Plans for the August 8 meeting

We’re going to be missing a couple of regulars (Anne and Ishmael), but some people who don’t come very often have said they’d come tonight. So it should be a good night for trying out a bunch of new stuff.

Last week we did all but one of the pieces in the new Swan Songs book, so we’ll try to do the last one.

We’ll be doing drop-in meetings on Tuesdays at the usual time and place for the forseeable future.

Last meeting

We played:

  • Both Silver Swan rounds
  • Gibbons, Silver Swan
  • Dowland, Me, me and none but me
  • Dowland, All ye whom love or fortune hath betraid
  • Arcadelt, Il Bianco e Dolce Cigno
  • Vecchi, Il Bianco e Dolce Cigno
  • Ravenscroft, O my fearful dreams

Added sidebar to single post display

I had noticed that looking at a single post, e.g. http://laymusic.org/wordpress/?p=267 didn’t have the navigation sidebar, and had vaguely thought that might be a problem.  But then I started using an RSS aggregator (Google Reader)  and realized that everybody who gets to a post that way is seeing the single post layout.

So I edited the single post Presentation file so that it included the sidebar.  This reminds me yet again why wordpress is so popular — the PHP in the  Presentation files for the default style is really pretty easy to read and modify, even though I’m not a very experienced PHP programmer.

Dog Parks

I haven’t posted much about politics in this blog, but there is a political change that’s made a major difference in my life over the last year or so.

Sunny, May 2006 My dog Sunny is well-trained indoors, but by no means impeccable outside when he thinks he knows how to get food. The nearest official dog park to where I live, Fort Washington Park, was for some time enclosed by a fence with several ungated gaps in it. The railroad track between the park and MIT is a hangout for homeless people who make use of the shelter on Albany St. at night. So one of Sunny’s major activities at the park used to be running out on the railroad tracks to steal the food from the homeless people. This was embarrassing to me on any number of levels.

Over the last couple of elections, one of the issues in the Cambridge City Council race has been who is most interested in getting more and better dog parks, and last year, this finally translated into some money for putting in a new gate and closing the other gaps in the Fort Washington Park fence. So now instead of my trying to police a food-obsessed dog, Sunny and I just go to the park and hang out with our friends.

Removed Cafepress

I’ve found that Cafepress doesn’t work for my purposes, so I have removed all the items from the store, and removed references from my site. If you still want to buy a drinking songs book or a t-shirt, email me and we’ll work something out.

I am researching other ways to do e-commerce on this site, and expect to have something working soon. Leading candidates are zen-cart and lulu.com. Let me know if you have an opinion.

Removed the phpwiki’s

I had written phpwiki‘s for a couple of recent performances by the Cantabile Band.  It’s pretty good software, making it pretty easy for a group to collaborate on a fairly complicated site, but there’s no security at all.  So when you go back after not looking at it for a couple of weeks, the front page has a bunch of links to porn sites.

So now that people don’t need the links to print their music out or get it straight what the routes of the pieces are, I’ve removed the Wiki’s.

Next time, I’ll either go back to the tiddlywiki software we used for the Walk for hunger, which is very secure but not so good for letting people collaborate (which they didn’t do anyway), or find a different Wiki solution.

Report on the July 25 meeting

Schedule

We’ll continue to meet on Tuesdays at 7:45 PM at my place for the forseeable future. We’ll be doing our usual mix of familiar music and sightreading.

Last Meeting

We played:

  • Silver Swan round in three parts
  • Susato, Mille Regretz
  • Josquin, Mille Regrets
  • Byrd, Lord in thy rage rebuke me not
  • Gibbons, In Nomine
  • Arcadelt, Il bianco e dolce Cigno
  • Ravenscroft, O my fearful Dreams

The spelling of dueil in the Josquin Mille Regrets is indeed the one used in the Oxford Book of French Chansons.

The Wikipedia article about the In Nomine genre is here.

July 25 meeting announcement

The concert Saturday was a success, and now we can resume our casual, drop-in sessions, with lots of sightreading exciting new music, and playing any old music people want to see again.  We will meet tomorrow, Tuesday, July 25, at 7:45 PM at my place.

Bonnie and I have both been transcribing at close to our usual  rate, and we haven’t been having time to check it all out, so there are several new things to try.  I think there’s some Ravenscroft that we haven’t done, and I’ve done the Josquin Mille regrets.  I’ve also done an Orlando Gibbons In Nomine.  And of course, there are several things we’ve tried and haven’t had time to work on like the new Byrd (Lord in thy Rage rebuke me not) and the Jenkins Pavanne‘s.

If we do feel like working on something specific, I’d like to solidify the Swan set.

If there’s something specific you’ve been looking forward to singing now that we’re singing anything we want to, let me know so that I can have the music out instead of fumbling for it in rehearsal.

Concert report

It was a good concert, and we helped make that happen.  The compliments I got afterwards specifically mentioned that they liked hearing the singing with the cello.

I was pleasantly surprised with the variety in the other sets.  I especially liked the Shaker dance demonstration and the solo singer who sang some of the tunes in the Primitive Baptist style.

Last meeting

As expected, we worked mostly on the program for Sunday’s concert, but we finished our second run-through with 15 minutes to spare, so we sang Come again.

Made up a teaching flyer

I’ve been listed as a recorder teacher on the Boston Recorder Society teachers’ list for some time, and I’ve gotten one student that way. It’s being a pleasant way to make a little extra money, and I’m learning at least as much as she is, so I’ve decided to see if I can get a couple more students. So I’ve made up a flyer that I will put up on some bulletin boards. If you know anyone in Cambridge who wants recorder lessons, send them my way.

John Dunstable, O Rosa Bella

More of the backlog.  This was transcribed last winter by Kay Dekker, who was using the ABC export feature of Harmony Assistant.  She was interested in whether it would work smoothly with abc2ly — the answer was that it was pretty good but there were a few glitches in the ABC that had to be fixed by hand.

Anyway, she had been transcribing a lot of Dunstable, and the piece my group likes is O Rosa Bella, so she sent me that one.