LayMusic.org

One last event from BEMF, Saturday June 23rd. A special concert/demonstration by Paul Leenhouts and the Royal Wind Music for Boston Recorder Society at New England Conservatory. The entire double-sextet plus subcontrabass presented a varied program with introductions to the ensemble, the instruments and the individual pieces. There were demonstrations of the ranges of the recorders, and multiple ones of the lower octave of the largest recorder we will probably ever see, the 10-foot-long subcontrabass recorder in B-flat built in the shop of Adriana Breukink. All pieces were played from memory, there was no sheet music for the one-hour program.

Their recorders are built in the same style, and all tuned to A=460, one of the many standard pitches particular to an early time and place. They blend well and speak clearly and quickly, even in fast passages on the bass instruments.
Questions and answers after touched on topics of arranging, tuning to pure intonation, memorization, rehearsal language (English, for an international group of twenty-something students). Paul explained and gave a demonstration of perfectly tuning thirds, both major and minor. He prefers arranging for the lower voiced consort, since the tenor recorder is the highest pitched one to match a human voice. A good time was had by all.

As you can see, I’m still catching up on all the things I’d like to write about, and I know a lot of people who were interested in this project had even less time and internet access than I did.

So if you heard things you’d like to blog about, my offer to do it here still stands:

* Comment on the articles.
* If you want to write your own articles, let me know and I’ll give you an author account.
* If you want to write but not deal with blog software. email me and I’ll post it, attributing it to you.

If you want to blog but not to be a guest on someone else’s blog, there are lots of places where you can set up your own blog without charge, and quite easily. The one I know and recommend is “wordpress.com”:http://www.wordpress.com. I don’t use it because I can’t put “Google Adsense”:http://www.google.com/adsense ads on it, but if you’re not interested in monetizing the blog, it seems to be at a pretty good spot on the flexibility/ease of use continuum. If you do that and have content relevant to BEMF 07, let me know and I’ll put a link to it here.

This was a group of a dozen young professional recorder players who played about two dozen renaissance recorders under the baton of Paul Leenhouts. I thought it was by far the most riveting all-recorder concert I’ve ever heard. Here are some high points:

* The improvisation on Boffons, where Andreas Böhlen walked out into the audience.
* The award for the single most startling chord on the concert, and maybe in the entire festival, goes to the one on the penultimate cadence of the Bach Choral ??Leit uns mit deiner rechten Hand??. I had been thinking that group (seetings of ??Vater unser in himmelreich??) was being very square and German compared to the dance music that had preceded it, and suddenly, it was unsquare and German. Of course the startling quality was possible only because of the impeccable tuning.
* The low quartet playing ??Triste España sin ventura??. Most of the concert had most players playing most of the time, using sizes from soprano or alto to the 10-foot subcontrabass. But this set alternated a low consort (with the top line on C-bass) with a high consort).

I found it inspiring, and I hope the people I play with did too, that the entire concert was performed without written music (except for the conductor). Tom Zajac remarked that that made his 10 minutes of onstage memorized music in the opera seem like child’s play. I’m told a group member said that the hardest part of this was remembering the order of pieces and which of the two dozen recorders you need to pick up.

h3. You too can play this music

We play this stuff all the time, but most of it has fairly good modern editions. The ones on this site are the “Dowland”:http://www.laymusic.org/music/sp/html/bycomposer.html#4 group:
* “Lachrimae Antiquae”:http://www.laymusic.org/music/sp/html/pieces/69.html
* “The Earle of Essex Galiard”:http://www.laymusic.org/music/sp/html/pieces/86.html

Both of these will be in ??Lachrimæ, or Seaven Teares figured in seaven passionate pavanes??, to be published soon at the “laymusic lulu.com store”:http://stores.lulu.com/laymusic

h3. And you can see more of the recorders

The “Boston Recorder Society”:http://www.bostonrecordersociety.org will be hosting a special event for their friends and members on Saturday, June 23 from 2-3:30 PM in the Carr Organ Room of the “New England Conservatory”:http://www.newenglandconservatory.edu.

I didn’t go to either of these concerts, but here’s the “Boston Globe review”:http://www.boston.com/ae/music/articles/2007/06/18/mozart_sonatas_sparkle_at_early_music_fest/?rss_id=Boston.com+%2F+A%26E+%2F+Music+-+CD+and+music+reviews%2C+news+and+clips
of the Mozart recital by Kristian Bezuidenhout and Petra Müllejans, and the Sequentia concert.

I did hear people in line for the 11 PM concert that night complaining about the absence of Benjamin Bagby; I agree that the Festival management should have announced it.

Please leave a comment if you want to discuss these concerts.