Gibbons In Nomine

I usually don’t put things up on the site before my group has played them, but I promised this to someone who might need it next week, and we can’t play it until the week after next, so here it is.  Let me know if there are any problems.
An In Nomine is a four or more part piece where one of the middle lines is playing the In Nomine chant tune in very long note values, and all the other parts are playing highly decorated and often rhythmically complex parts in short note values.
In Nomine‘s are great if you have a mixed group — if you have one person who can’t play as fast as the other people, they can play the In Nomine line, and if you have one very advanced person in the middle of a bunch of players who are high on being able to play rhythmically complex stuff, they can play the In Nomine  line and work on their breath control.  In our group, the serpent usually grabs that line.

Probably for at least some of those reasons, lots of great 16th and 17th century English composers wrote at least one; here’s one by Orlando Gibbons.

William Byrd, Lord in thy Rage rebuke me not

Continuing to publish the backlog, today we have Lord in thy rage rebuke me not by William Byrd. Again, we’ve only done it once, since it doesn’t fit any of the gigs we’ve had the last couple of months, but we will surely get back to it. It’s good for a group with tenors and altos but no basses; the part called tenor is for a low alto and the part called bassus is for a tenor.

The transcription is another contribution by Bonnie Rogers.  The lilypond conversion is the new style, with the notes in a separate file from the styling commands.

Browning

Less publishing over the last week, because my flaky old computer died on July 4, and I’ve been having to get everything installed on a shiny new computer.

But I finally got to testing the publishing procedure, and the first thing to go up is Browning by Elway Bevin.  It’s a pretty challenging piece; we definitely used the rehearsal letters to get through it the first (and so far only) time we did it.  But even the less experienced players were able to join on the tune, which is one of the big hits of the late sixteenth century.

Plans for July 11 meeting

The meeting will be mostly a rehearsal for the July 22 performance. We may have time for a little bit of other stuff (I like singing La Marseillaise this time of year, and I’ve improved the Browning we did last week), but basically, we’re going to get the Ingalls route decided on and run it a couple of times. So if you aren’t performing, you’re welcome to come, but I don’t know that I’d bother if I had to go any distance.

Last meeting

We did:

  • Ingalls group:
  • Millennium
  • Friendship
  • Night Thought
  • Browning
  • Swan group
    • Arcadelt, Il bianco e dolce cigno
    • Vecchi, Il bianco e dolce cigno
    • Gibbons, The Silver Swan

      Plans for the July 6 meeting

      Schedule

      The next meeting of the Cantabile Renaissance Band will take place on Thursday, July 6, at 7:45 PM at my place.

      Note the unusual day of the week. We decided it was easier to deal with that than with the unusual traffic patterns here on July 4, or with an unusual meeting location (which would still have required some of us to deal with the traffic patterns).

      This meeting, and the following one on July 11, will have the first section devoted to rehearsing the Ingalls program for July 22. Those who are performing on that program should make an effort to arrive on time. The meeting on July 18 will be entirely devoted to the Ingalls program, and will be limited to those performing on July 22.

      Last meeting

      We played:

      • Ingalls Group:
        • Millennium
        • Friendship
        • Night Thought
      • Jenkins Group:
        • Pavan in D minor
        • Pavan in E minor
      • Ravenscroft, Joan come kisse me now
      • Isaac, Innsbruck, two settings
      • Byrd, Lord in thy rage rebuke me not
      • Susato, Ronde I
      • Slaves are they that heap up mountains

      Plans for the June 26 meeting

      Schedule

      This week

      We’re finally back to our regular drop-in groups. Come when you feel like it and suggest any music you want to play.

      We’ll be playing some Ingalls, but we’ll also get back to our more normal Renaissance stuff.

      There’s another Jenkins Pavanne that Bonnie’s transcribed that we’d like to do.

      One of the advantages of having learned All ye whom love or fortune hath betraid is that it fits in our dying swan set, so we might play that. We also want to learn the Vecchi setting some time.

      I probably won’t get to it for this week, but I dug out the Josquin setting of Mille Regretz and I’d like to transcribe it for us to do soon.

      Next week

      We have a problem with the Tuesday rehearsal following this one — it’s the Fourth of July. Our usual venue is not suitable for a rehearsal from 7:45 to 10 PM on the Fourth of July:

      • You can’t possibly park anywhere near here at 7:45.
      • You can’t possibly leave here at 10:00. That is, you can leave, but it will take you an hour and a half to get a mile away.
      • During the rehearsal time, it is unlikely that the percussion from the fireworks will be idiomatic or accurate for the music we’re playing.

      There are several options for dealing with this problem:

      • We can have a party here, starting at 3 or 4 in the afternoon and going until midnight or so, with the music-making part of the party happening before the fireworks start. Then people who wanted to watch fireworks could go watch them, and maybe we could do some more singing afterwards.
      • We can skip the rehearsal that week. This is what we’ve done in the past, and if we didn’t have the Ingalls concert coming up, I’d be in favor of it.
      • We can rehearse some other time that week. I’ve polled a few people about Sunday night, and a couple of them aren’t available, but one of those is away for the whole week and wouldn’t come on Tuesday, either.
      • Someone who lives somewhere where there aren’t half a million people coming by to watch fireworks could offer to host this rehearsal.

      After that

      The July 11th meeting will still be open to dropins, although we will be spending time on the Ingalls program. The July 18 meeting is only for Ingalls performers. After that, we’re dropin for the forseeable future, unless we decide to do something crazy like make a demo tape.

      Ingalls Concert

      We will be working on the music for the Ingalls concert on July 22, but that’s three pieces of which we already know two pretty well, so it shouldn’t take up the whole meeting. We find the shape note stuff is a good warmup, so I’m going to plan to do the Ingalls first. This will accomplish several things:

      • People who aren’t interested in the Ingalls but do like the other stuff we do can just come a little late.
      • People who want to perform the Ingalls but need to get up early the next morning can rehearse without disrupting their schedule for several weeks.
      • People who are chronically late for everything will not have rehearsed the Ingalls, and therefore won’t be performing the Ingalls, so we won’t have to be stressed out before the performance about whether we have all the performers.

      The program of our segment of the concert that I sent Tom Malone a couple of weeks ago says:

      • Millennium (instrumental followed by vocal)
      • Friendship (instrumental followed by vocal)
      • Millennium (instrumental)
      • Night Thought

      This is not by any means cast in concrete — specifically if there’s a piece besides Friendship that people would rather learn, we can do that instead.

      I need to know by the end of next week (June 30) who is planning on doing the Ingalls concert, so that we can start working on orchestrations.

      Dreams Concert

      Many thanks to all the people who worked hard to pull off a complex program. We now have 6 people who know some very beautiful music, and who played it for a couple of hundred people, who seemed to be enjoying it very much.

      We also know several things that we need to work on a bit harder for the next performance. Chief among them is getting started gracefully and with the tempo set by the starter. We will be doing drills on that over the next few weeks.

      More Billings is up

      The Cantabile Renaissance Band has been doing a fair amount of shape note singing lately. Although the music dates from later than the period we concentrate on, it turns out to fit our abilities quite well, being polyphony written for amateurs to sing. While the tradition in this country is to sing it unaccompanied, we find having the instrumental support adds to our performances.

      At our regular meetings, we normally do an “instrumental” versions of the vocal pieces, before we attempt to put both words and music together. The singers who don’t play instruments but do sing shape notes are enjoying having the shapes from lilypond 2.8 to sing.

      What I put up today are three William Billings songs we enjoy:

      • Africa, with the verses that Isaac Watts wrote that don’t get into the hymnals. We sang it in honor of Mothers’ Day.
      • Lamentation over Boston. We sing this every year by the banks of the Charles River near Watertown for the Walk for Hunger.
      • Easter Anthem. I sang this in the Robert Shaw edition with a church choir once; it works better with the renaissance band. This version is transcribed from the Norumbega Harmony book. which includes the extended section Billings wrote for a later printing of his book. It wasn’t in the Robert Shaw edition.