Tablature and lilypond

If all you’re doing is entering notes, you can probably take
lilypond from 15 years ago, run it through the automatic updater,
and get your music typeset by current lilypond, using all the
improvements made by all the developers since then.

If you have lyrics, they did something 8 years or so ago that
the automatic upgrader doesn’t deal with, so you have to manually
change two or three lines per part to use the current version. This is why there’s still a
lot of old lilypond on my music publishing
site. But it’s certainly possible to use 10 year old work
with current lilypond.

If you want tablature, someone who actually has tablature may
have figured out something better than what I can see. What it
looks like from here is:

  • Some time in 2003, I spend some time figuring out how I
    would have to enter Dowland’s tablature if that were what I
    wanted to do. I actually had a measure or two entered, and I
    got some help writing a scheme function so that it would look
    more like what’s printed in the Dowland facsimiles. I didn’t at
    the time have any real use for the tablature, so I didn’t bother
    entering more than that measure. However, in 2007 I decided a
    few of the Dowland third book pieces didn’t really make sense
    musically without the lute part, so I attempted to enter the
    tablature, and found that all the work I’d done 4 years before
    was useless. I translated the tablature into standard notation,
    and didn’t do anything about having it as tablature.
  • This last week, someone from the recorder mailing
    list     offered to help me proofread tablature, so I took a
    look at what lilypond has now. It would clearly be a fair amount of
    work to get from the notation I have (for a few pieces) to
    anything that looks like what Dowland printed, but I found a post
    on the LUTE
    mailing list     from last year claiming that they had something
    useful. However, this may have worked with lilypond 2.10, but it
    no longer works with lilypond 2.12.

Now I didn’t spend a lot of time figuring out what has changed
about tablature between 2.10 and 2.12, and it could be that it’s a
trivial problem that just didn’t get into convert-ly by accident,
and if I wrote a bug report it would get fixed immediately. But
since I’ve done considerable work on tablature over the years, all
of which is completely useless with current lilypond, and of
course I still have several projects on the website with a fairly
tight deadline of mid-October. So I’m not going to do any more
work right now. But if any of you feel differently, and do get to
where there’s useful French lute tablature coming out of lilypond 2.12,
please let me know about it.

Meanwhile, I should mention that abctab2ps was
already producing useful tablature 10 years ago, and has
presumably improved. I stopped using it since tablature by itself
is of limited use to me, and there wasn’t any way to get from the
abctab2ps input to standard notation. But another possibly useful
program would translate the tab (plus the tuning information) into ABC or lilypond.

RIP, Senator Kennedy

I’ve been thinking quite a bit about Ted Kennedy since he died
a couple of days ago. I grew up in Massachusetts, so via the
miracle of television, he’s spent a lot of time in my living room,
even though I didn’t know him personally, and I only remember once when
we were in the same (large) room together.

Many other people have been analyzing how his work in the
senate shaped America as we know it today. I’ll just tell you a
couple of personal stories.

Chapaquiddick

The speech he gave where he offered to resign is the other
television event I remember from the summer of 1969, besides the
moon landing.
It was a well-delivered speech, and an effective piece of persuasive
writing. The person who is usually credited with writing it,
Theodore Sorenson, was proposed as head of the CIA in the Carter
administration, but the appointment was withdrawn. I remember one
of the arguments against it being that he had written that speech,
which may have contained some lies, and certainly didn’t tell the
whole truth. At the time, I was surprised that the opposition
would have been stated that way, since I don’t see how never
having told a lie or suppressed a truth can possibly be a
qualification for being head of an intelligence agency.

Money from an insurance company

The only time I actually called on him for help as a
constituent, his staff was quite effective. I had been using what
was then called Harvard Community Health Plan (HCHP), one
of the original
manged care organizations, for my health care for about 15 years.
I had been fairly satisfied with the care I’d received, but once I
became a contractor and no longer had my coverage paid for by my
employer, I found dealing with their billing organization
increasingly annoying. The last straw was when they wrote that
they were cancelling my policy because they hadn’t gotten my check
on time. (It had actually crossed that letter in the mail.)

I went into a frenzy of letter writing, and wrote to their
billing that they
weren’t cancelling me, I was cancelling them, and wrote letters to
the two doctors I had a relationship with explaining what was
happening.

When they didn’t return the check I’d sent after a month or
so, I wrote to Senator Kennedy, explaining the situation. In
fact, I was more concerned that he be aware that individuals were
having this kind of problem retaining coverage than that he get me
my check. I had both a diabetes and an asthma diagnosis at this
point, and I suspected HCHP of cherry-picking, and also of not
really wanting to deal with billing individuals. His office sprang into action and called both the
HCHP billing office and the Massachusetts Insurance
Commission.

Less than a week after writing that letter, on the same day I got a letter in
the regular mail from Senator Kennedy’s office saying what they’d
done, and how I should follow up if I didn’t receive my check in a
week, and an express delivery of the check from HCHP.

Cancer diagnosis

I heard of Senator Kennedy’s cancer diagnosis while I was on my
way to pick up Bonnie’s
belongings from the hospice two days after she died. I remember
wondering how much difference it would make that he was richer,
more powerful, and maybe more knowledgeable about the health care
system than Bonnie had been.

The answer seems to be quite
a lot. He was getting out of bed most days until the actual
day he died; he was at home with his family and friends and dogs
until the end; and while the brain surgery did affect his vision
and motor skills, he continued to do what he loved doing,
including sailing and writing letters until almost the very end.

Of course, it may well have been just the luck of the draw that
his surgery left him relatively unimpaired and Bonnie’s left her
unable to speak or move her left side, but it may well also have been a
difference in quality of care. If it happens to me, I hope I get
closer to the kind Kennedy got than the kind Bonnie got.

Sunny takes a bath

I did think while I was doing this that you would enjoy
pictures, but really, it takes at least two hands to give a dog a
bath, and setting up a camera, tripod, and remote control while
you’re doing it would make it even more too much work than it
already is. So you’ll just
have to take my word for it that we both looked wet, and he looked
miserable.

Sunny and his cousin Monte both got fleas while Monte was
here. Monte’s seem to be clearing up from the Frontline flea and
tick stuff, but
Sunny’s just seemed to be getting worse, and I got a good look at
the infestation yesterday when Sunny was rolling in the grass in
the sunlight, and after that it made my skin crawl just thinking
about it.

So I decided he probably needed a flea shampoo in addition to
the monthly flea and tick stuff.

People at the dog park have spoken well about Laundramutt as a place to
give your dog a bath. They have tubs the right height and give
you aprons and assist you getting the dog into the bath. But when
I called them, they said they weren’t interested in helping bathe
a dog with a flea infestation.

I stopped at the pet store on the way to pick up the farm share
and picked up some flea shampoo. I took Sunny out in the back
yard and tied him to the fire escape and turned the hose on. The
internet instructions suggest wetting and soaping the neck first,
so that the fleas don’t just go hang out around the ears and eyes,
which you’re going to be trying not to get shampoo in, and then go
back and feast on dog blood. So we did that, and then wet the
rest of him, and soaped him, and rinsed him twice, and then I
toweled him off and took him inside and blow dried him.

He spent this whole process looking martyred, and clearly
wondering why I was torturing him, and the rest of the day feeling
miserable because he smelled wrong and his mommy didn’t love him
any more, but he seems to have mostly forgiven me today.

He’s normally a pretty clean dog, and any bad smells he picks
up seem to be temporary. I’ve dealt with skunk smells with a
sponge bath. The only time I resorted to a hose was when I first
got him. He’d spent a month in the shelter, so he had a pretty
strong disinfectant smell, so I hosed him off but didn’t bother
with shampoo. So this is the first real bath he’s had since at least 2000,
so it’s obvious that he thinks it’s not only cruel but also
unusual punishment.

But he’s nice and fluffy, and doesn’t seem to be scratching
anything like as much. He is shaking his head more than usual, so
I probably got water in his ears, or maybe a few fleas took refuge
there. But the flea population should be down to the number that
the monthly spot of stuff can handle.

Halfway through

Yesterday was my half birthday. This means two things:

  • In one year, I will be 59 1/2 and I will really own all the money in my
    retirement accounts.
  • I’m half through with this experiment in blogging every day.

I know I already told you about how I felt about being one third
down, but I’ve had a couple of new thoughts since then, so I’ll
pass those on.

I think I’m writing some better. My current crusade is to use
the word “thing” less, and substitute a more specific noun.
I’m doing this in routine emails, as well as in these blog
posts.

I may be reading better, as a result of the fact that my
default is to write about anything I read that I really love
and want to tell people about. One of the more popular posts
on this 59’th
year experiment was the one I wrote about Little Dorrit
after watching the BBC adaptation and rereading the book.
Part of what made that one good was that I took notes about what I
noticed and had to look up while I was reading it. I’m
currently rereading Anna
Karenina, and I’m planning a similar post about it.

I did finally get a request from a friend to change something.
I had goofed and left his real name in some text copied from
elsewhere on the web, and my blog turned up on
the front page of a google search for his name, and he was starting a job
hunt. Of course, I immediately redacted his name. It does
prove that this blog has a higher google page rank than the
page from which I lifted the quote with his name in it.

Of the top ten most popular posts, four are about the Boston Early Music Festival. I
got a request this week from the American Recorder
Magazine to use my blog post about the recorder
masterclass with Paul Leenhouts, since the person who had
been assigned to cover it for them hadn’t come up with an
article.

I still don’t know much about who’s reading this blog, but the
numbers of readers are going up steadily, so someone must be
enjoying it, or finding what they search for in google on
it.

I still haven’t completely missed a day, although I admit that
days like last
Wednesday are cheating a bit. But I had written real
content, just in other contexts from the 59’th year blogging
every day project.

I chopped down a cherry tree

I was late with my post yesterday because I spent the morning
in Fall River. I usually go there to see my mother and sister
for dinner, but there are things you don’t feel like doing after
dinner, so I spent the night and in the morning helped with the
tree and practiced some of the music
Judy and I will be playing on September 21 at the Fall
River Arts Around the Block festival.

We didn’t really chop down the whole tree, but we ended up
cutting off a lot more of it than I would have expected. The
problem was that Comcast wouldn’t install cable television
(which they need because with the new, improved digital
broadcast TV they can’t get a lot of stations they used to get)
unless they trimmed the branches that were in the way of where
lines come into the house. It needed to be trimmed in any case,
because it was quite likely that if a storm moved the branches
violently enough, they would stop having telephone service.

There was really only one branch that needed to go away, but
the ladder we were using wasn’t high enough to reach that branch
just before it started trying to grab the phone line. So we had
to saw it off close to the trunk of the tree, and to get to
that, we had to saw a lot of other branches. To get the ladder
to where we could saw those branches, we had to saw some more
branches.

So the upshot was there was a fairly big pile of cherry
branches, some of which will make firewood for next winter.
They’re choke cherries, so the birds will be upset, but it won’t
affect the Conrad family food supply any.

And the flower bed on that side of the house will get a lot
more sun now. It’s a southern exposure, so you tend to think of
it as full sun, but of course the part that was under this tree wasn’t.

Edamame

The farm share included a sheaf of edamame two weeks ago. I’ve
served them at two gatherings, and was surprised by how many people
had never heard of them, or if they had heard of them, couldn’t
remember enough of how they were spelled to pronounce the name
anything like right. So I figured I should tell you about
them.

They’re soybeans that are picked still green. The pods of the
ones I had were fuzzy — someone in the band claimed to have had
them with smooth pods, but nobody else remembered them that way.
I’ve only ever had them already shelled until now.

One enjoyable feature of this farm share item was that they
came on the stalk — that is, the farm saved labor costs by just
cutting off the plants and putting them in the box, and I took the
beans off the plants and put them in a bowl. I did this while
chatting with a friend who was picking up some items that she
could use better than I could, so it wasn’t time-consuming.

I put a little water in the bowl, and microwaved the pods for
about 4 minutes, and then served them after band rehearsal last
Tuesday. It’s pretty good finger food if you aren’t really
hungry and just want something to nibble on, but they really
taste better with some flavoring. I put out sesame oil and soy
sauce, but nobody felt like shelling enough at once to put on a
plate and put sauce on them, so we just ate them straight out of
the pods.

There were still a lot left, and my plan was to shell them into
the salad I made for the cookout I went to yesterday. I went
through all the vegetables in my refrigerator and put at least
some of most of the ones that are edible raw into the salad
bowl. I’d had a dozen ears of corn last week, and cooked them
all and eaten all but three, so I cut the kernels off the cobs
and put that in the salad too.

By the time I’d done all that, it was time to leave for the
cookout, so I decided to take the edamame with me in the pods
and maybe people would just eat them while we waited for the
charcoal to cook the meat, or maybe someone else would want to
shell them.

Everybody had a few, but then went back to munching on potato
chips, but one person volunteered to shell them for the salad,
so we got some in there, and they were good with the dressing.

I think there are still a fair number left, but they’re at the
house where the cookout was.

If you want to try them and don’t have a farm that sells them,
some supermarkets (Trader Joe’s that I know of for sure) have
them in the frozen foods section.

How the gig went

I posted yesterday that I
had a gig in Waltham and I didn’t know much about what I was going
to play.

As is usual with gigs where you don’t know much about what’s
happening the morning of the gig, it didn’t work out to very
much playing. It wouldn’t have been worth going to Waltham for
the 5 minutes of performing time, but the rest of the performance
was entertaining, and the rehearsing with Lynn and Ishmael was really
fun. They’re both good people to play with; I play with Ishmael
all the time but usually in the context of a larger group, not all
of whom are very experienced performers, and I’ve only had a
chance to sing with Lynn a couple of times.

The original email sent to possible performers talked about
two 5 minute intermezzos and implied that there might be a fair
amount of playing time before the performance. So we rehearsed a
fair amount of stuff, and we were all prepared to fill in with
solos if something needed setup time.

When we got there, the first person we talked to said there would
be 5 minute intermezzos, but that he didn’t think he wanted before
performance music. So we arranged to get food before the
performance. (At one point there’d been a mention of food during
the rehearsal time, but that didn’t happen, and I’d gone easy on
lunch expecting an early supper, so I was hungry by 6:30.)

The second person we talked to said the intermezzos would be
3 minutes or less, but he had no problem with lots of music before
the performance. So Ishmael played fiddle tunes when he’d
finished his sandwich. I could have played too, but I’d packed my
soprano recorder when they told us there wouldn’t be
before-performance music, and I wasn’t confident enough that the
right key would come out on the G alto.

So we ended up doing Ravenscroft’s
We
be three poor Mariners for the first intermezzo, but being cut
off before we could follow it up with To
Portsmouth and He
that will an alehouse keep, which would have been a 5 minute
set, or maybe a little more.

The second intermezzo was supposed to be Jenny went to
gather rushes, sung by Lynn with me and Ishmael chiming in
on the choruses to encourage the audience, and maybe doing an
instrumental verse if Lynn needed to catch her breath, followed by me and
Ishmael playing one or two Morley
Canzonets
to two voyces, but the actors popped out during the last verse
of Jenny.

Ishmael’s friend who came along and hasn’t had much experience
of this kind of thing was quite annoyed at how truncated the
performing was, but Ishmael, Lynn and I had really been
expecting it. I was surprised during rehearsal when Lynn
suggested we sing Purcell,
since he’s a good 200 years later than the play, but she denied
that she’d ever suggested we do it in performance — she says
she just said I
gave her cakes and I gave her ale is fun to sing, which it is, so we burst into song..

Gig in Waltham

I Sebastiani, a
Commedia del Arte troup based at MIT, is giving a free
performance in Waltham tonight and I’ll be playing before and
during intermission with Lynn Noel and Ishmael Stefanov.

The website says:

# Saturday, August 22 at 7pm at 144 Moody Street,
Building 18, Floor 3, Waltham, MA; open to the public and
FREE!

It’s a pretty informal gig, so I will be able to tell you what
we played tomorrow, but it’s likely to include lots of singing
and some serpent and recorder. We’re pretty sure to play Ravenscroft’s
We be three poor Mariners,
which we do with an instrumental on serpent and five-string fiddle
in between the verses.

Feb. 2003 I Sebastiani performance

Come if you can. The Commedia del Arte is quite good — I
played stage music for a week-long run once, and they really are
improvising, and a better audience does make for a better
performance.

That week, the lead actress (left in the picture above) was someone who teaches fourth grade for her day job.
She was playing a lusty young widow in a very low-cut bodice with fairly raunchy improvised dialog. She did her very
best performance the night a bunch of her students came. This is probably related to why
three of the five Hugo
award nominees, including the winner, were Young Adult fiction.

Wrote a program yesterday

It’s a pretty short program, and it doesn’t do as much as I
wish it did, but it will make a tedious and error-prone job a
little bit less tedious.

I’ve mentioned this before, but turning a website from html
into a content-manged site is a pain in the neck, and one of the
most painful things is getting the images and pdf files and such
into the media library, because that’s a terrible web-based
program, that only lets you do one file at a time.

So my program uses the python wordpresslib. It takes
one argument, which is the name of the file to upload. (The url,
username, and password
for the wordpress blog are hard-coded for my purposes.)

The program uploads the file and returns the URL for accessing
the raw file in the media library.

This isn’t really as good as you would hope for — what you’d
want is to supply a title and caption for the item and get the
link that shows the image in your post as a link to the page
page in the media library. You have to do all of that through
the web interface. But at least that web interface is a
reasonable program. The one for uploading gives you two
choices, one of which never works for me and the other one makes
you pick the filename via the browser even if you know it.

I’m glad I got programming energy for this even if it isn’t
much of a program. I think it’s important to use skills like
that pretty often. Of course I’ve been writing some PHP in the
course of the website redesign, but that’s closer to writing
html than it is to real programming.

Here’s the program if you want to use it:


#!/usr/bin/env python

# 09-Aug-20 lconrad; created
# usage: addmedia.py filename
# adds filename as a media object to the serpentpublications.org wordpress blog

# import library
import wordpresslib, sys

if sys.argv < 2:
print "usage: addmedia.py filename"

filename = sys.argv[1]
# note that it's the xmlrpc.php interface you need to specify
wordpress = "http://serpentpublications.org/wordpress/xmlrpc.php"
user = "*redacted*"
password = "*redacted*"

# prepare client object
wp = wordpresslib.WordPressClient(wordpress, user, password)

# select blog id
wp.selectBlog(0)

# upload image for post
imageSrc = wp.newMediaObject(filename)

print "Image uploaded to: %s" % imageSrc