP (hostrocket) to the
new ISP (dreamhost). Note
that this isn’t in any way a criticism of hostrocket as a host if
it meets your needs. I acquired the dreamhost account when I
desperately needed a way to move a bunch of mailman
mailing lists to a new place. They’d been hosted on my home
machine when I had my internet connection from speakeasy, and this wasn’t
going to work when I started connecting with comcast.

Hostrocket doesn’t offer mailman, and while I could probably
have managed to move the mailman lists to what they offer instead,
the non-technical people who’ve been administering some of the
mailman lists would have had a lot of trouble, and I thought that
even for my purposes, mailman was better. So I found a coupon
code that gave me the first year of dreamhost hosting for very
little money. Last Spring I moved the music publishing part of
the site to dreamhost, and now I’m moving the rest of it, before
I owe hostrocket for another year.

Just moving the existing site to a place on dreamhost and
pointing the laymusic dns to the new place would be easy, but what
I’m trying to do is to move the pieces that should be on this site
and that I want to maintain
into the laymusic wordpress installation, and then I’ll just have
a pointer to the old stuff for historical reasons.

The job is a bit less tedious than it might be because of the
wordpresslib
program that adds files to the wordpress media library. I may
write a version of that that creates a post from the part of a file between
certain markers. But mostly it’s tedious because it involves
doing minimal updating of a lot of stuff that could use major
rewriting, but that would be major thinking, and that isn’t going
to happen before October 15.

I have a cold

It was coming on yesterday, which is why after trying to make a
post come out through the masses of wool in my head all morning, I
gave up and tagged the post
 for the West
Gallery Quire as my post for October 2.

This isn’t quite as much cheating as when I use the posts I do
anyway for the Cantabile Band or
Serpent
Publications, but it’s pretty close, since there wasn’t any
actual writing involved.

I knew I should stop even trying to work later in the
afternoon, when I managed to break both the CSS and the DNS for
this site, and spent a fairly long time before managing to fix
it.

So today I’m going ot take the day off. This means I can’t
write you about how much fun the New England Sacred Harp
Convention was going to be, or about what I cooked to take
there, since I’m not going.

I hope this cold clears up by tomorrow so that I can go and
write about those things then.

Housecleaning story

I mentioned in my post about cleaning
out Bonnie’s house that there were more stories than fit
into one post. Here’s one of them.

Part of what I needed help with was just carrying all the old
papers out to the trash. Of course a lot of people who came to
“help” were really more interested in snarfing things, and I
didn’t have a problem with that. But I think most people did
manage to take a couple of bags of trash out along with the
books and CD’s and kitchen equipment they were taking.

However, one day I arrived and there were two bags of wet paper
smack in front of the front door. I moved them enough to open the
door, and later had to stop my 86 year old mother (a dedicated
snarfer of books, objets d’arts, and plants) from trying
to take them all the way to the trash. They were really heavy
enough that my shoulders felt it the next day after moving them 10 feet to
the trash cans.

I wrote the mailing list:

A couple of undesirable things seemed to have happened between when I
was last there on Thursday and when I arrived yesterday afternoon:

For those who have been inhabiting some alternate universe and
have just arrived in this one: the current climate of New England
has a fair amount of rain in the summer months. Therefore, it is
unsuitable to leave paper outside exposed to the elements. Please
put paper trash into plastic bags before taking it out.

One of the points of this exercise is to remove large amounts of
stuff from the house. Therefore, it is counterproductive to leave
things in front of the door.

The culprit replied:

Sorry, that was partly my fault. There was a large pile of paper trash
blocking the door when I tried to leave. I had to put it outside in order to
close the door.;-) I was exhausted by the time I noticed that problem and
didn’t have the energy to try to bag it.

Someone who had been there while she was opined that if there
was trash blocking the front door, she was who had put it there.

So if you’re dealing with this kind of housecleaning problem, be careful who you get
to “help”. If a volunteer has any kind of history of creating
messes and then leaving them for other people to clean up, you
want to direct that person’s energy elsewhere.

Roasting vegetables

A frustrating part of getting a giant box of vegetables every
week at the height of summer is that the easiest thing to do
with lots of vegetables is to roast them in the oven. But when
the temperature and humidity are both high you don’t actually
want to turn the oven on.

I no longer have that excuse, so tomorrow or Friday lots of
things are going in the oven.

I’ll be spending the weekend at the New England Sacred Harp
Convention (5 hours of singing a day, and nobody minds if
you sing loud), which means I’ll have to bring potluck
contributions for lunch on both Saturday and Sunday.

I’ve already written about some of the possibilities:

The announcement of what’s in the share this week suggests
another option, courtesy of another shareholder:

Oven Roasted Kale
the kale last week was the most amazing. I roasted it in the oven at 350 until crisp, with a little olive oil and sea salt–better than potato chips!

There’s also just plain potato salad, a bunch of leeks staring
at me wanting to be put in a sharp mustard vinaigrette, a
cabbage that wants its leaves to be stuffed with something…