Category: Uncategorized

Report on the September 29, 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.

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

Web page

We had a new member come last night, and when she called me it
was clear that the website had not been as enlightening as I’d
hoped. When I looked at it, it was clear that it was confusing,
erroneous, and outdated in some major respects.

So there’s a new
version. Please look at it and let me know if you can think of
any improvements.

First they came…

I thought everybody knew and had reflected on the famous poem:

First they came for the communists, and I did not speak out — because I was not a communist;
Then they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out — because I was not a socialist;
Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out
— because I was not a trade unionist;
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out — because I was not a Jew;
Then they came for me — and there was no one left to speak out for me.

But I had dinner with a friend last night, and was telling her
about my
neighbor being arrested. I said that the fact that they’d
siezed his computer and all the peripherals and his cameras made
me feel I should have off-site backup.

She said, “But why? You don’t grow marijuana.” So I pointed
out all the other stories of people being arrested without having
done anything illegal: Gates,
the
father who took pictures of his kids, and the more recent story
about the grandmother who’s being prosecuted for buying
two bottles of cold medication in one week.

She said, “You’re not black,” and, “You don’t have kids,” and
“You don’t live in Indiana.” (This last one still has me
puzzled.)

About this specific problem, she’s just plain wrong — I’ve
been worrying about the hole in my backup
procedure that it doesn’t produce an off-site backup for some
time, and of course I’m worried more about it because my
next-door neighbor in the same building has been in a situation
where he should have had one. After all,
even if there’s no conceivable situation where the police would
break into my apartment and steal my computer, someone else
certainly could. And there’s the risk of fires and natural
disasters. Having an off-site backup of the things that are
important to you is just a Good Idea.

But I’m concerned that she doesn’t empathize more with all
these people getting arrested. Especially the grandmother in
Indiana. Her grandchildren all live in the same household at the
moment, but if her other son ever gets married and has kids (which
is something she wishes for), I would think it quite likely that
she could buy two bottles of something for the grandchildren in
one week.

Then they came for the people who had two children with
offspring and I did not speak out — because only one of my
children had offspring?

More about converting MIDI to lilypond

I wrote a a
couple of days ago about having tried out a new way of
converting MIDI files to lilypond. I posted the gist of the
idea to the lilypond
users’ mailing list, and got some more suggestions of things
to try.

The idea I liked best was that the MuseScore program has an
experimental Capella import (and
lilypond export),
which would have let me avoid using the MIDI files as an
exchange format at all. Unfortunately, in its current state,
the import crashes on the capella files for Holborne.
(I did report the bug on the MuseScore tracking program.)

So I tried several other programs that import MIDI and export
lilypond, and the one that seems to work best for this
particular purpose was the rosegarden one. I
haven’t finished a whole piece, but from what I’ve done, it
looks like the work I have to do is work I couldn’t reasonably
expect a MIDI reading program to do for me.

The most time-consuming part is that the MIDI files for the Holborne
are what lilypond calls “unfolded” repeats, and I want “volta”
repeats. That is, when something is repeated, these MIDI files
play it twice (which is what you want when you’re using the MIDI
file to practice with), whereas I want to print the music once with repeat
signs around it. But otherwise, I’m just making the changes
which are necessary because I want unbarred parts.

Hobson’s Choice

I watched this
movie last night, and enjoyed it a lot. It’s about a
woman who does all the work for a family with a mostly absent
father and two lazy sisters.

Not that I believe the fairy tale about getting capital for
your business from the first person you ask and paying it off
before it’s due. But the fairy tale about a woman deciding what
she wants and going and getting it is a lot of fun to watch.
And she gets to be the fairy godmother to the bootmaker in the
basement who hasn’t ever thought of getting a better job or a
better place to live.

The key sentence of the plot goes, “This business runs on the shoes you
make which sell themselves and the boots everyone else makes,
which I sell.” So obviously they should go into business for
themselves, and ditch the parasites.

Which they do. Unfortunately, the “happy” ending has them
coming back to the original shop and taking care of the
alcoholic father, but at least the lazy sisters are out of the
picture. The Cinderella ending I always imagined after “and
they lived happily ever after” was better, but the one in
Rossini actually leaves her still dealing with the father and
the stepsisters, so probabably I’m just being too escapist about
my fantasy life.

The cinematography of the alcoholic delirium is a bit dated,
but Charles Laughton’s acting of a man who’s drunk himself into
oblivion and incapacity is really good.

http://rcm.amazon.com/e/cm?t=laymusicorg-20&o=1&p=8&l=as1&asins=B001LMU1A0&fc1=000000&IS2=1&lt1=_blank&m=amazon&lc1=0000FF&bc1=000000&bg1=FFFFFF&f=ifr
http://rcm.amazon.com/e/cm?t=laymusicorg-20&o=1&p=8&l=as1&asins=B00005BEYB&fc1=000000&IS2=1&lt1=_blank&m=amazon&lc1=0000FF&bc1=000000&bg1=FFFFFF&f=ifr

MIDI to MusicXML

One of the problems of sharing music with people who prefer
some other music notation software is that until recently the
best available way to do it was MIDI. MIDI has many fine
qualities, but it doesn’t save the same information that printed
notation needs.

There’s a fairly well-thought-of standard exchange format
called MusicXML. Lots of programs (including lilypond)
implement an import of MusicXML, but export is a lot less
common, so most people (including me) who put their work up on
the web can’t give you MusicXML from their source. Finale users
could, but mostly don’t.

The reason I call it an exchange format is that while it
captures all or most of the information any of the notation
programs save, it doesn’t do it in a way anyone would want to
work with. For instance, here’s the information for one note (a
g quarter note in the second octave above middle C) in
MusicXML:


<note>
<pitch>
<step>G </step>
<octave>5 </octave>
</pitch>
<duration>96 </duration>
<voice>1 </voice>
<type>quarter </type>
<dot/>
<notehead>normal </notehead>
</note>

In lilypond, you would normally enter that “g4” (or just “g” if
it were in a string of other quarter notes) and in ABC it
would usually be “g”. So you can see why people would rather
type ABC or lilypond.

Earlier this week, I wanted to transcribe a piece
by Antony
Holborne. The whole book this piece is in has been
transcribed, and is on the web at the Werner
Icking Archive. But the person who did this did it in a
notation program called Capella 5, which I
don’t have. He did provide sources, as well as PDF and MIDI
files, so I tried importing the MIDI file into lilypond, and
decided it would be easier to just enter the lilypond.

One reason I decided this was that midi2ly had decided to spell
all the MIDI pitches that are a half note below B and a half
note above A as A♯ instead of B♭. (The MIDI format only records
what the pitch is in terms of how many half steps from 0
(roughly the bottom of the piano) it is, it doesn’t know
anything about how a notation system would want to write that
pitch.)

So I was excited when I read in a newsletter from Noteflight that they now
have MIDI import. Noteflight is a web-based notation system
that seemed promising when I looked at it a few months ago, but
hadn’t yet implemented anything I was particularly interested in
using.

So I ran the next of the Holborne MIDI files through it, and
was gratified to see that it spelled the notes between B and A
as B♭ instead of A♯. Unfortunately, it spells the ones between
F and G as G♭ instead of F♯. But you can import the MIDI file,
export the XML file, and import the XML file into lilypond and
get something you can work with more easily in several ways than
the direct import of MIDI into lilypond, which is fairly
orphaned. And it may well be that some of the manipulation
you’re going to have to do to the score can be done more easily
in noteflight than in lilypond, although I can’t tell you that
from personal experience.

So if you’re looking for a web-based music notation software,
or a fairly clean way to get MIDI files into MusicXML, look into
noteflight.

Here’s the Holborne Galliard as I imported it from the MIDI
file. I think the only thing I did was to change the key
signature and edit one G♭ into an F♯.

More ebook sloppiness

I never minded stuff like this when the ebooks I was reading
were being produced by volunteer labor, but now that I’m paying
real money for them, it really irritates me.

I’m reading The
Confusion, volume 2 of The
Baroque Cycle by Neal Stephenson, which I purchased
from fictionwise.com.

The chapter I’m reading takes place at a castle in Germany, and
I believe Stephenson refers to it by the german word Schloß.
However, the producers of the ebook got the code for the German
double s wrong, and so instead of a Schloß, the ebook keeps
talking about a Schloé. (Html entity 233 instead of 223.)

This book is published by “William Morrow, An Imprint of Harper
Collins Publishers” and I’m sure there are lots of people who work
for that organization who could spot a typo that bad and that
consistent, so I can only conclude that none of these proofreaders
was asked to look at the book after the people who converted the
text to the epub format were through. And that the people who did
the conversion aren’t good proofreaders.

Of course, this would be even more irritating if I weren’t
running the illegal script that turns the ereader format back into
html, which I can edit with emacs.

http://rcm.amazon.com/e/cm?t=laymusicorg-20&o=1&p=8&l=as1&asins=0060733357&fc1=000000&IS2=1&lt1=_blank&m=amazon&lc1=0000FF&bc1=000000&bg1=FFFFFF&f=ifr
http://rcm.amazon.com/e/cm?t=laymusicorg-20&o=1&p=8&l=as1&asins=B002MTU5BQ&fc1=000000&IS2=1&lt1=_blank&m=amazon&lc1=0000FF&bc1=000000&bg1=FFFFFF&f=ifr

What I wanted to yell at the President

I watched the address to the joint session of Congress a couple
of weeks ago with a friend. In general, I really like watching
Obama speak, because it’s such a relief to have a President who
isn’t embarrassing me with every sentence out of his mouth.

But there was one point when I was talking back to the TV
screen. It was after he’d talked about how he and everybody else
in the country could design a system from scratch that would work
better than the one we have, but he believed that we could get
more done by building on the system we have.

So then he said, “We will place a limit on how much you can be
charged for out-of-pocket expenses, because in the United States
of America, no one should go broke because they get sick.” I
remarked to my friend, “So how is that incremental?” At the time,
and until I just looked at the text of the speech, I believed he
actually had used the word incremental.

The reason I’ve continued to think about this off and on for
the last two weeks is that I think that really is the reason
health care reform has been so hard to get. There really isn’t a
consensus in this country that no one should go broke because they
get sick.

This is why, although it was a well-delivered speech, the polls
all found that it didn’t convince anyone. People who believe that
they won’t go broke when they get sick because they’ve done the
right things all their lives, and that the people who will go
broke are lazy and improvident, want to hear why this new system
isn’t going to cause them to go broke because other people get
sick. And the President did say that, but not in a way that anyone
really believes.

The reason I understand this better than President Obama does
isn’t because I’m a better politician than he is. It’s because
he’s spent his life doing what the system says he should do and I
haven’t. I know people who really believe that I should go broke
when I get sick because I retired at the age of 50. They don’t
say it in such crude language, but their disapproval of someone
making that choice says it for them.

So the right way to pitch the reform shouldn’t be telling sad
stories about the people who go broke because of the present
system. It should be making the point that the present system
is in fact making you go broke because other people get sick,
and spending money differently will make you go less broke as
well as making them get less sick. I don’t say I know how to do
that, but I can see that that isn’t what the President is trying
to do.

End is in sight

Of the executrix gig.

I just printed off the statement of income, expenses and
deductions that the lawyer for Bonnie’s
estate needs to file the estate taxes. Yesterday I sent what I
believe to be the final check to the IRS to cover the tax mess she
was in.

If you ever have to do this, you should be more organized about
keeping records than I was. I put everything relevent in a box,
but it ended up being a lot of stuff to sort through to find the
numbers I needed. I had a good spreadsheet about the instruments,
and about the amounts of money that went between my checking
account and hers while I had power of attorney, and between my
account and the estate’s account after I was appointed executrix.
(A lawyer isn’t going to say directly that you should do this, but
I figured out from what he did say the day after she died that I should back date a check
to before she died and put it in my account so that I’d be able to
pay bills in the weeks between her death and my appointment as
executrix. So most of the funeral expenses came out of my
checking account, but it was mostly money that had been in
Bonnie’s checking account.)

But all the stuff about donations and sales of things other
than instruments should have been in the spreadsheet and were
instead in the box.

I think I have to produce an accounting of some sort before I
can pay any money to the legatees, but I’m hoping it won’t make me
feel as helpless as the tax statement did. I’m not sure why,
because I do my own taxes fairly easily, but it reminded me of when
I first went to school and had to do workbooks. I was young for
my grade, and clumsy at writing but facile at talking, so it
always seemed that there was nothing like room enough to really
answer the questions, so you had to not only figure out the
answer, which was easy, but figure out how to fit it into the
space they gave me, which usually seemed impossible.

So even after finding the cool new LaTeX class, I had to take
lots of deep breaths and assure myself that this really isn’t
anything I couldn’t do, and if I really couldn’t find the numbers,
I could just make up something plausible, and finally it’s in the mail.

The marginpar command in the tufte-handout class
is in fact a good feature for something like this. I had a list
of items like:

  • 4 boxes of books to Haverhill Library sale
  • 25 bags of clothes to Big Brother Big Sister

and I put marginal notes in explaining how many pounds in a box or
a bag.

How it went at Arts Around the Block

This was the event I told you about last
week.

Me

My playing went well.

The background noise level when I was
playing outside was not intrusive. I was playing country dance
tunes on the G alto recorder, and it was carrying well enough
that although there wasn’t much foot traffic where I was, people
who were hearing it from a block or two away came to investigate
and stayed to listen for a while. I never had a large, visible
audience, but a woman who was manning one of the booths came up
specially to tell me how much they were enjoying it.

When I moved into the chapel to play the Ortiz, I was able to
take over the audience for my sister’s harpsichord set. She’s
been doing concerts in Fall River for several decades, and has
built up a small but loyal following. So there were a dozen or
so people in the small chapel with some of the best acoustics
for recorder playing I know of.

I’d been working on making the Ortiz variations on Douce
Memoire and O felici occhi mei sound easy
and convincing. I made lots of progress; I probably didn’t
completely succede, but the audience did seem to enjoy it. One
good thing about that audience was that it liked singing; Judy
had given them Greensleeves and Drink to me
only with thine eyes to sing, and they’d sounded really
good. They weren’t quite as good on Douce
Memoire, which most of them had probably never heard
before, but they were making the attempt.

Everybody else

The big success was Peter and the Wolf. There
were about 40 people, including a lot of children, in the
audience. The musicians for the solo parts were quite good, and
the electric piano filled in for the rest of the orchestra.

The basic problem with the rest of the programming is that
there isn’t enough audience for three classical music venues.
And aside from my recorder playing, the other acts scheduled for
outside weren’t loud enough to draw in from where the foot
traffic was. And the music down the hill did get louder as the
afternoon progressed, so the last outside event (a recorder
group) was partially drowned out, even for the performers
themselves. (Recorder groups need to hear each other.)

Arts Around the Block is a relatively new institution, with
some growing pains that are still in evidence, but there seemed
to be enough success for enough participants that one believes
they will continue and improve.