Report on the February 22 (non)meeting

Ishmael and I have a gig on Saturday, and I had told both Bonnie
and Barney when I saw them that there wasn’t going to be an alist
meeting this week, so that Ishmael and I could get together and go
over the stuff for that gig. Anne had mentioned that the 22nd was the day
she would be flying back from Spain, so she wasn’t going to make the
meeting. And I didn’t send out an email invitation, so I wasn’t
expecting anyone but Ishmael to show up. Ishmael locked the door when
he came in.

So we were about half way through our program, and Sunny started
saying someone was at the door. I didn’t believe him, but my doorbell
has been a bit flakey, so I went down to check, and sure enough, there
was Anne. She had decided she really should stay up until her normal
bedtime, and that would be easier to do if she were singing.

So we told her she could dance for us, and she did some dancing and
some listening, and we finished going through our stuff and got out
the Morley trios.

We started with “Good Morrow, fair ladies of the May”, which we still
tentatively have on the list for the Walk. It went fine with the
three of us.

Then we did “Hold out my heart”, and moved to the sad ones in part
two, with “Farewell, disdainful”.

That didn’t go so well that we thought we should end with it, so we
did “Quand je bois” to finish off with.

Then we looked at Anne’s pictures of Spain and listened to the rest of
“Bruce Randall’s West Gallery Quire featuring Laura Conrad on
Serpent”.

New avenues for Zaurus sound

The good thing about having the blog up is that I’m actually
writing about what I’m working on, and people are finding it and
writing me questions, and then I write them back.

This is from an email to someone else who wants sound on
Familiar/Opie (in his case an old Ipaq).

The latest accomplishment described on February
12 was that
using
this page
I was able to record from the command line, and play back at
two different wrong speeds.

My guess is that what I’m getting with that is a raw audio file
format, and that with the right magic words, sox, running on my
desktop computer, would add headers and convert it to something more
convenient.

I’m also guessing that xmms-embedded is what changed the playback
speed from too slow to too fast, and that if I play around with
options to that, I may be able to get it to play back the raw file at
the right speed.

I have some other lines of attack that I will try when I get the time:

  • the linux-audio-user mailing list does not have any Zaurus or
    Familar experts on it, but it likely has lots of people who
    could figure out how to do the sox-type tricks if I can’t easily
    find what I need to know on the net.
  • OpenZaurus 3.5.3 is coming out next month, and may have some
    improvements, although from the responses to my queries on the
    list, it’s likely that nobody is working on sound recording.
    But the opie-recorder problem probably has nothing to do with
    sound, and might be an OS-related problem that might get fixed.
  • The tkcVox app worked
    ok when I was running the TKC ROM, so if I could figure out how
    to make the compatibility libraries work, I could probably use
    that. However, it’s pretty useless, because I couldn’t figure
    out how to convert its format to anything useful on any other
    machine. (They sell a windows-only converter program, but I
    haven’t booted my only windows box for several months, and don’t
    intend to start doing it more often.)

How to install Konqueror-embedded

Someone else asked how I actually got konqueror-embedded
installed. This is typed from memory, and it was actually a lot more
floundering and I may have something wrong this time, too, but here’s
what I wrote him:

The C library is actually called libstdc++6, which I think isn’t what
Mickey said on the mailing list.

Also, if you’re installing to your sd card, you have to ipkg-link
everything you install. (And you can’t ipkg-link some of this stuff
if your sd card hasn’t been reformatted to be an ext2 filesystem.) If
this is greek to you, you either aren’t installing to your sd card or
you’d better figure it out before you start.

So you have to:

  • edit /etc/ipkg.conf to add a line like the others, but with devel
    instead of opie or base or whatever.

  • ipkg -d sd install libstdc++6 libpcre0
  • ipkg-link add libstdc++6
  • ipkg-link add libpcre0
  • ipkg -d sd install
  • ipkg -d sd install konqueror-embedded
  • ipkg-link add konqueror-embedded

Message from Bruce about NEFFA

Hello, everyone,

As promised, or threatened, here’s another message from me. NEFFA
isn’t happening until April, but we need to attend to this Wicked
Soon:

I need to submit names for NEFFA. As you probably know, we’re leading
a West Gallery Music workshop at NEFFA on Sunday, April 10, at 12:00.
We’re listed in the schedule as “The West Gallery Quire.”

Anyone who comes and helps will be considered a member of “The West
Gallery Quire” and will get free admission to the entire festival (3
days of fun! oh boy!). BUT they need your names Real Soon.

To help, I’ll need people to do these:

  • A few people to make copies of booklets in advance;
  • a few people to
    hand out booklets;
  • four people to hold up the signs that show where to
    sit;
  • and a big lot of people to sit in the crowd amongst other people
    and “Sing (or Play) Lustily And With Good Courage” to help out the
    newcomers (this is the way we’ve done it before; no new surprises).

Having your name on the list will also help them schedule stuff in the
future; they won’t schedule you opposite something else which you’re
also part of. So even if NEFFA already has your name as part of
another event, you still should give me your name.

If you’re hoping to do this, please send me your name NO LATER THAN
Feb. 27th. That’s a week from this Sunday. I’ll submit the names to
the Neffans that evening.

Thanks,

Bruce

Laymusic.org goes to a 3 column layout

I haven’t changed the blog yet, but the static pages on the site are
now a 3-column css layout, instead of the old two-column table based
layout.

Update February 19: The blog is now changed,
too. I seem to be getting a fair amount of correspondence based on
people finding interesting things I’m doing by googling and hitting
the blog.
I also regenerated the music html pages, which
get a fair amount of hits from both google and cpdl.

This should accomplish the following:

  • the Google ads will be “above the fold”. In the old layout, there was no way for both the ads
    and the major navigation aids to be above the fold.
  • It will give a reasonable length reading line for the site content
    without the css margin stuff that some browsers (as far as I know,
    only IE 5.x, where x is a small number, on Mac OSX) couldn’t deal
    with.
  • The actual html is more reasonably organized, without a lot of td,
    tr, table, etc., and the content is above the navigation and ad stuff.

If this doesn’t work in your browser, please let me know. I did ask a
bunch of friends with a wide array of browsers and os’s to test, and
the ones that replied didn’t have any major problems.

Report on the February 15 Rehearsal

What we did:

  • Marlbrouk
  • Drinking songs
    • Quant je bois
    • Vignons, vignons
    • Changeons propos
    • Vive la serpe
  • Dowland
    • Go nightly cares
    • From silent night
    • Me, me and none but me

Please note that if I print out 4 copies of something, and don’t throw
any of them away, I expect that there are still 4 copies in our
rehearsal room the next time we want to sing this song. Please tell
me if you are taking music away — I put a lot of work into making
all the music I set publicly available, and I’m happy to help people
print it out, but I need to know that that’s what I’m doing if I think
I’m printing music for our rehearsals.

We only had 4 people, so we couldn’t try out the (5 part) Vecchi swan
piece. It’s probably not reasonable for this spring, but if we try it
soon, we can still change our minds.

Walk for Hunger

We are officially scheduled for the same time and place we’ve been
doing. I am attempting to set up the same kind of schedule we had
last year, with people doing half-hour solo sets in the morning, and
our group plus another one (I’ve asked the Quilisma Consort, but haven’t yet
heard back) alternating 45 minute sets in the afternoon.

So I need official commitments from people who want to play on May 1
from 12:30 to 3:00 PM. It will be the same spot we’ve been playing
at, on the Charles River at the Cambridge-Watertown line, across from
the Cambridge Cemetery.

Also let me know if you’re interested in doing a solo set.

laymusic.org is at 3 columns

Mostly. Still to do:

  • put the blog on 3 cols too

    Update: Feb. 19. Done. I didn’t get the blog
    to use the .css stylesheet, so it it in a style tag in the head, but I
    don’t see that that’s a problem, except that I might want some slight
    differences between the private one and the public one.
  • get all the browsers checked.
  • See if I can get the new serpent publications banner to not look
    quite so bedraggled.
  • Fix some odd cases in the footer.

Medway announcements from Bruce

Hello, everyone!

MEDWAY REHEARSALS

There will be two rehearsals for the Medway March 6 church service –
Thursday, Feb. 24 and Wednesday, March 2. They’ll be at 7:30 at the
Medway church (directions forthcoming, probably early next week).

Please come to at least one; if you’re free both nights, it would be
great if you can come to both.

I want to spend some time actually rehearsing all the music, including
some simple orchestration for some tunes (nothing more complex than
“voices only,” “voices and winds,” and so forth), and make sure we all
know what verses to do (as soon as I decide). Besides going over the
music, I want to make sure we have proper seating arrangements worked
out

If you can’t come to either rehearsal, please let me know. Maybe I can
schedule another rehearsal, although I’m not sure where or when. We
need more days in the week.

IF YOU NEED A RIDE to either rehearsal or to the service, send a
message to this list (at wg@serpent.laymusic.org) and hopefully
someone who’s going past your area can pick you up.

THE SONG LIST:

This is not the actual order, but these are the tunes we’ll do. Except
for Psalm 23, these are old familiar ones which most of you probably
know well.

  • PRELUDE:

    • Psalm 122
  • HYMNS & PSALMS:

    • Cranbrook (with congregation)

    • Zadock (after reading about King David)
    • Psalm 23 (after reading of the same)
    • Allendale or Frome, maybe, if we need another.

  • SERMON – one verse each, to illustrate the talk:

    • Lyngham

    • Birmingham
    • Stocks
    • Gibraltar
    • An Hymn for Easter Day
    • Otford
  • COMMUNION:

    • Gwehelog Grace
    • Lydia, if we need another.
  • OFFERTORY:

    • Corfe Castle
  • POSTLUDE:

    • Pentonville

There are some major butt-kickers on this list, but we will be about
24 in number, so as long as we all know our words and notes, we can
stay relaxed for most of it.

Please let me know if you have any questions. And stay tuned to this
channel for up-to-the-minute news bulletins!

Thanks,

Bruce

Cantabile Renaissance Band meeting reminder

The next meeting will be tomorrow, Tuesday, February 15, at 7:45 PM at
my place.

The next Dowland, “Go nightly cares”, is one we’ve done before, so
I may transcribe the one after that. In addition, we’ll try to
finalize the candidates for the river music set. The one we’re
thinking of that we haven’t done recently is the Vecchi “Il Bianco e
dolce cigno”. One of the two soprano parts is higher than any of us
likes singing, and the bass isn’t especially low, so we’ll try it
transposed this time.

We have performances coming up on Saturday, April 2 and Sunday,
May 1. (I have the official Walk For Hunger invitation, and have
replied to it, but have not yet received the official time and
location.) So I’d like to know as soon as possible who wants to play
these performances.

Since we aren’t really a performance group, we have in the past
performed with some people who don’t play with us regularly but like
performing. I would like to keep this to a minimum this year. So if
you haven’t been coming regularly and would like to play at either of
these gigs, let me know, and we’ll try to figure out a rehearsal
schedule that lets you get to at least a couple of rehearsals.

If we keep to our every other week schedule, we’ll be conflicting with
Roaring Jelly in April, so I’m suggesting the following schedule:

  • February 15
  • March 1
  • March 15
  • March 29 (this will probably be limited to and compulsory for the
    people playing the April 2 gig.)
  • April 5 (previously had said April 3)
  • April 19
  • April 26 (ideally limited to and compulsory for the people doing
    the Walk for Hunger.) This is probably a conflict with Roaring Jelly,
    and if that’s a problem for people who want to play May 1, we can talk
    about it.

I’ll be getting better set listings with links to all the music in
the next week or so. But the big picture is that we’ll do three sets
at the Walk for Hunger:

  • May music
  • River Music
  • Drinking songs

We will do either the River Music or the Drinking songs on April
2. If the schedule on May 1 is the way it’s been the last couple
years, we’ll do a 45 minute program twice, with some other group
performing in between.

Irish tenor serpent

The tenor serpent has decided that he’s the next John McCormick.
So I’ve been learning “How are things in Gloccamora?” and letting it
loose on “I’ll take you home again Kathleen” and such.

It’s much better at staying on pitch than it used to be, and when
it doesn’t spend a lot of time above middle C, it’s usually pretty
close to on when I check it.

So the right way to be practicing it would be with chant or
something and a drone, but it want to sing the McCormick repertoire.