Category: Uncategorized

Results from the January 30 concert

I thought I’d write a coherent account, instead of throwing you
dribs and drabs like I did in December. The previously posted
information is all in this post, except that I posted the picture later.

It was one of the nicest spaces we’ve played in. We’ve played
there twice before, but because it’s an art gallery, and they
put the art in different places for each exhibition, we end up
performing in different spots. It’s an old factory building
with stone walls and tile floors and high ceilings, so it’s
always fairly live, but this was an ideal spot for our
instruments. I played one note on the serpent and said, “O,
good, the serpent likes this space,” but the recorders,
especially my Prescott transitional soprano, liked it even
better.

We had about 25 people, which was good considering how short a
lead time we had for publicity after scheduling it. They seemed
to enjoy it, and stayed around for crackers and cheese afterwards
and asked questions about the instruments and the music. There
were a few people we knew, but it looked like most of them were
people who come to events at the gallery.

The opening piece was We
be three poor Mariners. We’ve been using that as a
beginning piece, as have at least two other groups I’ve heard play
it in the last 5 years. It doesn’t make large technical demands,
and is a good warmup for the harder pieces later, and both
performers and audience enjoy it. This is the current state of
the solo serpent playing; not as good as I wish it were, but
better than it’s been in the past. The recorder playing on the
middle verse was a debut recorder performance by someone who is
usually a singer.

We had to take the two French drinking songs off the program in
December to keep the length under an hour, so we put them back for
this. It was a mistake in the case of Changeons
Propos, so I won’t inflict the recording on you, but Quand
je Bois was good except for the beginning.

We’ve concentrated on the Weelkes Aires and Phantasticke
Spirits about spring and birds singing because we
usually do them at the Walk for Hunger in May,
but both of the ones that made it onto this program were
successful. Here’s Strike
it up, Tabor.

I’ve always wanted to do whole concerts full of the Morley
Canzonets, and this half concert was the best chance I’ve had so
far. They went well; here are some of the better ones:

As I was making up this list of greatest hits, I realized that
none of the three-voice ones are on it. They’re about as easy
to sightread as the two-voice ones, but at least twice as
difficult to perform, and while none of the performances was
bad, they all had at least one section where somebody wasn’t
quite on the same beat as the other two people. Cruel
you pull away too soon has the shortest such
section.

The ovation at the end definitely justified an encore, so we
sang He
that will an alehouse keep. Some of the audience
joined in.

How the Burns party went

I’m just now getting to hear the recordings from the concert on
January 30, so I’ll write about that later. Yesterday’s Burns
birthday party was quite pleasant.

My sister, the hostess, read an article from the Manchester
Guardian pointing out that the custom started within a few years
of Burns’ death, when there were still people around who had known
Burns. She discussed the history of the 19th century parties
where the guests provided the entertainment. At the Burns
parties, everybody contributed, whether professional or not.
Later, at the parties where Chopin played and George Sand read her
works in progress, it was the professionals who performed, but
they were doing it in their own social context. Later still, the
professionals were asked to perform for other people, and either
were paid, or felt they should have been.

There was an animated discussion of the “Question” — Resolved:
that candidates for public office *should* want to stand in the
cold outside Fenway Park and shake hands. Everyone agreed that
Coakley had not been a good candidate, but none of the
political activists in the room wanted to discuss my point
that there had been no Get Out the Vote.

People enjoyed my selections from Judith. A friend who has
usually played recordings of folksongs he likes this year sang an
Irish lullaby from the Clancy Brothers’ repertoire, and turned out
to have quite a pleasant voice. Someone read a newly discovered
poem by Burns, and someone else sang his setting of a lullaby by
Yeats. I got a chance to play my Mexican Polka with piano
accompaniment. My sister read the whole of the Wordsworth poem on
the death of Lord Nelson that President Obama had quoted the last
three lines of in his eulogy of Edward Kennedy.

The food and drink were all good. Monte began the procedings
by making off with the whole wedge of the most expensive cheese.
After that it was mostly humans enjoying the food they’d cooked
for each other, including “neaps and tatties”; a casserole with
barley, shrimp, and chicken; and lemon squares.

More Judith

I had to spend most of the morning producing the handout for
the
party, so I’ll give you the rest of it today.

I’m reading parts of two sections — the one I gave you
yesterday about Holofernes cutting off the water supply to
Bethulia, and the one about the death of Holofernes.

Here’s the version in the Apocrypha:

And Holofernes was made merry on her occasion, and drank exceeding
much wine, so much as he had never drunk in his life.

And when it was grown late, his servants made haste to their lodgings,
and Vagao shut the chamber doors, and went his way.

And they were all overcharged with wine.
And Judith was alone in the chamber.
But Holofernes lay on his bed, fast asleep, being exceedingly drunk.

And Judith spoke to her maid to stand without before the chamber, and to watch:

And Judith stood before the bed praying with tears, and the motion of her lips in silence,

Saying: Strengthen me, O Lord God of Israel, and in this hour look on the works of my hands, that as thou hast promised, thou mayst raise up Jerusalem thy city: and that I may bring to pass that which I have purposed, having a belief that it might be done by thee.

And when she had said this, she went to the pillar that was at his bed’s head, and loosed his sword that hung tied upon it.

And when she had drawn it out, she took him by the hair of his head, and said: Strengthen me, O Lord God, at this hour.

And she struck twice upon his neck, and out off his head, and took off his canopy from the pillars, and rolled away his headless body.

And after a while she went out, and delivered the head of Holofernes to her maid, and bade her put it into her wallet.

The version from the program notes for last June’s concert is
interrupted by two soliloquies, so I’ll give it to you straight,
first:

Holofernes was barely able to stand
on his feet, and sleep did overtake him.
Bagoas closed the tent and ordered the others to leave.

Holofernes’s strength melts away,
the filthy deeds of lust dilute it,
The bed was in the middle of the chamber,
soft, clean, white.
Entering, Holofernes collapsed upon it,
he began to snore louder than a sea lion,

Judith moved aside the curtains of the bed
while her heart beat fiercely,
She joined hand to hand,
fell to her knees, poured forth tears;
and prayed to herself:
O God,
remove from me all fear, guide my arm
that it accomplish what my mind has plotted!

Now, now I pray, free Your city Jerusalem,
smite the arrogant who elevate themselves,
give peace to the virtuous who humble themselves,
Give me Your power, and deign to assist me.

This she said, then silently she took the sword from the pillar of
the bed,
and drew it; with one hand she seized Holofernes’s hair,
with the other she smote him.
He groaned, shuddered, lying on his back, then
he expired; he had no strength; from his throat dribbled blood:
thus the hero perished, thus he closed his eyes.

He lay there like a log,
God did help Judith
that her work was not in vain,
she struck him again and took off his head.

I believe these soliloquies are not from the original epic, but
are what were called “Agonies” in Croation poetry. The first one
is inserted between Judith’s prayer and her actually taking the sword in
her hands:

[At that moment, the mind of Judith got up and spoke to her soul]

Why are you so sad, my soul, and why are you confusing me…

The soul answered: oh, how greatly you confused my heart…
I have been given to the body to live with it, and the body
cheated me…

The mind: My soul, your excuse isn’t good,
Because your body is made of earth, and you are made of wisdom…

Therefore I am so surprised that your heart is so petrified…
Overcome your body…

Then the soul said: Woe to me, I hoped to receive from you a
consolation, and instead I received even bigger sadness… You
know that I have been living on this world for many years… I
cannot overcome my body. It is older, cannot move, and cannot do
any good…

O, my soul, how bitter are your words, don’t lose hope if you are
losing your mind, I pray you… weep and fall upon your knees…

And then there’s one for Holofernes right after he dies:

[Then, Holofernes’s soul stood up and spoke ot his body angrily:]

Where are your lands and vineyards?

Where the pearls and Stones?

Where are your golden rings?

Where all the money that was your god?

Where are the delicious spices, that you prepared and forgot about
the poor?
There is no more fowl or wine on your table, now you are the drink
of disgusting worms,
that will crumble your body into dust.

It will be God’s decision,

do you want to cry in this chaber, where you lie with your nose
up?

Your beautiful eyes now stay closed,
your tongue is now silent, speechless.

[Then the evil Holofernes’s body, parting from the world, started
lamenting in a death rattle:]

Alas, where is my pride,
alas, where is my life?
Alas, where are my friends?

Alas, where are all my riches?

Oh, my dear companions, look at my body which lived with you
not fearing death,

My arms are still here,
but they don’t help my soul.
My eyes are closed
and all my arms killed.

Why has God created me?

Cursed be the day when I was born;
cursed the place when I was fed!
Be lost the paths that I crossed!

The Book of Judith

I’m going to a Robert Burns Birthday Party tomorrow, where
people read poetry that’s impressed them. We’ll also song some
Burns songs and read some of the standard Burns, but people
mostly pick poems that mean something to them no matter who the
poet is or
when they were written.

I thought over what poetry I’ve run into this year, and what
impressed me most was the Croatian
poems based on the Book of Judith that I heard at last
year’s Boston Early Music
Festival.

I’m going to just read a couple of short passages from a Bible
translation, and some slightly longer passages from the
translation in the BEMF booklet. But I’ve been looking at some
of the information on the internet about the original, and why
it’s in Apocrypha.

Here’s an article
about how it’s been perceived in several religious traditions,
and here’s the Wikipedia
article, which includes a list of literary, musical, and
artistic works based on the story, including the Croation Juditha,
which was part of the basis for the concert last June.

My brief summary is that the Rabbis who decided on the Hebrew
Canon decided not to include it because it was clearly not a
contemporary account. It seems to have been written during the
time of the Maccabees, and set during the reign of
Nebbuchadnezzar. So it’s a historical novel.

One of the aspects of it that struck me last June was the
description of the Assyrian atrocities against the civilian
population, like this one from chapter 7:

Now Holofernes, in going round about, found that the fountains which supplied them with water, ran through an aqueduct without the city on the south side: and he commanded their aqueduct to he cut off.

Nevertheless there were springs not far from the walls, out of which they were seen secretly to draw water, to refresh themselves a little rather than to drink their fill.

But the children of Ammon and Moab came to Holofernes, saying: The children of Israel trust not in their spears, nor in their arrows, but the mountains are their defense, and the steep hires and precipices guard them.

Wherefore that thou mayst overcome them without joining battle, set guards at the springs that they may not draw water out of them, and thou shalt destroy them without sword, or at least being wearied out they will yield up their city, which they suppose, because it is situate in the mountains, to be impregnable.

And these words pleased Holofernes, and his officers, and he placed all round about a hundred men at every spring.

And when they had kept this watch for full twenty days, the cisterns, and the reserve of waters failed among all the inhabitants of Bethulia, so that there was not within the city, enough to satisfy them, no not for one day, for water was daily given out to the people by measure.

The Croatian version of this is shorter and more vivid:

Holofernes approached Bethulia and diverted the water that
flowed into the city.

The water finished, there was thirst in the town,
Nothing to moisten their mouths,
their tongues began to dry out,
their lips to crack, and people waxed pale.

Bright Star

This
 is one of the best movies I’ve ever seen about a poet.
The people who make movies in general do better with composers
— you’re going to need background music anyway. You can
actually have background poetry in some cases, as the reading of
Ode to a Nightingale over the closing credits of this movie
demonstrates, but it’s less common. But often they just take some
event in the poet’s life that could be part of the plot of a movie
and write that movie without using anything at all about the poetry.

What makes this a good movie about a poet is that there’s
ordinary dialog (well-written, but not transcendent), which is
then echoed in a recitation of one of the poems (which is
transcendent). Keats is making love to Fanny, and says
something like “I need a better word for you than bright, or
soft.” And several scenes later, he’s reading her:

BRIGHT star! would I were steadfast as thou art—
   Not in lone splendour hung aloft the night,
And watching, with eternal lids apart,
   Like Nature’s patient sleepless Eremite,

The moving waters at their priestlike task
   Of pure ablution round earth’s human shores,

Or gazing on the new soft fallen mask
   Of snow upon the mountains and the moors—
No—yet still steadfast, still unchangeable,
   Pillow’d upon my fair love’s ripening breast,
To feel for ever its soft fall and swell,
   Awake for ever in a sweet unrest,
Still, still to hear her tender-taken breath,
And so live ever—or else swoon to death.

I was also really impressed with the costumes. It’s the Jane
Austen era, set between 1818 and 1821, so you have lots of
supposedly authentic BBC examples to compare them with. But
these costumes were made by someone who really likes looking at
fabric draped over the human body. Apparently the costume
designer used actual antique fabrics or copies.

Costume design was the only Academy Award this film was
nominated for. I’m not sure all the people nominated for Best
Actor and Best Actress were actually better than the two leads
in this film. And I haven’t yet seen the other films nominated
for Best Costume Design, but I liked this one well enough that
I’ll be rooting for it anyway.

http://rcm.amazon.com/e/cm?t=laymusicorg-20&o=1&p=8&l=as1&asins=B002WY65VA&fc1=000000&IS2=1&lt1=_blank&m=amazon&lc1=0000FF&bc1=000000&bg1=FFFFFF&f=ifr

Songs my mother taught me

A surprising number of them are under copyright. I thought
about it this morning because the BBC had a story that
hinged on Kookaburra
being under copyright.

Of course, everybody knows about Happy Birthday,
largely because of the suit
against the Girl Scouts. This is why a family-friendly
restaurant I go to sometimes has its staff come out with the
lighted cake singing “Happy Birthday” to the tune of the
Hallelujah Chorus, instead of the tune the rest of
us use.

An example I noticed reading through a fakebook, that I don’t
know anyone’s been sued over is On Top of
Spaghetti. (No, my mother didn’t teach me that one —
I learned it in the gutter.)

Wolf Hall

This
book is mostly set between 1527 and 1535 at the court of Henry
VIII, while Henry was maneuvering to control the English church and
marry Anne Boleyn.

I found it difficult to get into, as did a friend of mine who
read it before I did. Eventually it turned out to be as gripping
as you would expect a narrative about an interesting period of
history with well-drawn characters to be.

Analyzing why this was, I realized that it was the narrative
style. Eventually I figured out that it was written in the third
person, but completely from the point of view of Thomas Cromwell,
so that whenever “he” is used without an obvious antecedent,
Cromwell is “he”. Some of the time, this is made explicit, but I
continued to look backwards for an antecedent all through the
book.

I looked up the technical description of various kinds of
third-person point of view, and it looks like this one is called
“third person limited”. Wikipedia gives the Harry Potter books as
an example of this technique, so it doesn’t always have to make
a book hard to read, but I have to admit I thought it was
frequently clumsy here.

Aside from that, it was a fascinating book. I had read
biographies from the period, but hadn’t run across a lot of the
details in this one. For instance, I’ve read lots of things about
Thomas More, but hadn’t known that he was renowned for his
abilities as a torturer. The characterization of London
businessmen in terms of whether they had copies of Tyndale’s
translation of the Bible was interesting. I was intrigued by the description of
well-off, heathy people dying of the fever in the course of a
morning.

There are also scholarly biographies of the main characters in
this book, which are probably better if what you really want to
know is more of the history of the time. But if you want a good
read with some history from a point of view you might not have run
into, this is your book.

http://rcm.amazon.com/e/cm?t=laymusicorg-20&o=1&p=8&l=as1&asins=0805080686&fc1=000000&IS2=1&lt1=_blank&m=amazon&lc1=0000FF&bc1=000000&bg1=FFFFFF&f=ifr

When Everything Changed

I enjoyed reading this
book by Gail Collins, who’s one of the New York Times
columnists I read regularly. It’s not so much a comprehensive scholarly history, as
a collection of the stories about women’s issues in the last
century. They’re well-told. And even if you lived through it
all, you’ve probably forgotten even some of the good ones.

Of course, if you lived through it, you probably have your own
stories that are as good as plenty of these. I kept thinking
about the time (probably in the mid-70’s) I didn’t get a job I was interviewed for, and the
person who did get it was a married woman. My mother was
incensed, because she thought I should have had priority over
someone with a husband to take care of her.

Another good part is that Ms Collins
followed up on what happened to the characters in the stories. So
a woman who in the 50’s was famous for having been able to iron a
shirt in 12 minutes was interviewed in the assisted living
facility and said she only owned one skirt, because she wears
pants everywhere these days. And she gets both Gloria
Steinem’s and Phyllis Schlafly’s reactions to Sarah Palin.

Ebook experience

Most of my ebook reading has been fiction. Terry Pratchett
does put footnotes in his fiction, and the most recent one I
bought did the right thing about making the footnotes links.

This Adobe epub book does even better and has a link back from
the footnote to the place in the text where it occurs.
Unfortunately, when you move to the link, it doesn’t appear at the
top of the screen, so you have to scan the whole page to find the
footnote you were looking for.

Another annoyance was that the page numbers (unnecessary,
because they’re redundant to the Adobe Digital Editions display at
the top of the window) obscure some of the text.

The illustrations came out very well. They were all at the end
of the book, with no links between them and the text that refers
to the same subject. This is probably similar to the dead tree
book, but it’s a place where an ebook could provide some value
added. And flipping between different sections of an ebook is a
bit more difficult than with a dead tree book, so publishers
should be thinking about these things.

But on the whole, I’m glad I was able to take this out of the
library as an ebook, even though I wish someone would crack the
Adobe epub format so that I could have read it in more comfort.

http://rcm.amazon.com/e/cm?t=laymusicorg-20&o=1&p=8&l=as1&asins=0316059544&fc1=000000&IS2=1&lt1=_blank&m=amazon&lc1=0000FF&bc1=000000&bg1=FFFFFF&f=ifr

Sent a movie back unwatched

I don’t usually do that, and it’s not that it’s a terrible
movie.

It’s called Hands
over the City.It’s about urban development politics, which I expected to be
interested in, but in this case I just wasn’t. I tried twice,
and I just couldn’t get interested in any of the characters
enough to even recognize them when they came back in later
scenes.

There is a good scene at the beginning when a building
collapses, injuring several people. You expect that kind of
European film to have a lot of visual interest even if you don’t
like the characters, but I think one of the points of this one was
how ugly the development was making Naples, and there were an
awful lot of ugly shots of skyscrapers.

So I can’t really tell you not to watch it, because it could be
if I’d persevered there would have been all kinds of catharsis.
But I can tell you I found the first 50 minutes or so pretty boring.

http://rcm.amazon.com/e/cm?t=laymusicorg-20&o=1&p=8&l=as1&asins=B000H5U5KS&fc1=000000&IS2=1&lt1=_blank&m=amazon&lc1=0000FF&bc1=000000&bg1=FFFFFF&f=ifr

Crutches

I got a phone call at 8 AM Friday morning.

I was nervous when I realized who it was — it was the partner
of one of the people I was playing the concert with yesterday.
The last time I got a call from someone like that the day before
the concert, it was the wife of one of the performers saying he
had slipped on the ice and was flat on his back in bed and
couldn’t possibly get to and play a concert the next day.

So I was relieved when it turned out that this call was because
my friend wanted to borrow my crutches.

The story was actually somewhat alarming. She’s a fairly fit
person who climbs mountains and does folk dancing and ride a
bicycle for long distances. Two weeks before she’d been to a
folk dance weekend and danced 15 hours between Friday night and
Sunday afternoon and felt fine during and after.

For a couple of days before, her knee had been bothering her a
little, but then all of a sudden she went to leave work, and
pushed back the chair, and she couldn’t stand on her right
leg.

She was glad I didn’t mind loaning her the crutches. Until she
got them, she wasn’t able to move anywhere without assistance. So
she had to wake up her partner to go to the bathroom at night. I
said that was like having a dog, but she said the dog probably
didn’t whimper both to and from the bathroom. Actually it’s
probably easier with the human, because for the dog, you have to
put shoes and a coat on to take them out.

Anyway, I reminded her when she was being grateful that she
wouldn’t have thought to call me if she hadn’t been so helpful
during the six weeks I was on them — she regularly called to
see if I wanted to come to the supermarket with her, and went to
the pharmacy for me, and took me to visit Bonnie.

I was also glad I’d tested getting them out of the closet while I
was fit. They had enough ice skates and vacuum cleaners and
camping equipment in front of them that I wouldn’t have wanted to try
to do it standing on one foot. I’ll be more careful when I put
them back in the closet.

We don’t know quite what’s going to happen with my friend’s
knee. She’s had an x-ray, and it looks like torn cartilage or
maybe other junk in the joint. She has an appointment to see an
orthopedist next week.

Crutches aren’t so expensive that comfortably off people can’t just go buy
them, but they do take up enough space in a closet, and
reasonably fit people use them seldom enough, that it seems silly
for every household to have a pair. I think it’s something the
socialist model “From each according to his abilities; to each
according to his needs” should apply pretty well. So there
should probably just be a central supply depot that delivers a
pair when you need them, and then you bring them back there when
you don’t any more.

My rationale for keeping mine after the hip surgery instead of
donating them to one of the places that gives them free to poor
people, was that when you sprain your ankle, which I had been
doing every 3 or 4 years, people tell you it heals faster if you
use crutches and keep the weight off of it. I’d never tried that,
because of not having the crutches, but I was going to test it
out the next time my ankle gave out on me. It hasn’t given out
since the hip surgery. I hope that’s because the physical
therapy I got then, which focused more on balance than on
strengthening hip muscles, fixed the problem with my ankle, but
maybe it’s just having crutches in the closet makes it less
likely that you sprain your ankle. The same way carrying an
umbrella makes it less likely to rain hard.