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old cassette tapes and the secrets they hold
I discovered two differently-embarrassing things while processing some old audio cassette tapes today.
Item the first:
I had completely forgotten, until I came across the evidence, that early in On the Mark's existence we had booked a concert hall at CMU to record a demo tape (so we could apply to arts festivals, I believe). I know we used connections and not money but I've forgotten the details. (This wasn't a concert; it was just us, the good acoustics of the hall, recording equipment, and an engineer who knew how to drive it.) The technical quality of the tape is very good (I wonder who the engineer was); the content is, well, what you would expect from a young, not-yet-seasoned amateur group, but some of it is pretty good, good enough that I'm certainly keeping it.
This tape, which has long since become separated from its J-card, contains an instrumental piece, renaissance by the feel of it, that I cannot identify -- even though I performed and recorded it! It is not among the instrumental pieces that we ever published on our CDs, so that's no help. It is not among the pieces that the Debatable Consort published on its CD tracks (from the Tape of Dance project). And at that point in OTM's lifespan I was not keeping historical notes about repertoire, so if we dropped a song I deleted its entry from the master cheat sheet. If the other group members can't identify it I will have to resort to digging through piles of sheet music, no small task. Or settle for "Unknown" as the title among my mp3s. Or post it and ask y'all to take a crack at it. Oops.
Item the second:
I was in a short-lived folk-music group before On the Mark. We performed at exactly one SF con. And in listening to that tape now, it's clear that a polite audience could not possibly have made it any clearer that we should stop singing and just play the instrumentals, but we didn't pick up on that during the concert. We figured we were taking a risk by doing instrumental pieces at a con in the first place -- not only weren't we doing filk but we weren't even doing words? How crazy is that? And in reality, that was our best, and best-received, stuff and we should have done more of it.
Item the first:
I had completely forgotten, until I came across the evidence, that early in On the Mark's existence we had booked a concert hall at CMU to record a demo tape (so we could apply to arts festivals, I believe). I know we used connections and not money but I've forgotten the details. (This wasn't a concert; it was just us, the good acoustics of the hall, recording equipment, and an engineer who knew how to drive it.) The technical quality of the tape is very good (I wonder who the engineer was); the content is, well, what you would expect from a young, not-yet-seasoned amateur group, but some of it is pretty good, good enough that I'm certainly keeping it.
This tape, which has long since become separated from its J-card, contains an instrumental piece, renaissance by the feel of it, that I cannot identify -- even though I performed and recorded it! It is not among the instrumental pieces that we ever published on our CDs, so that's no help. It is not among the pieces that the Debatable Consort published on its CD tracks (from the Tape of Dance project). And at that point in OTM's lifespan I was not keeping historical notes about repertoire, so if we dropped a song I deleted its entry from the master cheat sheet. If the other group members can't identify it I will have to resort to digging through piles of sheet music, no small task. Or settle for "Unknown" as the title among my mp3s. Or post it and ask y'all to take a crack at it. Oops.
Item the second:
I was in a short-lived folk-music group before On the Mark. We performed at exactly one SF con. And in listening to that tape now, it's clear that a polite audience could not possibly have made it any clearer that we should stop singing and just play the instrumentals, but we didn't pick up on that during the concert. We figured we were taking a risk by doing instrumental pieces at a con in the first place -- not only weren't we doing filk but we weren't even doing words? How crazy is that? And in reality, that was our best, and best-received, stuff and we should have done more of it.
no subject
I think the mystery music might be a William Byrd piece
What I remember is that Kathy transcribed it into multiple parts and we learned it, and that it was sometime before we started calling ourselves "Ensemble Rigodon" in our early-music incarnation, and it was while Andrea was still with us.
What I don't remember, is exactly when that was. So this mystery piece might not be that one.
As I recall, to record that demo tape we pretty much went over to the College of Fine Arts, and asked. We'd been pointed to a particular studio over there and a recording engineer whose name I can't remember either, but we also had to get through a little bit of Fine Arts bureaucracy.
I remember pointing out, while we were speaking with somebody who could grant us access, that it seemed as if at CMU the question of whether or not a particular thing was "art" seemed to be resolved largely by asking who was doing it, and if they were an "artist" then it was "art." My point was that we were asking for an open-minded consideration of our status as performing artists on campus, even though we were classed in our normal CMU lives as geeks, not as artists. To their everlasting credit, Fine Arts basically said, "Sure, why not?" and we got the use of space and equipment to do that demo tape.
It was a hot week in about July of 1992 and I was in my second month of chemo and feeling pretty much like the inside of a damp cereal box, but as I recall the sessions went quite well, especially given that the group was, if not still in its infancy, at least not much beyond the toddler stage.
--Marion/Marian
Re: I think the mystery music might be a William Byrd piece
I'll ask Kathy if that description rings any bells to her.