www.laymusic.org
Bringing Live Music back into the Living Room

Why www.laymusic.org

This website is dedicated to providing resources for people who want playing or singing music to be a large part of their daily lives. It's maintained by Laura Conrad.

Support this site

There are a number of ways you can provide financial support, detailed on this page.

Of course, there are non-financial ways to support us, too. Tell your friends, and most particularly, if you find something wrong anywhere on the site, tell me.

Getting Music

If you don't live in the Boston area, your most likely reason to be looking at this site is to get music. There are a lot of sites devoted to making sheetmusic available over the internet. My Music Publishing Page is just the music I've transcribed for myself or for my groups to play. It's less encyclopedic than these:

If you find you don't like having loose one-sided printouts, or your printer isn't heavy-duty enough to print enough music for the people you play with, you can order some of the more ``finished'' products on this site from Serpent Publications.

Finding people to play with

A real live example of people making music in a living room will be my Christmas party, on December 16, 2007.

One of the advantages of thinking of music as something friends do together is that you don't have to wait for a professional musician or a government funding organization to start a group for you -- you can just start one yourself. But if you want to play a particular kind of music or instrument, you may not have friends (yet) who do that, so it is useful to have a way to know about already existing groups.

If you have a group that exists primarily for people to enjoy playing together, I would be happy to link to your page here, or to take the information you send me and set you up with a page here on this site.

The group I direct is the Cantabile Renaissance Band. I needed a place to play the serpent, and nobody seemed to have one that was suitable, so I put out a flyer, and emailed everyone I knew who played an instrument, and found some other people who wanted to do what I did.

I got into doing this kind of music by playing the recorder. The American Recorder Society maintains lists of recorder players, teachers, and groups you can join.

Meeting in a church hall rather than a living room, Bruce Randall's West Gallery Music Group is another example of a group of friends who get together to play a specific kind of music.

Mathew Mcconeghy maintains a website with a very comprehensive list of places you can play folk and traditional music in Southern New England here

Articles

Here's an essay I wrote a couple of years ago about why this idea is important to me. One criticism I've gotten on the article is that talking about music in the living room sounds like I'm excluding a lot of kinds of music that don't really fit. So if you do dance music that needs a dance floor, or bagpipe music that sounds better outside, or Industrial Rock that needs a deserted factory building, don't try doing them in your living room, but don't ignore the other things I'm saying.

And here's an article I wrote for the magazine of The American Recorder Society.

mstation.org has a couple of articles I've written about music publishing and early music, and also an interview with several people who publish music on the internet, where I talk about what I'm working on here.

Laura's home page

This address used to be "Laura's Homepage". If you came here looking for that, it's here

These days, most of what used to get put there goes on in the diary section of my blog.

Last modified: 2007-11-30 10:52, 2007
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