Lost Link

Some time ago -- a year, two years? -- I came across an article on the technical demands of music. I think it might have been linked to from Elaine Fine's blog, Musical Assumptions (to which I commend you anyway), but I can't find it there.

I remember quite clearly that it used a typing analogy, comparing playing music to copy-typing, but in a specific rhythm, in time with others, with precise pressure on each key according to how bold the letters are on the page, and having to get everything right. It went into more detail than that and explained the process far better than I can.

I can't find it anywhere. Has anyone seen it?

Ssssssomething a little different

I'm trying to find more local teaching. Rather than having the same old boring poster for piano lessons I thought I'd advertise a bit differently...




I've chopped off the bottom line for security reasons as I don't want my telephone number all over the internet, but please leave a comment or contact me via twitter if you are interested in lessons!

Song for October Ending

In around 2006 I wrote this SATB setting of a poem by my grandmother. The weather is a bit autumnal here today and a few people were talking about things they like about autumn, so I thought I'd post it even though it's two months early.

SONG FOR OCTOBER ENDING

For a season
cold rain imprisons us; our lives
circle around coffee cups,
blue teapots,
things simmering on the stove,
baking in the oven.

We
make jams, jellies and
press
radiant leaves
between slices of waxed paper.
Preserve the days.

Warmth imprints our lives
Warmth is the imprint
of our love.

----

I haven't made a recording, I ought to work on that at some stage.

Psalter Commons

I have a new project! It's called Psalter Commons and I would love your help with it.

I'd like the words of the psalms to be freely available for liturgy and study, but copyright law means the only truly free translations are quite old.

If you have translated or paraphrased a psalm or many psalms, please feel free to add the texts! They don't need to have music, though if you do have music that's great too. If you know of existing public domain psalters not listed on the category page please add those, too, preferably with links. Using a wiki is easy and quicky, er, quick.

More background details:

I have often whinged about the lack of freely-accessible, modern-language, metrical settings of psalms available these days. The older psalms available in the public domain are glorious! I do love them, and I'm very glad to have a chance to sing them fairly regularly in London Gallery Quire (though I play the serpent more often than I sing, I still get to read the words as I usually play from a vocal score). However, the language is considered archaic by many, and in some cases the translations are a bit suspect too, compared to modern scholarship.

There are modern metrical translations. Some of them are even included in the Christian Copyright Licensing Initiative (CCLI), which means that for a fee and with a lot of paperwork, we're allowed to make copies of the words -- if we've already bought a copy of whatever book they're in. That's admirable, but for a small parish like St Andrew's it's still a pretty high barrier to use. Why not just release them under a CC-BY-SA license and let everyone use them? Then I would be able to write my own musical settings if I wanted to, or set them to existing hymn tunes where appropriate.

There are accessibility difficulties with prose translations, too. The Common Worship Psalter publication terms aren't too bad for liturgical use but if I want to use that material in a separate piece of music I have to write an ask for permission. The Coverdale psalms which are usually bound with the Book of Common Prayer, and those in the King James Authorised Version of the bible, are commonly thought to be in the public domain, but in the UK they're actually under strange special copyright laws which mean that, again, I would need to ask for permission to use them.

So, I was having my usual moan and a friend offered to set up and host a wiki. It seemed like a better idea than just whingeing, so I said yes.

I hope that Psalter Commons will eventually become a valuable resource for anyone interested in the psalms for study and liturgical purposes. It will take a lot more work than I could do myself, which is why a wiki makes so much sense -- now others who are interested can join in. Please do, and please send this page to others who might be interested.

Alive and well.

I'm not in London at the moment, and where I am is perfectly safe.

St Andrew's Leytonstone will be open tomorrow from 11am to 3pm for prayer and for discussing concerns and responses to the London riots.

I might do a more in-depth post later. In the meantime if you want to help please see http://wiki.crisiscommons.org/wiki/London_Riots for information on how to do so.

Multi-tracking chant experiment

This is a brief experiment with multi-tracking chant.

Creator lucis optime (English) by artsyhonker

You see, I've got this hare-brained idea about podcasting a sung Compline online, possibly in some kind of Whitacre-style virtual choir. That's hard to coordinate, with chant: the pulse is directed by the words, so metronome markings are no help, for starters. But gathering together a little schola cantorum to come and sing with me in person once a week or once a month seems equally daunting. And I worry that singing Compline by myself is just going to sound a bit daft; there are too many responsorial bits, really.

So I thought I'd take something simple and see whether I can sing chant with myself, so to speak. In went the headphones and out came the hymnal to select something I'd not sung before. The results are... instructive, really. This will need a lot of work on intonation and timing before I'm happy to do an entire Compline. I did actually cheat and "mute" some sections of some voices in one or two places where the timing was just unbearably out of sync; I didn't do any other fancy stuff, though. What you hear is what I sang.

I guess if I want an online Compline to be a recording of an actual prayer, rather than something that takes hours of editing and re-recording to get into acceptable shape for posting online, I need to find some people to sing with me, or get used to the idea of singing alone.

There are, of course, other folks who put this sort of thing online. Most seem to be regular "Compline choirs" in the US, who rehearse regularly, or monastic groups with their daily Office available as podcasts. I'm not entirely sure how what I want to offer would be significantly different, and maybe I need to figure that out, too. On a very basic level, I'd like it to be something that encourages people to join in. That means providing links to the text and preferably to notation with the text underlaid, not just an audio file as I have above.

A little something for Canada Day

I had a horn teacher who had the custom, on Canada Day, of taking his canoe out to the middle of the lake and playing "O Canada" on the horn.

I lack a boat, the nearest lake has rather a lot of traffic noise and I'm a bit disorganised. So instead, here is a recording of me playing "O Canada" on the serpent.

O Canada by artsyhonker