Tag: performing

What’s a recorder society?

The
other day, I glossed over the description of what I was
doing for the Boston Recorder
Society (BRS) in 2002, so I thought I’d expand on that for this
post. Since it’s been on my mind, I’ll tell you some of what I
was doing that the current organization isn’t.

Note that all of this is from the publicity, and a bit of
hearsay from people who are still going — I haven’t actually been
to a meeting for over a year.

For the 6 years I was involved in putting together the program
and the publicity (2002 through 2007), there were a couple of points I always
had to argue with the rest of the committee:

  1. Describing the classes in terms of the music being played
    rather than the level of players in them.
  2. Having a class open to players of other instruments.

I also made it really easy to volunteer to help out with the
work of the organization, set up a concert series, and published
the names of the board members, both on the web and in the
newsletter.

Class Descriptions

This is the more important of the two points. Here’s a
description from the 2006 brochure, which I compiled:

16th Century Italian Madrigals with
Héloïse Degrugillier (9 meetings)
Play some of the most dramatic music of the
renaissance. This class will explore the
madrigals of Da Rore, Arcadelt, and others.
We will work on ensemble skills, expressive
playing, and fundamental recorder technique.

And here’s the description of the class taught by the same
coach on the current website:

Heloise Degrugillier (group C)
Players should know at least three instruments, play “alto up”, be fluent with cut time and eighth note beats, and be comfortable reading one on a part.

If you wanted to pass tests and validate yourself by moving up
to a more “advanced” group, I can see that you might prefer the
second class, but if you wanted to play music with people who were
excited about it, and you didn’t already know the people involved,
I can’t imagine why you’d even think of going to a class with the
current description.

Now you can make an argument that when I was doing the
brochure, many people were insecure about deciding from the
brochure what class they wanted to take, because I didn’t usually
say anything at all about the level of playing required for the
class. Thus some peole worried
that they wouldn’t be able to do what the class expected. Other
people worried that they’d be stuck in a class with people who
couldn’t play very well.

My contention always was that the coaches should make the
decision about whether the people who wanted to take their class
were capable of playing the music. And since we believed that a
class shouldn’t run unless at least 6 people signed up for it,
anything we said about how advanced everyone in the class was
going to be was usually a lie, because it was rare that there were
really 6 advanced players who wanted to take the same class.

And a further argument in favor of not describing the levels in
the brochure is that people weren’t really deciding what class to
take from the brochure, because the September meeting was always a
“shopping” meeting, where you could meet the coaches and see what
the classes were like. This seems like a better way to decide
than by counting how many instruments the other members of the
class could play.

Other instruments

The main reason I always pushed for a class that allowed other
instruments besides recorders is that I really wanted the BRS to
be an organization that served all the recorder players in the
Boston area. When I joined, there were a couple of advanced
recorder players who were coming and mostly playing Dulcian (an
ancestor of the bassoon), and I benefitted a lot from being able
to play with them.

A secondary reason is that there’s a lot of really good
recorder music that wouldn’t historically have been played in an
all-recorder ensemble, so having viols or dulcians does in fact
make the recorder playing experience better than it would be with
only recorders.

In fact, although the current class descriptions don’t make it
clear who’s invited, the current organization does believe they
should welcome the “right kind” of other instruments. Their
statement says:

No more loud instruments
We are sorry to announce that we will no longer be accepting loud instruments in our ensembles (including serpents, shawms, and krummhorns).

There is apparently somewhere a slightly longer list of
proscribed instruments, but it specifically does not include
cello, which is the other non-recorder instrument which someone’s
actually been bringing. As played at recorder society meetings
I’ve been to, the cello player is at least as loud as the serpent player, and a
less good sightreader of Renaissance rhythms than the krumhorn
player.

So in my opinion, that decision probably has to do with
considerations other than musical ones.

But we already knew that based on the way they describe their classes.

So what is a recorder society?

When I was on the board (including the two years I was the
administrator), I thought
it should be an organization that brought together all the
recorder players in the area of whatever level.

This is why I ran things the way I did.

The current organization has decided that it’s an organization
that lets the established coaches coach the players who want a
once-a-month playing opportunity. Note that this offers nothing
to either the less-experienced professionals or to the advanced
amateurs who want more serious ensemble-playing opportunities, and
it’s unclear how much it does for beginners who need to get their
first ensemble experience.

All the coaches they’ve hired are good musicians and good teachers, and although
you couldn’t tell that from their descriptions, if you sign up for
their classes, you will probably learn something from them.

This Sunday, September 20, is their first meeting of the year, so
if what they’re offering is what you want, you should go.

If you want anything else out of a recorder society, you should
probably look elsewhere. I don’t see any reason why a recorder
player who isn’t interested in the monthly meetings should feel
any desire to join to support their other work, because if there
is any other work, I don’t see it. If you want to do any other
work, I don’t see any suggestion of where you would go to
volunteer.

Real program for Sunday’s event

This isn’t the post I promised you this morning. That one’s
going to take a bit more than one day to write. This is a
followup to this
post, with the complete program.

Lower Highlands Historic Downtown Neighborhood Association

Arts Around the Block
The Classical Venue
Program

Church of the Holy Spirit, 160 Rock Street, Fall River
Sunday September 20, 2009 12:30 – 4

Chapel:

1: Judith Conrad
playing 17th century Neopolitan Virginals
Fantasia in C; Balletto del Granduca; Mein Junges Leben Hat ein End;
Fantasia ut re mi fa sol la
JAN PIETERSZOON SWEELINCK
Capriccio on La Girometta; 2 Canzone, La Bergamasca GIROLAMO
FRESCOBALDI
1:30: Laura Conrad,
Two ornamented renaissance standards by Diego
Ortiz, G-alto Recorder accompanied on Italian
Virginals Douce Memoire, O Felici Occhi Miei
2:00 Paolo Do Carmo
17th century Spanish Vihuela Music, early
gut-strung guitar
SONETO ENRIQUEZ DE VALDERRABANO
PAVANA I , II, III, FANTASIA LUIZ MILAN
FANTASIA VI, VII KYRIE DE LA MISSA BEATA VIRGINE DE JOSQUIN
GLOSADO ALONSO DE MUDARRA
FANTASIA, FANTASIA, GARDAME LAS VACAS, TRES DIFERENCIAS POR OTRA
PARTE LUIS DE NARVAES
2:30 Dr. Alan Powers
Reading From his own works

Sanctuary – Classical music:

2 Mike Shand
on Traverso Georg Philipp Telemann Flute Sonata in G
minor
2:15 Jagan Nath Singh Khalsa
J. S. Bach violin Sonata in E
Judith Conrad
music of Frederick Chopin. He was born 200 years
ago this coming March 1
Waltz in Eâ™­; Nocturne in Dâ™­; Mazurka in c# minor; Third Scherzo; Album
Leaf; Revolutionary Etude
3: Peter and the Wolf by Sergei Prokofiev.
Led at the keyboard by
Judith Conrad (who also plays the Wolf), Jagan Nath Singh Khalsa,
Violin as Peter, Ruth Shand, Bassoon as Grandfather, Mike Shand,
Baroque Flute as the bird, Dan Moniz, Clarinet as the Cat, Carroll
Grillo Brown, Alto Saxophone as the Duck, Alan Powers, Narrator.

Outside by the wall behind the cemetery (weather and noise level
permitting):

12:30 Laura Conrad
English Country Dances for recorder
1:30: Professor Emeritus Alan Powers
declaims great poetry of the
western world
2:30: Mike Shand
playing an unaccompanied flute Partita by J, S, Bach
3:30 The Fall River Fipple Fluters:
The Night Watch by Anthony Holborne
Mozart Trio
Folk Songs from the British Isles (The Banks of Allen Waters,
Flow Gently Sweet Afton, Dashing Away with the Smoothing
Iron, All Through the Night, Londonderry Air)
Dowland Now O Now I Needs Must Part

Performers

Judith Conrad
is here playing Piano, Virginals (an oblong
harpsichord-like keyboard instrument from 400 years ago which was the
favorite instrument of Queen Elizabeth the First of England) and
Recorders. A resident of Fall River, she is a graduate of Harvard
University and performs widely on keyboard instruments, most recently
at the Boston Early Music Festival, at the Loring-Greenough House in
Jamaica Plain, in Philadelphia and in Magnano, Italy.
Jagan Nath Singh Khalsa
studied violin in Chicago and in St. Louis.
He is a member of the Sikh ashram community in Millis, MA. His love
of music extends to orchestral, chamber music, and most especially
music for church. He also teaches violin and plays in local community
theater shows.
Mike Shand,
a physicist by trade, has studied traverso for over ten
years with Wendy Rolfe, Linda Marianiello, Anne Brigg, and Sandy
Miller. He has performed solo and in ensembles in northern New Jersey
and, more recently, in Newport, RI. He recently moved from New Jersey
to Tiverton. He is a graduate of Durfee High School.
Laura Conrad,
also a Durfee High graduate, now lives in Cambridge MA
where she directs the Cantabile Renaissance Band and studies recorder
with John Tyson. She is the webmaster for Laymusic.org and
SerpentPublications.org, two websites which support musicians who play
Renaissance Music in small groups. She is playing recorder today; she
also plays serpent, an ancestor of the tuba which was widely used as
the loudest bass instrument available between 1600 and 1850.
Paolo Do Carmo
studied classical guitar in his native Rio De Janeiro,
and has taken up early music since moving to Fall River 11 years
ago. He is playing a Vihuela today, which is an early Spanish
guitar. He also plays recorders and lute and makes instruments. He is
currently finishing a theorbo.
Ruth Shand
is the longest-serving member of the Fall River Symphony. A
former Somerset music teacher and a concert pianist, she is playing
bassoon for us today.
Dan Moniz,
a Swansea resident, is the first-chair clarinettist in the
Swansea Community Musicians.
Carroll Grillo Brown,
a Fall River resident, plays all sizes of saxophones.
The Fall River Fipple Fluters
are an amateur recorder-playing group
founded in 1991 by Judith Conrad. They play together for fun every
Friday at Four-thirty in Fall River. New members are always welcome,
willingness to try to learn recorder is the only requirement. They
play all sizes of recorder and many different styles of music, the
core repertoire being Western classical music from the 16th to the
18th centuries, the heyday of the recorder.

For further information
call Judith Conrad, 508-674-6128 or e-mail her at
judithconrad@mindspring.com

Read the other stuff I’ve written this morning

Once again, it’s almost lunchtime on Wednesday, and I’ve been
writing all morning, and I don’t feel the necessity of writing a
blog post to keep my hand in as a writer, so you can read the
other stuff I’ve written.

Not the emails

I will spare you the emails I wrote to the person I’m trying to
schedule a December concert with, and to the condo association about
the time and date of the proposed meeting, although there was a
lot of thought that went into how to word those.

Comment on another blog

Reading my RSS feeds before breakfast, I found that Phil
Greenspun has been writing a long article about health care
reform, which expresses a lot of the same frustrations I feel
about the current discussion, but missed a couple of points I’m
frustrated about, so I
wrote him a comment. Actually, the page that comes up when you
say you want to comment strongly suggests that you might rather
write an email if you aren’t sure your ideas will still be
interesting in two years, so I originally wrote him an email, but
he emailed me back suggesting I post it as a comment, so I did.
When you read the article,
mine might still be the second comment, or if you only want to
read the comment, you can go to my
comment space and see the health care comment, plus an
anti-Verizon diatribe I wrote last winter.

Posts on my own blogs

I wrote a report
on last night’s band meeting.

For the meeting, I had as usual transcribed a new piece, and we
found a bad mistake in a previous transcription, so there’s a post
on the Serpent
Publications blog about those things.

I’ll be playing on September 20

Here’s part of the draft press release my sister sent me
yesterday. I’d show you the whole thing, except that she sent
it for editing to the participants, and they may want something
edited in or out. But there will be lots of music and some poetry reading and probably opportunities to join in.

Arts Around the Block
Church of the Holy Spirit, 190 Rock Street, Fall River
Sunday September 20, 2000 12:30 -4
THE CLASSICAL VENUE

Chapel:

1:30: Laura Conrad, Two ornamented renaissance standards by Diego
Ortiz, G-alto Recorder accompanied on Italian
Virginals: Douce Memoire, O Felici Occhi Miei

Sanctuary – Classical music:
3: Peter and the Wolf by Sergei Prokofiev. Led at the keyboard by
Judith Conrad, Jagan Nath Singh Khalsa, Violin as Peter, Ruth Shand,
Bassoon as Grandfather, Mike Shand, Baroque Flute as the bird, Dan
Moniz, clarinet as the cat, Carroll Grillo, soprano and alto saxophone
as the duck, Alan Powers as narrator.

Outside by the wall behind the cemetery (weather and noise level
permitting):

12:30 Laura Conrad, solo recorder music by Jacob Van Eyck, music to
stroll through the park to, in 17th century Holland

3:30 The Fall River Fipple Fluters:
The Night Watch by Anthony Holborne
Mozart Trio
Folk Songs from the British Isles (The Banks of Allen Waters,
Flow Gently Sweet Afton, Dashing Away with the Smoothing Iron, All
Through the Night, Londonderry Air)
Dowland Now O Now I Needs Must Part

further information Judith Conrad 508-674-6128, Judithconrad@mindspring.com

Laura Conrad, also a Durfee high graduate, now lives in Cambridge MA
where she directs the Cantabile Renaissance band and studies recorder
with John Tyson. She is playing recorder today; she also plays
serpent, an ancestor of the tuba which was widely used as the loudest
bass
instrument available between 1600 and 1850.

The Fall River Fipple Fluters are an amateur recorder-playing group
founded in 1991 by Judith Conrad. They play together for fun every
Friday at Four-thirty in Fall River. New members are always welcome,
willingness to try to learn recorder is the only requirement. They
play all sizes of recorder and many different styles of music, the
core repertoire being Western classical music from the 16th to the
18th centuries, the heyday of the recorder.. For further information
call Judith Conrad, 508-674-6128

I’m not listed in the Peter and the Wolf program, but
apparently everyone who comes will be invited to participate in
the finale, so I may bring a tuba or serpent or something, or just twitter on a recorder. I will definitely be playing with the Fipple Fluters.

I chopped down a cherry tree

I was late with my post yesterday because I spent the morning
in Fall River. I usually go there to see my mother and sister
for dinner, but there are things you don’t feel like doing after
dinner, so I spent the night and in the morning helped with the
tree and practiced some of the music
Judy and I will be playing on September 21 at the Fall
River Arts Around the Block festival.

We didn’t really chop down the whole tree, but we ended up
cutting off a lot more of it than I would have expected. The
problem was that Comcast wouldn’t install cable television
(which they need because with the new, improved digital
broadcast TV they can’t get a lot of stations they used to get)
unless they trimmed the branches that were in the way of where
lines come into the house. It needed to be trimmed in any case,
because it was quite likely that if a storm moved the branches
violently enough, they would stop having telephone service.

There was really only one branch that needed to go away, but
the ladder we were using wasn’t high enough to reach that branch
just before it started trying to grab the phone line. So we had
to saw it off close to the trunk of the tree, and to get to
that, we had to saw a lot of other branches. To get the ladder
to where we could saw those branches, we had to saw some more
branches.

So the upshot was there was a fairly big pile of cherry
branches, some of which will make firewood for next winter.
They’re choke cherries, so the birds will be upset, but it won’t
affect the Conrad family food supply any.

And the flower bed on that side of the house will get a lot
more sun now. It’s a southern exposure, so you tend to think of
it as full sun, but of course the part that was under this tree wasn’t.

How the gig went

I posted yesterday that I
had a gig in Waltham and I didn’t know much about what I was going
to play.

As is usual with gigs where you don’t know much about what’s
happening the morning of the gig, it didn’t work out to very
much playing. It wouldn’t have been worth going to Waltham for
the 5 minutes of performing time, but the rest of the performance
was entertaining, and the rehearsing with Lynn and Ishmael was really
fun. They’re both good people to play with; I play with Ishmael
all the time but usually in the context of a larger group, not all
of whom are very experienced performers, and I’ve only had a
chance to sing with Lynn a couple of times.

The original email sent to possible performers talked about
two 5 minute intermezzos and implied that there might be a fair
amount of playing time before the performance. So we rehearsed a
fair amount of stuff, and we were all prepared to fill in with
solos if something needed setup time.

When we got there, the first person we talked to said there would
be 5 minute intermezzos, but that he didn’t think he wanted before
performance music. So we arranged to get food before the
performance. (At one point there’d been a mention of food during
the rehearsal time, but that didn’t happen, and I’d gone easy on
lunch expecting an early supper, so I was hungry by 6:30.)

The second person we talked to said the intermezzos would be
3 minutes or less, but he had no problem with lots of music before
the performance. So Ishmael played fiddle tunes when he’d
finished his sandwich. I could have played too, but I’d packed my
soprano recorder when they told us there wouldn’t be
before-performance music, and I wasn’t confident enough that the
right key would come out on the G alto.

So we ended up doing Ravenscroft’s
We
be three poor Mariners for the first intermezzo, but being cut
off before we could follow it up with To
Portsmouth and He
that will an alehouse keep, which would have been a 5 minute
set, or maybe a little more.

The second intermezzo was supposed to be Jenny went to
gather rushes, sung by Lynn with me and Ishmael chiming in
on the choruses to encourage the audience, and maybe doing an
instrumental verse if Lynn needed to catch her breath, followed by me and
Ishmael playing one or two Morley
Canzonets
to two voyces, but the actors popped out during the last verse
of Jenny.

Ishmael’s friend who came along and hasn’t had much experience
of this kind of thing was quite annoyed at how truncated the
performing was, but Ishmael, Lynn and I had really been
expecting it. I was surprised during rehearsal when Lynn
suggested we sing Purcell,
since he’s a good 200 years later than the play, but she denied
that she’d ever suggested we do it in performance — she says
she just said I
gave her cakes and I gave her ale is fun to sing, which it is, so we burst into song..

You’ll have to read my other blogs again

I really find on Wednesday that if I fix all the problems with the music
that the Cantabile Band
played the previous night, and get it uploaded, and maybe blog
about it on the Serpent
Publications blog, I don’t really have the time or energy to
write a completely unrelated post for the 59th year
blogging experiment. So the way I did a week or so
ago, I’m just going to point you at the writing I’ve
already done. Even if you aren’t interested in the Renaissance
music, read the Chidiock_Tichborne
article.

So here’s the report on last
night’s meeting, and the description
of the pieces I uploaded this morning.

West Gallery Quire Workshop

This is about the workshop I
attended on Tuesday, August 11, 2009, directed by Francis Roads. Here’s the music we played.
I had intended to write this yesterday, but got lazy, and let
A.A. Milne do the post for me. Now I’m
glad I did because it gave me a chance to talk to one of the other
attendees yesterday afternoon.

First the good things.

  • There were about 40 people, including a
    number who had never played West Gallery music before.
  • There was
    a really good section of bass singers, which is what the serpent
    really likes.
  • The ratio of singers to instruments was higher than
    it usually is at our regular meetings, which is probably both
    better musically and more authentic to the tradition.
  • The tempos Francis Roads picked were much brisker than the
    ones we usually play, and this did give us some better idea of the
    relationship of the music to dance music than we usually get.
  • I brought flyers for both the Cantabile Renaissance
    Band     and the Serpent Publications
    Website    , and lots of them disappeared. In fact, the Serpent
    Publications ones were all gone, and I should have made more than
    I did.

Some things that future workshop organizers might want to think
about:

  • This was the hardest serpent playing I’ve ever done. Some
    of that was because a couple of songs were in really difficult
    keys for a D serpent. Since most serpents in this century are
    in C, that probably wasn’t something Francis Roads would have
    known. Another thing that made it harder was that he spent the
    first 15 minutes we were playing trying to improve the balance,
    by making both the instruments and the basses not stand out as
    much. This meant that I was playing in difficult keys, softer
    and more staccato than I was used to. There was even one piece
    with difficult fingerings that I should have practiced harder.
    This is unusual in vocal music, since most people who play a
    brass instrument at all can play arpeggios faster than most
    singers can sing them.
  • The friend I discussed the workshop with yesterday had been
    in England for the Ironbridge workshop last spring. The pace of
    Tuesday’s workshop seemed quite fast compared with what we’re
    used to, but she said the people in England go even faster.
    They’d have been through all the verses by the time we got
    through with the first verse. I think the level of music
    education in the general population there isn’t much if any
    better than it is here, but the people who’ve been to those
    choir schools are really good choral sightreaders.
  • Logistically, putting the music on the chairs didn’t really
    improve anything, since enough people had printed their own to
    practice from that it kept having to be moved to the floor.
  • It wasn’t possible to organize an optimal seating plan.
    There were three incompatible influences on the seating plan
    that actually happened:

    1. The singers will sometimes stand up, since they sing
      better that way, but some of the instruments can’t be played
      standing up, so in general you want to put the instruments
      in front of the singers.
    2. The people who aren’t good sightreaders should be in
      front of the people who are, so that they can hear them
      better.
    3. People who are doing something new to them that they
      aren’t sure they’re going to be able to handle sometimes
      prefer to hide in the back rows.

I’m glad we had the workshop. West Gallery Music
is a form that should be better known and more widely used and
this workshop contributed to that happening.

Making one PDF of many

People who aren’t lazy enough to have figured out how to use
computers to save them work are really strange about using them to
make lots of work for other people.

The director of the West Gallery Quire sent
a mail to the list suggesting that everybody print their own music
for the workshop
next week, but providing only a link to a page with pointers
to the individual pieces, and a list of the order it should be in.

So before breakfast this morning, I spent 20 minutes
downloading the pdf’s and writing a LaTeX program to put them in
one pdf. I know there are other ways to do this, but this got me
a title page with a list of the pieces.

I was greatly assisted in doing this fast by a latex file
posted by Peter
Flynn to the Nokia
users list. He figured out how to put PDF’s into a page
exactly the size of the Nokia
N810, and posted it.

After breakfast, I put my pdf file up on my website and posted a link to it. I’m sure people are a lot more likely to print one 23 page file
than to chase 10 links and print them and put them in order.

Here’s a skeleton for how to do it to print a a PDF on letter
paper:

documentclass[letterpaper]{memoir}
usepackage[margin=0pt,nohead,nofoot]{geometry}
usepackage{pdfpages}
pagestyle{empty}
title{Your title here}
author{Your name}
date{today} %or use the date you want
begin{document}
maketitle
clearpage
includepdf[pages=-]{filename.pdf}
end{document}

Of course, you substitute the name of your PDF file for
filename.pdf, and you can have as many includepdf lines as you
like.

http://rcm.amazon.com/e/cm?t=laymusicorg-20&o=1&p=8&l=as1&asins=B000ZH8FI2&fc1=000000&IS2=1&lt1=_blank&m=amazon&lc1=0000FF&bc1=000000&bg1=FFFFFF&f=ifr

Wakefield Summer Band concert

The first Wakefield Summer Band concert of the year is
tonight. If you’re near Wakefield, and want to spend a pleasant
evening on the shores of Lake Quannapowitt (it looks like for a
change we’re getting good weather today), I gave details in the
weekly Cantabile
Band post.

I never played in a band in high school, so I’ve never been
properly socialized as either a tuba player or a band musician.
And there are lots of kinds of music I’d rather put the time into
than band music, although the really good arrangements are a lot of
fun to play.

Two summers playing tuba in a summer band (and one on alto
horn) isn’t enough to make you a very good tuba player, but it’s
amazing how useful you can feel just playing the easy notes on the
tuba arrangements.

From a low brass perspective, the best arrangement on tonight’s
program is Phantom of the Opera, where the
direction says “With a menacing manner”.

When I got the tuba and took it to Osmun Music to buy it a
mouthpiece, they guessed it was made in about 1910, so it’s almost
100 years old. It’s in Eb, which makes it easier to carry around
than the currently more usual Bb tubas. It’s also closer to the
same range as the serpent.

I’m not the only person in that band who doesn’t work seriously
on their instrument during the winter, so from the point of view
of hearing a good concert, you should probably wait to come until later
in the summer. The concert will last less than an hour, and if
there are good places to go drinking afterwards in the area, I
haven’t found them, so it isn’t worth driving a long
distance, but it’s certainly a pleasant option for how to spend
your evening if you live in Wakefield.