Entry tags:
Home again, home again, jiggity jig
Got home yesterday after a week at the Amherst Early Music summer workshop. Most people at the workshop take four classes a day Monday-Friday, and around Thursday each class decides whether to polish a piece for presentation to the rest of the workshop in a "student concert" on Saturday. I took three classes on the shawm, and one on the music of Matteo da Perugia in its original c1400 notation, played on recorders.
My (and![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
shalmestere's) first-period class was double-reed technique, taught by Rotem Gilbert from USC. We'd taken classes from her before, and she's an amazing teacher, with lots of very practical exercises and technique tips to improve sound quality and musicality. (I wrote down as many of them as I could.) Every person in the class sounded noticeably better overall at the end of the week than at the beginning; now if only I can (a) hang onto those improvements, and (b) pass them on to other shawm-and-dulcian players, particularly at Pennsic.
My second-period class (whileshalmestere played medieval bowed strings with Shira Kammen) was on polychoral music. St. Mark's Cathedral in Venice was famously built with two raised musicians' galleries, one on either side of the nave, and it gave rise to a school of music in which two dueling wind-bands or choirs take turns, each playing a similar-but-not-identical passage of 20-30 measures, the piece typically ending with a grand finale of eight to twelve parts in glorious harmony. At least that's how it's supposed to work. It's a good repertoire for wind band, particularly if you have lots of players, most especially if some of them are beginners without a lot of endurance (because everybody gets those 20-30-measure rests to recover their chops). Anyway, we had ten people: three cornetti, three dulcians, three sackbuts, and me on the tenor shawm (which is slightly louder than dulcian, definitely louder than cornetto, but can usually blend reasonably well with them). Teacher Liza Malamud is a sackbut player herself, from whom I'd taken classes in previous years, and she extracted some good music from the ensemble.
After lunch, bothshalmestere and I had another class with Rotem: a smaller ensemble of three shawms and a sackbut doing Song of Songs settings. The sackbut player was a young man majoring in trombone at Eastman; he's relatively new to the sackbut and to early music, so a lot of the class was Rotem explaining what's different in this setting: the "bass line" role is less an oompa-oompa harmonic anchor, more of an equal partner in the polyphony, although it still has special roles to play like not allowing the shawms to go sharp as they get tired. The kid picked things up very quickly, and the ensemble sounded glorious; this was the most musically fulfilling class of the day for both of us.
In the late afternoon, we had a class on Matteo da Perugia, with Annette Bauer. We'd taken notation classes from her before, both in person and on-line: she's fun and engaging, and really knows her stuff (while recognizing that sometimes there really are different legitimate readings of this notation, and open to alternative interpretations). The music was from the Modena A manuscript of c. 1400, the height of the "Ars Subtilior" school, when there was an arms race of sorts between more-and-more-complex rhythms in composition and more-and-more-complex notation to write down those rhythms. By this time it was an old, accepted practice to switch from black to red ink to write what we would now call hemiola or triplets. And there are lots of multi-note ligatures, in which the presence or absence and direction of stems determines the rhythm. And there are lots of dots, meaning three or four different things.ometimes they have the modern meaning of "this two-beat note should actually be three beats, half again as long", sometimes they act like measure lines, sometimes they mean "don't double this one-beat note to two as you normally would", and sometimes they mean "forget where you thought the beat was: we're going to pretend it's here instead, for a few seconds" for purposes of rhythmic interpretation. There was also a newer note-shape called a "dragma", with a stem pointing both up and down, which was basically a quadruplet -- four notes in the time of three. And in the final piece of the week, which we didn't even try to play but just discussed, there are also open (un-filled-in) black notes (apparently acting like modern dots, half again the notated duration) and open red notes (triplets within triplets). And one part changes time signatures several times while the others don't. And stuff like that. It was a mental workout, at the end of a long and physically-tiring day.
Saturday morning there was a half-hour performance by the single largest class, which had seven singers, about ten recorders, about six viols, etc. doing music of Gabrieli and Monteverdi. Then an hour-long performance by the "medieval project", a bunch of female singers who had spent the whole week working on music from the 13th-century Las Huelgas manuscript and were (for the most part) crystal clear and gorgeous. The afternoon was given over to short performances by a dozen other classes, mostly one piece each. All three of my wind-band classes opted to perform in this, and they all sounded good. There were supposed to be fourteen class performances, but two were cancelled due to students testing positive for COVID, and the order was shuffled at the last minute, twice, because a student had forgotten one of his instruments and had to go back to the dorm to get it; as a result, my polychoral group opened the concert, and our early-morning reed technique group closed it. Somewhere in between, our after-lunch class was perhaps the best-sounding ensemble of the afternoon concert. After dinner was a faculty concert, followed by a party/reception where everybody said their goodbyes and promised to be back next year.
And Sunday we drove home, sorta-unpacked, and collapsed. Today we're both scheduled to work from home, mercifully, but we do have to work, and we have to pick up the dogs from the boarding kennel, and continue unpacking, and get back into the normal rhythms of daily life. We'll both need to test for COVID again before returning to our respective offices, since there were something like ten people at the workshop (out of 250 or so) who tested positive and went into isolation. But we both tested negative last Saturday and again last Sunday, then again on Wednesday, then again this Saturday afternoon.
My (and
shalmestere's) first-period class was double-reed technique, taught by Rotem Gilbert from USC. We'd taken classes from her before, and she's an amazing teacher, with lots of very practical exercises and technique tips to improve sound quality and musicality. (I wrote down as many of them as I could.) Every person in the class sounded noticeably better overall at the end of the week than at the beginning; now if only I can (a) hang onto those improvements, and (b) pass them on to other shawm-and-dulcian players, particularly at Pennsic.My second-period class (while
shalmestere played medieval bowed strings with Shira Kammen) was on polychoral music. St. Mark's Cathedral in Venice was famously built with two raised musicians' galleries, one on either side of the nave, and it gave rise to a school of music in which two dueling wind-bands or choirs take turns, each playing a similar-but-not-identical passage of 20-30 measures, the piece typically ending with a grand finale of eight to twelve parts in glorious harmony. At least that's how it's supposed to work. It's a good repertoire for wind band, particularly if you have lots of players, most especially if some of them are beginners without a lot of endurance (because everybody gets those 20-30-measure rests to recover their chops). Anyway, we had ten people: three cornetti, three dulcians, three sackbuts, and me on the tenor shawm (which is slightly louder than dulcian, definitely louder than cornetto, but can usually blend reasonably well with them). Teacher Liza Malamud is a sackbut player herself, from whom I'd taken classes in previous years, and she extracted some good music from the ensemble.After lunch, both
shalmestere and I had another class with Rotem: a smaller ensemble of three shawms and a sackbut doing Song of Songs settings. The sackbut player was a young man majoring in trombone at Eastman; he's relatively new to the sackbut and to early music, so a lot of the class was Rotem explaining what's different in this setting: the "bass line" role is less an oompa-oompa harmonic anchor, more of an equal partner in the polyphony, although it still has special roles to play like not allowing the shawms to go sharp as they get tired. The kid picked things up very quickly, and the ensemble sounded glorious; this was the most musically fulfilling class of the day for both of us.In the late afternoon, we had a class on Matteo da Perugia, with Annette Bauer. We'd taken notation classes from her before, both in person and on-line: she's fun and engaging, and really knows her stuff (while recognizing that sometimes there really are different legitimate readings of this notation, and open to alternative interpretations). The music was from the Modena A manuscript of c. 1400, the height of the "Ars Subtilior" school, when there was an arms race of sorts between more-and-more-complex rhythms in composition and more-and-more-complex notation to write down those rhythms. By this time it was an old, accepted practice to switch from black to red ink to write what we would now call hemiola or triplets. And there are lots of multi-note ligatures, in which the presence or absence and direction of stems determines the rhythm. And there are lots of dots, meaning three or four different things.ometimes they have the modern meaning of "this two-beat note should actually be three beats, half again as long", sometimes they act like measure lines, sometimes they mean "don't double this one-beat note to two as you normally would", and sometimes they mean "forget where you thought the beat was: we're going to pretend it's here instead, for a few seconds" for purposes of rhythmic interpretation. There was also a newer note-shape called a "dragma", with a stem pointing both up and down, which was basically a quadruplet -- four notes in the time of three. And in the final piece of the week, which we didn't even try to play but just discussed, there are also open (un-filled-in) black notes (apparently acting like modern dots, half again the notated duration) and open red notes (triplets within triplets). And one part changes time signatures several times while the others don't. And stuff like that. It was a mental workout, at the end of a long and physically-tiring day.
Saturday morning there was a half-hour performance by the single largest class, which had seven singers, about ten recorders, about six viols, etc. doing music of Gabrieli and Monteverdi. Then an hour-long performance by the "medieval project", a bunch of female singers who had spent the whole week working on music from the 13th-century Las Huelgas manuscript and were (for the most part) crystal clear and gorgeous. The afternoon was given over to short performances by a dozen other classes, mostly one piece each. All three of my wind-band classes opted to perform in this, and they all sounded good. There were supposed to be fourteen class performances, but two were cancelled due to students testing positive for COVID, and the order was shuffled at the last minute, twice, because a student had forgotten one of his instruments and had to go back to the dorm to get it; as a result, my polychoral group opened the concert, and our early-morning reed technique group closed it. Somewhere in between, our after-lunch class was perhaps the best-sounding ensemble of the afternoon concert. After dinner was a faculty concert, followed by a party/reception where everybody said their goodbyes and promised to be back next year.
And Sunday we drove home, sorta-unpacked, and collapsed. Today we're both scheduled to work from home, mercifully, but we do have to work, and we have to pick up the dogs from the boarding kennel, and continue unpacking, and get back into the normal rhythms of daily life. We'll both need to test for COVID again before returning to our respective offices, since there were something like ten people at the workshop (out of 250 or so) who tested positive and went into isolation. But we both tested negative last Saturday and again last Sunday, then again on Wednesday, then again this Saturday afternoon.
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