Tag: circa63

A bunch of posts between August 25, 2013 and August 25, 2014, i.e., Circa February 25, 2014, which is my 63rd birthday.

Government Shutdown

I don’t know anyone who’s been killed by it yet.

One of the band memebers arrived yesterday saying that his SSI
payment wasn’t going to come. This isn’t what I get
from google, but certainly even if he’s wrong, if lots of
people believe that, they’re probably pretty upset.

The other consequence I’ve heard of was in this
post by Phil Greenspun. The short version is that because
the office he needed something from was only doing that ID, and
not all the other stuff they usually do, he got his ID much faster
than he normally would have.

I guess this probably shows that I live a pretty sheltered
life, at least on Tuesdays. And of course my not knowing about
any serious short-term consequence doesn’t mean that there aren’t
some, and certainly doesn’t mean there won’t be serious long-term
consequences.

And it also doesn’t mean that I agree with a system that allows
one man to single-handedly shut down the government. (I know the
House Republicans who elected John Boehner as speaker, and could
presumably elect someone else if they didn’t like what he’s doing,
share the blame, but really it wouldn’t be happening if he hadn’t
decided he wanted it, and it will stop as soon as he decides to
stop it.)

Partifi

Somebody told me about partifi
a year or two ago. It takes a PDF file with a musical score in
it, and turns the score into parts. Even if your religion doesn’t
forbid you to play Renaissance music from scores, you must have
run into a score with a page turn every 5 seconds that drove you
nuts, so this sounds like a really good idea.

At the time I heard of it, I went there and tried something and
the first thing I tried wasn’t immediately useful, so while I’ve
passed the word on to several people who were complaining about
page turns, I haven’t actually used it for anything.

But yesterday a music transcribing friend sent me a PDF of some
three part madrigals he’s been working on. He leaves out the
barlines, but puts the parts into score, so I thought about asking
him to send me the source or MIDI so that I could do parts, but
then I remembered Partifi.

I fed it three PDF’s, and the first two went very smoothly. It
guessed quite well at where on the page to split out the parts. I
told it the names of the parts and it produced three part files
for me.

The third one had to be set with the lines much closer together
in order to fit the whole piece on two pages. So partifi’s guess
about how to split the parts was much less useful, and even when I
figured out how to edit the guess, I still ended up with parts
missing words. I think I have an idea of how to fix this, but I
wanted to get the post done before fiddling with it any more.

My trip to the museum

[Turner Slave Ship]
Slave Ship (Slavers Throwing Overboard the Dead and Dying, Typhoon Coming On) by J.M.W. Turner (1775–1851)

I went to the Boston Museum of
Fine Arts on Saturday.

I was going to write a deep essay, but it would take too much
time, so here are some random observations:

  • The flow of the European painting galleries is currently
    very confusing. You walk out of the 14th century chapel into
    19th century French art. There used to be a fairly logical
    progression from Medieval to almost-twentieth-century art, but
    if there’s any logic to it now, I couldn’t find it.
  • There was a similar problem downstairs in the Art of the
    Americas gallery — we were in the American Revolution, and then
    all of a sudden we were in Peru, and then we were in early
    nineteenth-century Boston. If there were rooms about other
    places in South America, I never found them.
  • I did manage to find the Turner Slave
    Ship    . I don’t think I’ve ever been in the presence of any
    work of art that’s so immediately affecting. I have seen the
    Mona Lisa and the Pieta, but this is
    just hanging there on the wall and you can walk right up to it.
    It is listed in the brochure as one of the 12 greatest hits, but
    otherwise it’s treated just like any other picture.
  • The Rembrandt etchings were interesting, but to really see
    them, you’d need better light and a magnifying glass.
  • The other current exhibition I enjoyed was the Loïs
    Mailou Jones     one. My favorite of her works was a painting
    called My Mother’s Hats — her mother was a
    successful milliner.
  • The most memorable new-to-me work I saw was a Japanese print
    of a daemon who committed suicide after flunking the civil
    service exam. It’s in red.
  • You shouldn’t even try to see everything in one afternoon —
    we should have left and hung out in the pub across the street
    about an hour before we did.

My sister, who bought the tickets, got an email request to fill
out a particularly annoying survey about her experience. For
instance, they asked what the purpose of the visit was, and “To
see the art” wasn’t one of the choices:

Which of the following statements best describes your reason for 
visiting the MFA? *This question is required. 

* I went to see a specific exhibit and/or learn about a specific 
  topic

* I went to have a new experience and just follow whatever sparked
  my curiosity and interest

* I came to spend time with friends and/or family and help them have
  a meaningful experience at the MFA

* I went to attend a specific program, lecture, course, concert,
  class, and/or film

* I like to seek out interesting things to do and the MFA is
  considered an important institution in Boston

* I went to relax in a peaceful setting and contemplate the art 
  and/or myself

A limerick

I don’t write them very often — the one I
like best I posted here in 2005. But Garrison Keeler was on
the radio yesterday, and he pointed out that when he discovers a
rhyme it makes his brain light up and he needs to do something
with it, and I realized I used to be that way but I let it lapse.
So I swore that the next time I discovered a rhyme, I would write
a limerick. So I noticed one walking the dog this morning and
here’s the limerick:

Priscilla, a grey furry rat,
Had friends who thought she was too fat.
    So she ran down the street
    And tripped over her feet
And ended up totally flat.

Flat and rat isn’t a great rhyme like the ones Ira Gershwin and
Cole Porter used, but limericks don’t need a lot more than that.
I had rat and fat and street and feet by the time I got home.

My first reaction to the flat rat on Cherry Street was,
“Another flat squirrel!” because we’d seen one of those on Windsor
Street last night, but then I noticed the tail, and then I had the
rhyme.

Candidate meet-and-greet at my house

Teaparty

Two current Cambridge city councillors aren’t running for
re-election, so it’s a wild and crazy race this year. 25
candidates are running for 9 seats.

I usually like to find someone good who’s new to support, and
this year I’ve picked Dennis Carlone, based on the
recommendation of a couple of people who are currently active in
my neighborhood association. He’s an architect and urban planner,
and will bring a level of expertise about development and zoning
issues to the council that is currently missing. My friends also
tell me that he’s been superb in negotiations with developers even
after we’ve lost on the zoning issues in getting them to make
their designs more livable.

So I wrote his campaign a small check, and then we were talking
about what else I could do. I don’t usually put up signs, because
I live in a condo. One time another resident put up a sign for
the Libertarian candidate, and I was really annoyed at him.

But I like throwing parties, so I said I’d invite all my
friends and neighbors to come meet Dennis at my house, and we
settled on Calzones with Carlone on Wednesday,
October 9, at 7:00 PM at 233 Broadway.

If you vote in Cambridge, you’re welcome to come, meet people,
have some good food, and hear what Dennis has to say about what he
can bring to the city council.

Here’s an invitation
that you can print out and give to your friends.


carlone

The New York Continuo Collective

Continuing to bring you my reporting from the 2013 Boston Early Music Festival. The
American Recorder editor cut this one
even worse than most of what I sent her, because it wasn’t really
a recorder concert at all.

The New York Continuo Collective

L’amour et La Folie

Love and Madness in the Air de Cour

Thursday, June 13, 2013, Noon

Gordon Chapel, Old South Church

645 Boylston ST., Boston

The New York Continuo Collective is mostly a bunch of plucked string
players accompanying singers. There’s one bass viol (Virginia
Kaycoff), and they get instrumental solos (aside from lutes playing the
tunes) by having a couple of people play recorders (Grant Herreid and Paul
Shipper).

Every “semester” they study a different repertory of 17th century
song, and this Spring it was the French Air de Cour. The program was
based around a collection of songs with lute tablature published in
1614 by Gabriel Bataille, which seem to be from a ballet depicting a
quarrel between Amour and La Folie.

The program was semi-staged and variously costumed — some characters
only wearing a hat to indicate their character, but Venus (Kirsten
Kane) wearing a golden gown that was definitely not street wear. La
Folie (Brittany Fowler) wore street wear, but mixed patterns and
stripes in a charmingly disturbing way.

The plot involved Amour attempting to prove that he enhances human
happiness, in the face of La Folie’s claim that love only leads to
misery. So there are lots of songs sung by characters labeled
“quarreling lovers”, “rude lover”, or “angry lover”. So with the
dance interludes and the various moods of the lovers, it was a very
diverse program. The ornamentation, both improvised and written out
by the director (Grant Herried) also added variety.

One of the problems of running an early music group in contemporary
American musical culture is that the guitar and lute players often
become very skilled on their instruments without getting the ensemble
experience that wind and bowed string instrument players have
routinely. The Continuo Collective is a brilliant response to this
problem, while also producing a very enjoyable show.

Greens for Breakfast

If you’re single and you get a Farm Share, it’s more vegetables
than you can possibly eat. Of course, you use some up by
entertaining more, and bringing vegetables everywhere you go, and
giving some to the people who feed you. But you still end up with
more vegetables than you can eat, and you feel like you should be
eating some at every meal.

I haven’t usually eaten vegetables at breakfast. The rest of
the day I can cheerfully make a meal on a large salad with some
cheese or bacon or something to add a little bit of protein. But
at breakfast, I really want some carbohydrates.

The current farm share includes eggs, so that’s easy to eat at
breakfast, but I find I don’t like just eggs for breakfast, and if
I add toast, it’s pretty easy to go over the amount of calories I
need.

So I have a new standard recipe for when I have greens that want to be
cooked and already cooked rice. This idea came to me when I was
reading Cooking for Geeks, although the current
implementation comes closer to the one in The Microwave
Gourmet by Barbara Kafka.

Recipe for greens and rice with microwave poached egg

Take a microwave safe pan about 6 inches in diameter. Put a
layer of cooked rice on the bottom.

Cover that with a layer of greens. Any kind that you
liked wilted or really cooked is ok.

Squeeze the juice of 1/2 lemon over that.

Drizzle olive oil over that.

Put in microwave oven for two to 5 minutes, depending on
whether you want the greens just wilted or more thoroughly
cooked.

Make a well in the center of the pan, and crack an egg into
it. (You can use more eggs if you like, but you will have to
adjust the timing.) Pierce the yolk with a sharp knife two or
three times.

Microwave on high for three minutes.

Comments

You will find you like some greens better than others for this
purpose, but with enough lemon juice and olive oil, anything
tastes pretty good. Arugula is one of my favorites for this.

Barbara Kafka has dire warnings about what happens if you
forget to pierce the egg yolk, but her eggs may be different from
mine, because I forget quite frequently and have only had a small
explosion once.

This is the breakfast version. When I’m making it for later or
for company, I
add herbs and flavorings like hot sauce and tomato paste and
sometimes some cheese.


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Drying your extra tomatoes

Some weeks ago, the farm share offered a 25 pound box of
tomatoes for $13, so I took it.

I ate tomato salads, and put tomatoes into everything else I
cooked but there were still lots of tomatoes, and some of them
were starting to get soft.

Of course, you can can them, but that’s always seemed like a
lot of work, so I read recipes for a while and ended up with the
oven dried tomatoes in Mark
Bittman’s How to cook everything
vegetarian.

You set the oven to 225̣ (degrees Fahrenheit) and cut the
tomatoes in half and put them on a wire rack over a cookie sheet
and leave them overnight, or until they’re as dry as you want
them. If they aren’t the kind of shoe leather you buy in the
store, you put them in the refrigerator.

I tried using the broiler pan, and that didn’t work as well as
the wire rack, so for the second batch I only used the rack.

So now I have dried tomatoes that I can just chop up a couple
to add tomato flavor to anything I want. They chop easier than
the shoe leather. I added a few to the ratatouille
I made last night, and it was a good idea.


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BRS started last night

Four years ago, I posted a very
critical description of what the Boston Recorder
Society was doing at that time.

I started going again last year, because they decided to
start a loud wind class, and hired one of the better loud wind
coaches in the area (Marilyn Boenau) to coach it.

I’m really glad I did support that effort, because although
last year the
group had serious problems as a music making organization (it
worked fine as a way to give my brass chops a good workout once a
month), enough people were enthusiastic enough about the idea that
this year it’s even bigger and better.

We lost two people from the group we had last year. One of
them is a very good crumhorn player, who also plays shawms, but
there really are problems with playing both crumhorns and shawms
with the other instruments in the group. The other was a sackbut player
without a lot of experience playing Renaissance music, and he was
struggling with both the music and his instrument. It’s a better
group for people who are struggling with fewer things than he was,
and he lives pretty far away and had to miss several meetings.

We gained a crumhorn player who is open to the idea of trying
to play dulcian and has decades of experience playing recorder
very well, and two beginning dulcian players with lots of recorder
playing experience. Also the dulcian player who was mostly
playing bass dulcian last year has acquired alto and tenor
dulcians, and is playing them well, and one of the crumhorn
players who also owns a tenor dulcian has gotten better on the
dulcian. And I was complaining about having to play too much
cornetto for my chops last year, and this year I seem to have a
little more stamina. Also the coach seems to have been convinced
that she has to find at least one piece a meeting that someone
else can play the top line on, so I can play serpent.

As you would expect, not all the instruments and reeds people
pulled out of their closets were in wonderful shape.
The new crumhorn player’s only crumhorn
turned out to have serious tuning problems (not as in she couldn’t
play a meantone low third, but as in she couldn’t play a note that
was recognizable as a G), so she borrowed one
from someone else, and one of the other group members is going to
look at tuning her instrument for her. One of the dulcian players
has been learning to make reeds and loaned some of his reeds to
the new players to see if it helped them.

But we really ended up sounding pretty good. We played a 5
part instrumental piece with some dancy sections and some fanfare
sections, and it sounded really good. Then we played a seven-part
Gabrielli, that took some time to put together but will be really
wonderful. I got to play serpent in a fairly high tenor range on
that one, and I think it worked pretty well with sackbut, four
dulcians, and two crumhorns.

So to all ensemble musicians, Happy New Year, and I hope you
have something to be as optimistic about as I do.