LayMusic.org

I did take pictures of the tree, and I’ll figure out how to let
you see them tomorrow, but I don’t have time to struggle with
wordpress and images right now, so here’s another vocal from
Thursday’s concert. Come,
Sirrah Jack, Ho is about the joys of smoking. It’s
one of the ones people use to teach voice independance — the
middle line is really hard if you haven’t gotten the idea that
your voice is completely independant of the others. But if the
other parts are together, and you just start your part one
quarter note after there’s, it turns out to be easy.

Here’s Come,
Sirrah Jack, ho!the
sheet music if you want to play it yourself.

No, just because we had 20 pieces on our program
doesn’t mean I’m going to get 20 posts out of it, but I will
give you some highlights. And tomorrow it’s likely you get
pictures of the Christmas tree, which I’m about to go buy.
After all, if someone’s going to try to both blog and celebrate
the season, you have to expect blog posts that fall out of
celebrating the season.

Love
learns by laughing was the ending number. A
friend who saw the program posting emailed me that her recorder
group always ends with that when they play Morley. We agree
that its a really good ending number. The
sheet music is on SerpentPublications.org
if you want to play it yourself.

Yesterday, of course, being the concert
I’ve been telling you about for a couple of months.

The short answer is, pretty well. There were about 50 people, including 6 who came
because we told them to. They seemed happy — we felt completely
justified in doing our encore. I thought we lost them a bit in the
middle, but there weren’t any loud snores and they came back for the
end. I didn’t have any disruptive coughing fits, and although there
were some flubs, we didn’t completely lose it at any point.

We did take some pictures, but I don’t have them yet, because
they’re on someone else’s camera. I’ll probably get several
daily posts out of snippets from the recording, so today I’ll
just give you the one that has the best recorder playing on
it.

It’s the Ricercada
Primera by Diego Ortiz. I’m playing my G alto recorder by
Ralph Netch. I decided last summer that I needed to get more
comfortable on it, so I spent the whole summer playing English
Country Dances on it, both using C fingerings and using G
fingerings, which involve playing up into the third octave.
The bass line is played by Ishmael Stefanov on his 5-stringed
fiddle by Alan Carruth.

I started working on this piece last September, when we’d first
scheduled the concert. I asked my recorder teacher what solo
recorder piece he’d recommend for a concert like this (we didn’t
of course know very much about the actual program then), and
this was what he suggested.

If I’d been using the 465 body, I’d have hit the low G, and I
was hitting it most of the time in rehearsal on the 440 body,
but I flubbed it in actual performance. But otherwise, this is
the kind of Renaissance recorder playing I’m capable of these
days. A year ago there would have been a lot more unintended
spaces and forced (and therefore sharp) high notes.