Tag: performing

We’re starting to get settled on the program for the concert
we’re playing at the Boston Public Library at 2 PM on December
17, in the Rabb Lecture Hall. There’s not a lot of time for
rehearsing, so we’re having to limit the amount of new stuff we
play, but these are mostly people who haven’t heard us before,
so it won’t matter to them.

There will be three sections, with me playing Diego Ortiz
Ricercada’s in between sections.

First there will be songs about drinking, dancing, and
smoking. Most of these we’ve performed many times before, and
the one that we haven’t is mostly a vocal solo by a very
experienced performer.

Then there will be a group of “religious” music. When you
first start playing Renaissance music, you tend to think that
everything religious was church music and everything secular was
performed in the home, but in fact there were wide swaths of
Europe where the established church discouraged polyphony in the
church, and people liked it, so they played it in the home. There
are a couple of carols that everybody knows, and a Byrd about
Susanna, and a round about Judith and Holofernes.

The last section will be all Thomas Morley. We’re mixing the
Fantasias from the Two-voyce canzonets with the vocals from both
the two and three voice canzonets.

There’s a flyer, which includes the program
which you should give to all your friends. If you’re someone
who could possibly go to a 2 PM concert in Boston’s Back Bay,
you should come.

The Harvard
Square English Country Dance has open band several times a
year, where anyone who’d like to play for dancing can join in.

I’ve been three times in the last year. The first time was a
bit intimidating — the band leader clearly thought she was
offering constructive criticism when she said I was playing on the
back of the beat, but I couldn’t even hear what she was talking
about, let alone figure out what to do about it. But the playing
was fun when I wasn’t feeling criticised, and the tune list worked
well on recorder. I brought both serpent and recorder, but ended
up playing mostly recorder, since even I can hear some rhythm
problems when I’m playing serpent.

The second time I was just invited to sit in when it wasn’t an
official open band. The good part about that was that I danced
for the first half of the evening, and then just sat in on the
second half. I was surprised that they wanted the serpent to play
the tunes, which I hadn’t practiced. They were happier with the
serpent than the first leader had been, but still made cryptic
comments about how my recorder playing could stand to sacrifice artistry
for rhythm. (This was during the
dance — during the rehearsal I’d specifically asked if they
wanted me to change anything and had been told it was fine.) The
playlist was mostly pretty good for C recorder, but there was one
piece that just plain didn’t work for C recorder. The recorder
player in the band played it pretty well on his alto recorder, so
I was embarrassed that I hadn’t brought mine. This is part of why
I spent the summer playing dance music on the G alto.

Last night I had practiced the tunes on both serpent and
recorder, and carefully marked on the tune list which ones would
work on G recorder. But I noticed that it was really not as
recorder-friendly a tune list as the previous two. It turned out
that this band was really excited about having the serpent play
drones. There was a good bass player, so the oom-pah rhythm bass
was covered, and several of the tunes did work over a drone, which
is a lot more fun on serpent than it is on most instruments. It
was a pretty big band with lots of other melody instruments, so I
ended up not playing much recorder, although nobody complained
about it when I did play. But the G alto as country dance
instrument is still fairly untested. The serpent did feel a lot
better about it than about the two previous experiences. The bass
player took one dance off to dance, and complimented me when he
came back to play.

The Fall schedule in general is starting to fill up, and there are
several performance-like items on it:

• As usual, I’ll be playing serpent at the West Gallery Quire
  meetings. The next one has
  special leaders and some new songs, and will be this Sunday,
  October 11. There will also be meetings on November 8 and
  December 13, and a Pub Sing on December 6. These are the best opportunities I know of to sing with a serpent playing for at least a few hundred miles.
• I’m also planning to play recorder and serpent at the
  Harvard Square English Country Dance Open Band night on Friday,
  October 23. If you want to play, too, the rehearsal will start
  at 6:15, and if you just want to dance, it starts at 7:30. It’s
  at the Harvard-Epworth United Methodist Church, 1555 Mass Ave.,
  Cambridge.
• On October 25, the Boston Wort
  Processors will hold their annual Ciderfest.
  Some years I’ve organized some of my playing friends to come
  play with me. That doesn’t seem to be happening this year, but
  I usually stop drinking at least an hour before I drive home,
  and often play quite a bit of recorder music then.
• A few of the more experienced members of The Cantabile
  Band will be doing a concert for the Never too
  Late group at the Boston Public Library. That’s the event
  that needs the Wiki.

I started thinking this diatribe when I ran into a jazz
musician friend and asked him, “How are you?”, and he replied, “I
just got a new set of earplugs.” He realized that wouldn’t be an
exciting part of most people’s weeks, but for him being able to
both talk to the other musicians in his band and listen to what
they were playing without having his ears damaged was a major
improvement in his life.

I’ve run it by a lot of musician friends since, and haven’t
heard anything that seems like a valid counterargument to me.
Naturally, this has done nothing to change the number
of places I’m glad I have my earplugs along, or sorry I don’t have
them with me.

I basically think that if both the performers and the audience
need earplugs to listen to the music safely, it’s too loud.

I understand that if you’re playing acoustic music in a large
venue, it might be a good idea for some of the performers to need
the earplugs so that the audience has a chance to hear the whole
sound.

But if it’s amplified music in a normal sized room, there’s no
reason the volume level can’t be kept to one that doesn’t do
permanent damage to anyone’s ears.

So what kind of earplugs do I need?

For casual listening, those cheap
foam ones that come in boxes of 200 are probably good enough,
although if you spend a lot of time listening to loud
music, you might need something better.

If you need to both hear conversations and listen carefully to
the loud music, you’re better off with something designed
specifically for that purpose. After being too close to a loud
cymbal crash in the band a year ago, I bought a pair of these.

If you buy directly from the
manufacturer, you can get a quantity discount on more than 4
pairs. I didn’t do that, but there have been a couple of times
when I wished my pair were in my backpack, and not in my tuba
accessories pouch.

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