hudebnik

We had our traditional Christmas-eve dinner of beef Wellington, with creamed spinach and honey-glazed carrots and various kinds of Christmas cookies. Watched the Grinch and Rudolph, then Midnight Mass broadcast live from the National Cathedral, so we weren't out driving or interacting with hundreds of H. sapiens on Christmas eve. Walked the dogs, started the dishwasher, and got to bed only a little after midnight.

I woke around 8 AM, did some exercises, ate "first breakfast", checked the dishwasher, and found on triage that about half of the items therein were clean, while the other half looked as though they had just come off the table after a large meal. So I hand-washed the latter, leaving the drying-rack and the stovetop piled high. I emptied the filter, and can try different combinations of dishwasher powder and drying solution, but there may be a new dishwasher in our near future. Anyway, made some charitable donations in other people's names, then started on poffertje batter.

Eventually shalmestere woke up and we made and consumed our traditional Christmas-morning brunch of poffertjes, bacon, and blood-orange mimosas, then opened some presents. Of course, the big "present" from us to us arrived a week ago: a Prescott Renaissance C-bass recorder. (Insert photo here.) But other notable prezzies included (from her to me) Kees Boeke's edition of the works (certain and alleged) of Solage, and (from me to her) a well-reviewed novel based on the life of a 13th-century Irishwoman. And chocolate -- lots of chocolate. Happy Jolabokaflod!

Dinner, of course, was latkes. shalmestere doesn't believe in applesauce, and we didn't have any sour cream in the house, so we topped them with butter and Greek yogurt. And just to make clear that we're not really Jewish, we had (pork-and-beef) kielbasa coins sauteed in butter as the protein source for the meal. Played some Solage together on F-bass and C-bass recorders, watched "A Child's Christmas in Wales", walked the dogs, took out the trash, and went to bed.

Today I'm officially back to work, although not going into the office. Today's holiday rituals include delivering assortments of Christmas cookies to the neighbors and donating more money to worthy causes.

Two friends are coming over tomorrow and/or Saturday to play early music, so we have house-cleaning and pre-cooking to do.

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 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.

Baked a loaf of bread Friday evening. It came out a bit underdone in the middle -- I think I set the timer for 45 minutes, should have been 50 or 55 -- and there's a horizontal-plane split that makes the top quarter of each slice inclined to split from the lower three quarters. Tastes pretty good, but not useful for anything resembling a sandwich. Probably ought to make another batch sooner than next weekend.

We've got almost all the held mail from our three-week trip to Spain: there's one package that the Post Office says is "held at customer request", but I went there yesterday with the tracking number and they couldn't find it. But we retrieved a box of dahlia bulbs from the next door neighbor, and a box of violet-adjacent baby plants arrived (and were planted) Friday afternoon. Gardening yesterday was postponed due to rain and wind, so we went to Trader Joe's and Home Depot instead (getting a bunch of potted plants at the latter). Today looks more promising on the weather front: we need to put in the aforementioned dahlias, and the pansies and violet-adjacents that shalmestere bought yesterday, and the Thai-chili and bush-bean plants that I bought yesterday, and I want to start some basil seeds indoors before moving them to the front lawn. And there are more bean seeds left from last year; might as well put those in too, so they produce a few weeks after the ones I bought yesterday in plant form.

When we returned from Spain, one of the smoke/CO detectors was chirping, not to say "please replace my batteries" but to say "please replace me". So I bought two new detectors (I think the one in the attic has completely given up the ghost, not even chirping) yesterday at Home Depot, and need to install them.

The two large suitcases we took to Spain have been emptied, nested with their smaller siblings, and put away in the attic. There's still a suitcase that shalmestere took to the living history show a month ago; I'm not sure what needs to be done with that stuff. And there are a few items of clothing that I took to the same living history show; I think they're clean enough that they only need to be put away.

This afternoon we're scheduled to attend the "celebration of life" for Richard Pace, a fixture of the NYC and Amherst early-music scenes. He was a decent amateur musician, specializing in voice and dulcian/bassoon, and a prolific fund-raiser, and he had a wonderful, infectious, boyish grin than I'm sure people will bring up repeatedly at the event. Immediately after that is an album-launch concert by local early-music group Alkemie which we may or may not get to depending on our energy levels.

It would be nice to accomplish some house-cleaning and stuff-triaging today, but I don't know how likely that is. There's Too Much Stuff piled up.

And as mentioned before, the weather is nice today, so we should walk the dogs in the park.

Spent much of Saturday at an SCA Crown Tournament, which was conveniently less than an hour and a half's drive from our home. Weather was lovely. We set up a musicians' gallery (inherited from Will McLean) facing the tournament field, and played three-part shawm music during and between bouts. Several people came by and thanked us for adding appropriate music to the event atmosphere, including the guy who was named Crown Prince at the end of the day. Had some logistical difficulties with the wind blowing sheet music off the stands.

After the new Prince was chosen, shalmestere and I had planned to go immediately home, but Deonna wanted to go to dinner together, and also wanted to stay for Court. So we watched Court, finished packing the cars, and went to a Thai restaurant -- which we picked because it was two miles away, but it turned out to be quite good. Drove home, tired and dehydrated. Got home about 10 PM, walked and fed the dogs, unpacked the car, and fell down boom.

An old friend of shalmestere's from the Chicago area was in town for a music workshop, and we agreed to meet her at the Cloisters before she flew home. She hadn't been to the Cloisters in over thirty years, so we were able to see a lot of our old favorites with new eyes. Again, the weather was lovely, and we walked around the various gardens of the Cloisters exclaiming over the useful herbs and beautiful flowers. We had brought a picnic lunch, which we ate while sitting on a stone wall in the park.

Then we drove home, made dinner, made some chocolate-chip scones, and watched a video of Saturday's UK Coronation. Still tired and dehydrated. But now it's Monday.

So we're going to an in-person SCA event, "Barleycorn", next weekend. It's a camping event, with most of the activities taking place outdoors, so I'm not too worried about plague, but still... as one of shalmestere's T-shirts says, "People -- ew!"

We were approached some months ago about providing music for court, which includes the stepping down of one set of Viceregents and the investiture of another, which means the Royalty have to be there, which means a number of Royal hangers-on have to be there. I asked some questions about what they wanted where and when, and received no reply until after Pennsic, at which point (with 2-1/2 weeks' notice) I learned that we were not only to provide music for court, but provide background music throughout the day (not a problem, as that's usually what we do for our own enjoyment anyway) and "be in charge of music at Barleycorn... coordinate with other musicians to provide music throughout the event."

Gulp. There's only so much we can do (or feel like doing) on 2-1/2 weeks' notice, and we didn't do anything about this last week because Stuff Happened, but if you're a musician who plans to attend Barleycorn and would be interested in performing something, either at the Queen's Tea, at Court, or in the general background, please contact me or Rufina.

It's one of the little ironies of the Covid Era that we're attending more early-music classes and concerts than we did in the last few years. Classes that would ordinarily be packed into a week of summer camp are instead conducted over Zoom, several per week (which also means we regularly see classmates and faculty from Hawaii and Germany), and concerts by ensembles in the San Francisco Bay Area or the Netherlands are just as easy to attend as those by ensembles in Boston or NYC. (And the faculty who teach these classes now have a steady trickle of workshop income throughout the year rather than earning it all in a month in the summer -- which is good, as many of them have "day jobs" that haven't been happening in the past year.)

Friday evening we watched this week's installment of "Wandavision" ("witches and robots"), as well as an early-music concert from Utrecht that had been filmed in 2019, back when they had a live audience. And I started a batch of sourdough bread.

Saturday morning we walked the dogs in the park. After noon we had the second in a four-class series on the development of Western music "from the early Middle Ages to the beginning of the Renaissance", followed shortly by an in-somewhat-more-depth class on Machaut's 1340-ish "Lai de la Fontaine". In the evening I had a video-chat with my mother, who sent a couple of photos of my week-old nephew (whom neither I nor she has met face-to-face yet). And somewhere in there we watched this week's episode of "Discovery of Witches" ("witches and vampires"). Shaped the bread into a loaf and left it to rise overnight.

Sunday morning we were up early for a Taborers' Society Play-In: no formal agenda, just a bunch of pipe-and-tabor players gathering over zoom and each performing a piece in turn for the rest to hear and praise. Most of them live in the UK, so it started at 8 AM our time (although one participant lives in Japan, where it was 10 PM, and one in Oregon, where it was 5 AM!) Shortly after that ended, we had a "medieval strings" class -- mostly vielles, although I played harp and switched to recorder when things got too chromatic -- by a teacher in Washington Heights, NYC. Then walked the dogs in the park, baked the bread, and ate brunch before printing off the sheet music for a Valentine's-day class in original notation on the Chansonnier Cordiforme, a 1460-ish collection of love songs in the shape of a (Valentine-style) heart. Then had a festive Valentine's Day dinner of pizza (mail-ordered from Chicago), watched a (Covid-era, socially-distanced) concert by Boston-area ensemble Blue Heron of love songs from the 1475-ish Leuven Chansonnier (discovered only in 2014), mixed down one of our multi-tracking experiments (a four-part shawm performance of "Buffons"), and practiced together a piece that D's preparing as homework for the next session of a four-class series on the early-15th-century Faenza Codex.

The Chansonnier Cordiforme class conflicted with a Renaissance lute concert by a dear old friend from the Midwest, but the concert doesn't require real-time interaction so we're going to watch it today.

1. Are you an Essential Worker?

Not really, but (a) I can easily work from home, and (b) my work-for-pay is tangentially related to CoViD-19. To wit: I work for Google Maps, which in the past month has dealt with tens of millions of "temporarily closed" businesses, tens of millions more changes in business hours, the invention of new kinds of business hours like "senior citizens only", the invention of new kinds of geographic features such as "CoViD-19 Testing Center" (some of which the local government doesn't want publicized because it would be swamped), etc.

2. How many drinks have you had since the quarantine has started?

Two to four times a week we have a chocolate avocado milkshake at bedtime, including 2 oz. of some kind of liqueur (one "drink") in a milkshake that serves two people. So, one to two "drinks" per week.

3. If you have kids... Are they driving you nuts?

No kids, two dogs, who are LOVING the increased time with us and the opportunity to walk in the park in the middle of the day.

4. What new hobby have you taken up during this?

None, really. We have a bunch of long-term construction and home-improvement projects that are progressing slightly faster under Stay At Home than they would have otherwise.

Oh, I've planted some bean and squash seeds in the front yard and in planters in the back yard. I figure green beans and squash are both almost impossible to kill, and will produce a bunch of food with minimal tending.

And I've been lifting weights more often than before -- probably every other day.

5. How many grocery runs have you done?

Probably two a week, although we're trying to keep it down to one. The limiting factors are milk and salad greens. My mother is horrified that I'm going out that often: she goes shopping every two weeks or so under normal circumstances, and is down to once a month now. We've had a couple of grocery deliveries, mostly specialty stuff like sausages from a German butcher; haven't yet hooked up with an ordinary grocery store that can promise delivery before May.

6. What are you spending your stimulus check on?

Not expecting to get one, because we're in the top 5% of the U.S. income distribution. Revisiting our annual charity list to make extra donations to especially CoViD-impacted organizations (Meals On Wheels, City Harvest, Red Cross, etc.) Employer's matching limit has been raised for this year.

7. Do you have any special occasions that you will miss during this quarantine?

A bunch of summer early-music workshops have been postponed or cancelled. But the people who would have been running them are instead running early-music classes by Zoom, which usually works OK unless you want to hear one another in real time. Pennsic may or may not happen, and if it does, we may not go because the thought of staying in a dense tent city with dubious sanitation and people converging from all over the world is terrifying at the moment.

8. Are you keeping your housework done?

No better than usual.

9a. What movie have you watched during this quarantine?

See this post. No others that I recall.

9b. What are you reading right now?

Too much news.

9c. What video game are you playing?

Turn-based civilization-building or empire-building games like FreeOrion, FreeCiv, FreeCol. Entirely too many hours.

10. What are you streaming with?

FiOS, which comes with phone and Internet as well as a few hundred channels of TV. We haven't historically watched enough TV to make any of the strictly-TV services worth the cost.

11. 9 months from now is there any chance of you having a baby?

No.

12. What's your go-to quarantine meal?

One thing I've been making more often than before (because I have more time between waking up and work-for-pay) is custardy oatmeal. Boil 1/2 cup of water, add 1/2 cup of old-fashioned rolled oats (plus salt, honey, cinnamon, whatever), and cook for a few minutes while beating an egg or two and microwaving 1/2 cup of milk. Drizzle the milk into the egg, beating constantly. Add to the oats and cook for a few minutes more, stirring constantly until it thickens into custard.

Oh, and I've been baking a loaf of sourdough bread every ~5 days, up from every ~10 days before the pestilence.

13. Is this whole situation making you paranoid?

No. I don't see any evidence that anybody's out to get me or us in particular, or even that there's much of an intentional conspiracy, only a rare confluence of greed, corruption, mendacity, and incompetence that was bad news even before the pestilence.

14. Has your internet gone out on you during this time?

Nope.

15. What month do you predict this all ends?

Some face-to-face businesses will be able to reopen in a month or two, with restrictions, but we won't be back to the status quo of six months ago for at least two years. On the bright side, the next few cold-and-flu seasons may be less bad because everybody has developed habits of hand-washing, social distance, and mask-wearing. Also on the bright side, the economic shutdown may have bought us a few weeks' delay in global warming.

16. First thing you're gonna do when you get off quarantine?

Dinner out and a concert.

17. Where do you wish you were right now?

Actually, I'm pretty happy where I am right now.

18. What free-from-quarantine activity are you missing the most?

Dinner out and a concert.

19. Have you run out of toilet paper and hand sanitizer?

No. We had a decent amount of TP, and installed a "hand-held bidet" a month ago that has reduced demand for it. We didn't have hand sanitizer before, and still don't.

20. Do you have enough food to last a month?

Perhaps, including all the dried and frozen stuff. It would get a little weird towards the end of the month as we got down to the ingredients in the backs of the cupboards that we'd forgotten about years ago. Storage space, particularly frozen, is a limiting factor. We seriously contemplated getting a small trunk freezer last fall, but it would have required calling an electrician to put in a new line, and we didn't get around to doing that before the Pestilence.

21. Anything else?

We're basically enjoying the stay-at-home situation. The air is cleaner than usual, the streets are quieter than usual, there's less traffic than usual, and we're not spending hours a day on mass transit. We're both still employed and doing something resembling our usual jobs, so we're not suffering economically, and we're both sufficiently introverted to be not suffering socially. Feeling a bit guilty about not suffering enough.

Saturday late morning: shalmestere and I went into Manhattan for a Viola Da Gamba Dojo concert at St. John's in the Village, a cute little church where we've heard a couple of early-music concerts before. Then went around the corner to a barbecue restaurant for dinner. Came home, tired. I don't know why this relatively mild schedule should have been so tiring -- at least shalmestere was actively playing music, while I spent most of the time just sitting in the pews reading or doing Google-work. But I made a start on this year's income taxes, which I think I can do without paying Turbo Tax or anybody else for the privilege.

Soaked Moongrrl's foot. The corn seems to be emerging a bit.

Sunday: I woke up, earlier than I intended to but later than usual, with Moongrrl panting. I thought she might need to go out, so I took her downstairs, whereupon she lay down on a nest and stopped panting. I offered her some water, because I'd been pretty dehydrated overnight, but she wasn't interested. So I started soaking the Romertopf to bake bread. (I had fed the starter Thursday night, made a sponge Friday night, added eggs, salt, and more flour Saturday morning, and formed a loaf Saturday night.) Fed dogs, walked dogs, set a beef roast to lying in salt (which should ideally have happened the night before), baked bread, and went back to work on the taxes. shalmestere woke up, and I made pancakes for brunch.

We both had showers, and the drain clogged: I got some hair and gunk out of it with the plunger, but it was still clogged, so I went to the basement to get the snake. Which also didn't seem to make much progress, although I eventually got the water level low enough that it wasn't standing in the tub (but left a bunch of gunk in the tub). In the evening, I tried to rinse out the remaining gunk, and it didn't go away, but at least the water drained more quickly. Still need to do some scrubbing and apply some drain-clearing compound.

shalmestere did several loads of laundry. I soaked Moongrrl's foot again.

I didn't make any progress on the (first) bedside table, but retrieved from the basement the thrift-store lamps we were planning to put on the bedside tables once both of them are built: confirmed that (a) the electrical connections work, (b) both lamps will need some gluing before I feel secure putting bulbs into them, and (c) both lamps need shades, but currently have no harps onto which to attach shades.

I made more progress on the taxes. We make too much money to use free-file, but we can use "free file fillable forms", in which there's minimal software support but at least you can fill out the forms on a computer, it does much of the arithmetic for you, and you can e-file. At the state level, we make too much money to e-file without paying a tax-prep company for the privilege, but there are forms one can fill in on a computer, it does much of the arithmetic for you, and you then print out the forms on dead trees and mail them in, because e-filing would hurt the business models of the tax-prep-software companies. And some of the forms have bugs. There's a line on Federal Schedule 1 that says "please attach Form 8889", and it'll automatically fill in the 1040 line from form 8889, except that form 8889 isn't actually available on-line -- I presume because the relevant law was changed in December, and they haven't finished implementing it in software yet. And on State form IT-196, line 42 is supposed to be auto-computed from lines 40 and 41, but in fact it ignores line 40, so line 42 is always zero, and I can't fill it in by myself because it's auto-computed, so the subsequent lines are wrong.

Mid-afternoon: the bread had cooled enough to try some. Much tastier than the previous batch: not only did I remember the salt, but I think I gave it a longer rise time. Yum!

Made and ate dinner -- roast beef and Brussels sprouts, both producing leftovers.

After dinner, we (mostly shalmestere) took most of the ornaments off the Christmas tree, found the appropriate boxes to put them in, and played Tetris to get those boxes into bigger boxes and the bigger boxes onto a shelf in the basement until next December.

Also looked at Moongrrl's foot. With a nail-trimmer, I managed to remove a majority of the corn that's been in her toe for months. Maybe she'll limp less now. Still needs more soaking to get out the remainder.

I was expecting, by now, to be en route to, if not at, the site for Musicians' Day, an early-music slumber party for thirty friends and acquaintances in a lodge in the woods, with a day of classes, hours of jamming, good food, a roaring fireplace, and all that stuff.

But when the first attendees arrived at the site (several hours before I could get there), they found another group already in the lodge, swearing that they had it reserved through Sunday evening, and had had it reserved since January. (We also were sure we had it reserved since January.) The organizer of the other group works for the Parks Department, and called the Park Superintendent on his private line to see what was up; he says the Superintendent confirms that he has the lodge reserved and we don't. I haven't talked to the Superintendent myself, nor have I been able to get anybody at the park to answer a phone in several days -- I've spent at least an hour wandering through touch-tone phone trees searching in vain for a human being.

Anyway, the event is cancelled on the shortest of notice. A good number of the attendees are probably still on the road driving to the site, and others may arrive tomorrow morning. #^*%^$^&%$*%^&

A number of our favorite early-music recording artists (e.g. Ciaramella, Ex Umbris) have recently been slumming in the 17th century, playing ornamentation or improvisation over grounds such as Chaconne, La Folia, Passamezzo (of whatever age), etc. So after listening to some of these on CD this evening, I went to Home Depot looking for late-night cup-hooks and sand, still whistling variations on the Chaconne, and suddenly over the loudspeaker come the first notes of... "Bodyguard".