laymusic.org mail is down

On Friday, August 5 at about 11 AM, apparently one of the hostrocket mail servers went down.
So I stopped getting email. Apparently at some point it started
bouncing email people sent me saying it didn’t have a laymusic.org
account.

One of the things I’ve liked about hostrocket in the year or so
I’ve been with them is that their customer support is usually prompt,
friendly, and knowledgeable. However, I don’t think much of their
disaster recover procedures.

At 11:30 on Saturday, August 6, I filed a support request asking
that if the mail outage was going to last much longer, could they set
up a forward to one of my working email accounts so that I was at
least seeing current mail. They ignored this request, and predicted
that I would be getting my email in “a few hours”. I continued to
report that I was getting no email although they claimed to be having
a “delay” while they were processing their backlog. Finally, they
said at 11 PM that they weren’t able to check for any other problems
until the entire backlog was processed, which would take a few hours,
and that if I still didn’t have mail when I got up in the morning,
that I should tell them and they’d check immediately.

At 8 AM, Sunday, August 7, I still had no mail from that account,
and I reopened the ticket with that information. Since then (3 hours
later) I haven’t heard from them.

I actually moved my web hosting to hostrocket from your-site.com last summer because
your-site had a similar problem, although I don’t think it lasted as
long. So does anyone know a mail provider with good disaster
recovery procedures?

Meanwhile, if you want to email me, I’m suggesting that you use lconrad@wort.org.

Update: I finally called the phone support,
who assured me that my bulk mail had all been processed and that my
mail was working. He sent a test mail to the main account, which
worked. At this point I realized that when they brought the server up
after the crash, they didn’t restore the catchall account, so
therefore all the mail they reprocessed and everything everybody has
sent me since they brought it back up has probably disappeared
forever. This is really not what’s supposed to happen. When I finish
transferring the domain registration, I will route my mail differently.

[publishing] Additions

The new Dowland, Up merry mates, has an extended tenor solo with no
accompaniment except the lute, so I was inspired to transcribe the
lute tab into normal notation so that a keyboard player could play
it. I know lute players sneer at this, because to do a real keyboard
transcription you would have to look at all the voicings of the chords
and figure out which notes to let ring into the next chord, but it
really seemed to add something to our rehearsal. I haven’t figured
out how to make lilypond print the actual tablature, so there’s just
the notation, which means it probably isn’t well proofread.

I continued the transcription of the Gervaise fifth book with
“Huict Bransles de Poictou”.

[cantabile] plans for the August 2 meeting

The next meeting of the Cantabile Renaissance Band will be tomorrow,
Tuesday, August 2, at 7:45 PM at my place.

We will have a new Dowland, “Up merry mates”, which is clearly a
tune for a mask where a ship rolled onto the stage with a male chorus
singing this song.

It’s possible but not likely that we’ll have a keyboard
transcription of the Dowland lute part, which would be good because there’s an
extended tenor solo with no other accompaniment. But entering lute
transcriptions is tedious, and proofreading them is both tedious and
error-prone, and I only have 4 measures entered so far.

We will probably have a new set of Bransles. (This is over half
entered, and dance music with no words goes pretty fast.)

Otherwise, we’ll take requests, but I’d like to continue with the
drinking songs we’re trying to solidify, and if there are enough
people, the Vecchi “Il Bianco e Dolce Cigno”.

Publishing news

The Dowland project is winding down — we have two more songs from
Pilgrims’ Solace and 3 or four that are in “A Musical Banquet”.
There’s still lots of “Lacrimae” to transcribe, but lately that
hasn’t been suitable for the people showing up.

I have an offer from someone in New Zealand whose group uses my
stuff to help with converting the lilypond source to the latest
version of lilypond. So if you have strong feelings about
typesetting, you might want to read my discussion of why and why not
to do this in the publishing
blog.

And if you have opinions about a Renaissance composer you’d
like to do more of, let me know so that we can start acquiring music
to work on when we’ve finished doing a new Dowland every week.

Meeting information

Since putting the blog up, I haven’t been sending information about
our meetings every week to the entire list. I do send it to the
people who show up regularly, and I post it to the blog. And July was
unusual in having
two Tuesdays where we didn’t meet — in general it’s
pretty safe to just show up on Tuesday. But feel free to call or
email if you’re not sure whether to come or not.

[cantabile] Report on the August 2 meeting

We did:

  • Huict Bransles de Poictou
  • Drinking songs
    • Slaves are they that heap up mountains
    • Vive la serpe
    • To Anacreon in heaven
  • Dowland, “Up, merry Mates”
  • Arcadelt “Il bianco e dolce cigno”
  • Gibbons “The Silver Swan”

Having a keyboard player on the lute part seemed to add a lot, so
I’ll try to get better at transcribing and proofreading them.

I don’t know of any reason why we can’t meet regularly for the next
few Tuesdays.

[wg] West Gallery Music workshop with Dr. Francis Roads

Please join us for a special workshop in English “West Gallery” Music,
led by West Gallery expert
Dr. Francis Roads, on Tuesday, July 26, at 7:30 p.m.

The workshop is open to all singers and melody-instrument players, and
will be held at St. Maryâs Episcopal Church, 258 Concord St., Newton
Lower Falls, Mass.

Admission is free; a collection will be taken to cover the expenses.

This is an unusual opportunity to learn about West Gallery music from
one of the leading experts in the field.

FRANCIS ROADS studied music at Pembroke College, Oxford and the Royal
College of Music, London. He has devoted himself to researching and
performing West Gallery Church Music; he is an active member of the
West Gallery Music Association, and leads many workshops and other
music-making sessions throughout England.

In 1997 he founded the London Gallery Quire; in 2002 he was awarded a
Ph.D. by the University of Liverpool for his thesis on West Gallery
manuscripts in the Isle of Man. In 2003 he led a West Gallery
workshop here in Boston, and is looking forward to his return visit.

WEST GALLERY MUSIC is traditional music from English rural churches;
most of it dates from the 1750-1850 era. The music is known for its
folk-like compositions and its robust singing style and instrumental
technique.

The music is suitable for all types of singers; the pieces are not
particularly difficult, but are hearty and rhythmic, and fun to sing!
If you like choral music, folk music, early music, or shape-note
music, you will enjoy West Gallery Music.

Melodic instruments are also welcome: Bowed Strings, Flutes,
Woodwinds, Concertinas, Serpents, and Trombones are the most suitable
(please note that Percussion, Keyboard, Plucked or Strummed
instruments are NOT appropriate for this type of music).

To learn more about West Gallery Music, see the West Gallery Music
Association’s Web page at: http://www.wgma.org.uk.

St. MARY’s CHURCH is at 258 Concord St in Newton, just off Rt. 16,
near the Wellesley border. Heading west on 16: after crossing over
128, Concord Street is a right turn at the next light (the Lower Falls
Wine store is on the left). There is plenty of free on-street
parking, and Riverside and Woodland T stations are less than one mile
away. The building is wheelchair-accessible.

FOR MORE INFORMATION, please contact:

Bruce Randall

(978) 373-5852

melismata@hotmail.com

Van Eyck and words, by a guest blogger

In a previous
entry, I had lamented the fact that I hadn’t come up with a
plausible set of words for van Eyck’s En fin
l’Amour. One of the places I reported having looked was in Ruth
van Baak Griffioen’s book about van Eyck, and she read the blog and
wrote me the following explanation:

About the mention on your site of the facsimile of a setting of the
“En fin l’amour” tune in the Van Eyck book: the reason I did not
translate the Dutch text for that song is because the Dutch text is
just a text found in a Dutch songbook along with instructions to sing
it to the tune “En fin la’mour”. But that Dutch text has no actual
relation to the original French text; it’s not a translation of it,
or a paraphrase. If Van Eyck had chosen to identify the tune by this
or any other Dutch contrafactum text, I would have provided a
translation. But Van Eyck refers to the song by the French original,
and that text hasn’t been found (yet). I only translated the Dutch
texts when they matched the title used in Der Fluyten Lust-hof, and
the reason is that once you simply pick one contrafactum text like
the one shown in the facsimile, you’re into a pretty random selection
criterion. For example, look at the top of page 173, just to the
right of the facsimile you mention: a dozen or so *other* Dutch
contrafactum texts are listed, all of which were meant to be sung to
the “En fin” tune. Again, Van Eyck’s piece is known by the French
‘ancestor’ text to all of those, not to any of the Dutch knock-off
texts. Almost every one of the songs on which the Lust-hof
variations are based have anywhere from a handful to a hundred of
such contrafactum possibilities, so the only really sensible way to
go about providing texts is to give the ones that match the title Van
Eyck uses, or sometimes a 17th-c singable direct Dutch translation
thereof. Hope this explains why I left off the Dutch translation
you wanted to have! It’d kind of be like printing the text to “Mine
eyes have seen the glory of the burning of the school” when what was
really meant was the actual original “Battle Hymn of the Republic.”
Or, even more directly, any one, say, of a hundred French social
satire song texts meant to be sung to that tune, none of which had
anything to do with the Civil War or the Second Coming and none of
which became well-enough known to supplant the title “The Battle
Hymn…”

Sorry for the long explanation; I didn’t have time to write a short one.

[publishing] Additions, July 23, 2005

Dowland

The newest from the Pilgrim’s Solace is “My heart and tongue were
twins.” It’s a really nice one, and not as difficult as some of the
other recent ones.

We did it a fourth down from the original key.

Isaac

We’ve been doing these as relaxing things for the end of a hard
rehearsal for quite a while, but for some reason they didn’t make it
to the web until today.

“Innsbruck, ich muss dich lassen” is well-known to most church
musicians as a hymn tune; here’s Isaac’s original setting, and a
double canon version.

Gervaise

We enjoyed the Bransles de Champaigne so much that I did “Dix
Bransles Gays” from the same book.

Sermisy

This is another one that I did some years ago, and just got around
ot putting up on the web now. John Tyson uses the tune to “Tant que Vivrai” with his
students for ornamentation practice. So I’d entered it so that I
could use the MIDI file to practice with, but never fixed up the word
underlay to upload it.