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Public performance tomorrow
Four months ago an acquaintance from the NYC early-music community contacted us about the Fort Tryon Medieval Faire (aka "the Cloisters Fair", because it's all around the Cloisters, although it's organized by the Washington Heights Inwood Development Corporation with no actual involvement by the Metropolitan Museum): she and her partner had a performing slot scheduled, but her partner was unavailable that day, so she asked ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
shalmestere and me if we'd like to join her instead. We said yes, then didn't hear anything for a while.
In August she contacted us again and said she wasn't available either; would we like to take the performing slot ourselves? So we contacted a couple of other friends, updated the listing with the event organizers, and are now scheduled to perform as "Musica Tramontana" for two half-hour sets tomorrow (12:30 and 4:00, in the "Music Niche" just west of the Cloisters). In between, we may be at the SCA booth, but that's at the opposite end of the park and (experience shows) getting around the park on Faire day can be slow. (Another acquaintance, "Foxy Bard", also has two sets scheduled, at a different venue within the Faire. He and his partner play a different game from ours, but an interesting game in its own right: largely period repertoire, all performed so as to sound like Jethro Tull.)
We'll be doing a variety of rounds, canons, and rondellus, largely 14c but two or three later pieces, variously on shawm, sackbut, vielle, recorder, and voice. Today is tech rehearsal, at which we polish things, confirm which instruments we need to take, and confirm that we can fit all the planned pieces into half an hour.
shalmestere and me if we'd like to join her instead. We said yes, then didn't hear anything for a while.In August she contacted us again and said she wasn't available either; would we like to take the performing slot ourselves? So we contacted a couple of other friends, updated the listing with the event organizers, and are now scheduled to perform as "Musica Tramontana" for two half-hour sets tomorrow (12:30 and 4:00, in the "Music Niche" just west of the Cloisters). In between, we may be at the SCA booth, but that's at the opposite end of the park and (experience shows) getting around the park on Faire day can be slow. (Another acquaintance, "Foxy Bard", also has two sets scheduled, at a different venue within the Faire. He and his partner play a different game from ours, but an interesting game in its own right: largely period repertoire, all performed so as to sound like Jethro Tull.)
We'll be doing a variety of rounds, canons, and rondellus, largely 14c but two or three later pieces, variously on shawm, sackbut, vielle, recorder, and voice. Today is tech rehearsal, at which we polish things, confirm which instruments we need to take, and confirm that we can fit all the planned pieces into half an hour.
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We spent four or five hours Saturday rehearsing, with the results that one piece was changed from shawm-and-sackbut to vocal, two others had slight changes in instrumentation, and one was dropped altogether.
The weather forecast for Sunday was demoralizing, with 70-80% chance of rain every hour from noon to 4 PM, i.e. covering both of our scheduled gigs. But in fact it was just grey and overcast most of the time, with a light sprinkle around 3:00. The Medieval Faire was not as heavily attended as in past years (between pandemic and weather and "it skipped two years, so people forgot that it exists"), but decent.
We arrived around 9:00 and drove around looking for our assigned performance space, which we had been told would have a canopy and chairs. Eventually we found a semicircle of straw-bales on the side of the road between two vendor stalls, approximately where our venue should be on the map, and concluded this must be it. But we really wanted the canopy to protect the instruments from the still-predicted rain, and we wanted at least one chair because
Around 11 AM a truck showed up with the last available EZ-Up, reserved for our venue. The straw-bales needed to be moved a bit to make room for it, and while trying to help with that I slipped on a paving stone (smooth leather turnshoes, doncha'know?), fell, and scraped my hand open. So I stopped trying to help, rinsed the blood off my hand at a water fountain, and walked to the other end of the park to join the opening parade, which culminated approximately at our venue.
The playlist, on a "rounds, canons, and rondellus" theme:
Both of our half-hour shows went reasonably well, aside from music stands falling down in the wind. We attracted a decent crowd of probably twenty or thirty people, which is all there's room for at this particular venue without entirely blocking traffic, and several of them stuck around to ask questions, ask for our contact info and upcoming performances, and tell us how great we sounded. The other performers scheduled at the same venue before and after us were either solo acts or duets, and none of them had an instrument louder than a strummed lutoid, so they had a harder time attracting public, and I don't think I saw any of them with a crowd larger than half a dozen.