We played:
For the month of August, we'll be having dropin meetings as usual on Tuesdays at 7:45 PM at my place.
We played:
For the month of August, we'll be having dropin meetings as usual on Tuesdays at 7:45 PM at my place.
The posts were thin for a while there, and one of the things I was doing instead of posting was reading all the Hugo award nominees so that I could vote by the July 31 deadline. Here are my votes, with some comments on why.
With these shorter forms, I wouldn't have read them except for the Hugo voting, but they're really pretty good.
Luckily, the ones of these that I wouldn't have made a point of seeing anyway were all on Netflix Watch Now, so it didn't cost me anything except the time.
Some day I'll be organized enough to start the reading early enough to vote on some of the other categories. But if you want to know what's happening in science fiction, you can do a lot worse than get an associate membership to the convention of the year (Aussiecon, this year). It cost $50 this year, and they gave me free electronic versions of all the print nominees.
It was a pretty busy week, and I only had the little camera, so I couldn't do the butterflies, and I was usually carrying too much to make it easy to stop and take pictures. But here's what I got.
This statue was how to identify the building a lot of the classes were in:
![[Putti at Connecticutt College]](http://serpentpublications.org/laymusic/wp-content/uploads/2010/08/putti.jpg)
![[plaque identifying Putti]](http://serpentpublications.org/laymusic/wp-content/uploads/2010/08/putti-placque.jpg)
One of the cornetto players had always wanted to play serpent, so he spent some time with mine, and we took pictures of each other.
![[Laura playing serpent]](http://serpentpublications.org/laymusic/wp-content/uploads/2010/08/lauraserpent.jpg)
![[Michael playing serpent]](http://serpentpublications.org/laymusic/wp-content/uploads/2010/08/michaelserpent.jpg)
We played:
For the month of August, we'll be having dropin meetings as usual on Tuesdays at 7:45 PM at my place.
I didn't wrap up the Amherst experience because I was busy writing the evaluation form. And by the time I was through with that there were other things I wanted to think about.
But I did promise to let you know how it turned out. You'll be glad to know that the Saturday concert was really good, and lots of people (including world class faculty members who didn't even know me) came up to me at the party and told me how good the serpent playing was.
I'm not going to give you the parts from the evaluation about individuals, but here's something I wrote about the workshop in general:
This is from the section that asked for comments about the daily schedule and kinds of classes. I wrote:
I was concerned that there didn't seem to be any classes in anything suitable for beginners. I don't mean beginners in the sense that they don't know the fingering of a soprano recorder, but people who haven't previously had the opportunity for the kind of ensemble experience that Amherst offers. I notice a lot of the people who were beginners when I first came 20 years ago are now populating the advanced classes. But we're all going to die sometime, and if you don't do beginner classes now, where will the advanced classes come from 20 years from now?
I would think the faculty should be more aware of this problem, since presumably most of them make a substantial portion of their income from teaching, and if there aren't places where people who want to learn something can meet the teachers, where will they get their students?
Those questions come from someone who doesn't have an association with a university. I'm aware that if you know as a teenager that music is something you want to study, and you go to the right kind of high school (I didn't) and college (I did, but of course nowhere was that good forty years ago for early music), you can get a lot of what I'm talking about from your academic experience. But one of the strengths of Amherst, and the early music movement in general, used to be that people who hadn't had that experience in school could take it up later in life. It's not clear that that's still happening.
And of course if there'd been brass ensemble classes for beginners, there would have been a place for a low-level cornetto player, even if nobody wanted to touch a serpent. My cornetto playing isn't performance quality, but if you had a beginning loud wind ensemble with people who couldn't count, it would have been easier to teach with me in it.
This month's Lilypond Report includes a brief note which I wrote about how (and why) to automatically double (or quadruple or halve) the note values in a lilypond transcription.
You might also enjoy looking at the code swarm in the last report, which has my name (with many others) swimming in and out of the swarm of contributors.
We played:
For the rest of August, we will be having our normal dropin meetings on Tuesdays starting at 7:45 PM at my place.
We played:
For the next few weeks, we will be having dropin meetings as usual on Tuesdays at my place starting at 7:45 PM.
There's another Wakefield Summer Band concert, with me on Tuba, this Friday, July 23, at 7 PM, at the bandstand on the Wakefield town green.
![[Buy from the laymusic lulu.com store]](http://www.lulu.com/services/buy_now_buttons/images/gray.gif)
![[SerpentPublications.org]](http://www.serpentpublications.org/wordpress/wp-content/themes/serpentpublications/images/spbanner-colorbox.png)
No Cantabile meeting tonight
I actually probably feel better than I have either of the last two weeks, but I now have a diagnosis (pneumonia) that justifies feeling crummy. So I'm going to cancel the meeting tonight, to avoid being tempted to clean or transcribe music or cook when I should be napping instead.
Unfortunately, there will also not be dropin meetings on either Tuesday, September 7 or Tuesday, September 14, because some of us will be rehearsing for a concert on September 19.
So the normal dropin meetings will resume on Tuesday, September 21, at 7:45 PM at my place.
I'll attempt to call people who normally come and who might not read email between now and this evening. If you've been coming regularly, if you can let me know that you got this, it will save me trying to dig up your phone number.