Overheard at last night's choir party:

Director: ...And I told (another choir's director) that we have five tenors now and quite a few basses too, and she was blown away. [Context: for whatever reason, SCA choirs and maybe amateur choirs in general have a lot of trouble getting enough tenors. Our choir has about 25 members and five tenors is considered very good.]

Transgender tenor: Some of our tenors used to be sopranos.¹ She could suggest...

Other choir member: In the Debatable Choir we make tenors!

¹ Two, in fact. There is also a woman in the bass section (who hasn't undergone physical changes thus far).

I'm home from Pennsic. Brief notes in the form of bullet points:

• My good friend Yaakov HaMizrachi was elevated to the Order of the Laurel! Yay! The Laurel is the SCA's highest award (peerage) for arts and sciences. He's also now known (additionally) as Yaakov HaMagid, Yaakov the Storyteller. The ceremony felt like a reunion of old friends, and it was a nice touch that they had his son chant the scroll (in Hebrew).

• The part of Atlantian court that I attended (because of the previous) was very well-done and engaging. I don't live there, I don't know most of those people, and yet I was not bored. They moved things along without it feeling rushed, and everybody speaking from the stage could be heard clearly. They also mixed it up, instead of doing all recipients of one award and then moving on to the next. Sprinkling the peerages throughout the court works well and, really, it's not a big deal for order members to get up more than once in an evening. (Also, if peerage ceremonies are burdensomely long -- theirs weren't; ours sometimes are -- it's nice to be able to sit down between them.)

• I don't think I've ever heard "we're ahead of schedule; let's take a 10-minute break" in the middle of court before, though. I wonder if someone on the stage had an urgent need?

• They elevated another bard to the Laurel, and that one sang his oath of fealty. While he was doing so I wondered if the king would respond in song -- and he did. That he used the same melody suggests some advance coordination (beyond "we're singing"), I wonder which of them wrote the king's words.

• I had long, enjoyable conversations with both Yaakov and Baron Steffan. I miss the deep email conversations I used to have with both of them, before the great fragmenting of the digital-communication world (some to email, some to blogs/LJ/DW, some to Facebook, some to Google+, some to Twitter, some to places I don't even know about). It's harder to track and stay in touch with people than it used to be.

• No I am still not going to start using Facebook. It's frustrating that by declining to do so I miss more and more stuff, but I'm not ready to let yet another thing compete to be the center of my online life. Also, Facebook in particular is icky in some important ways.

• SCA local group, that means you too. Plans for a baronial party at Pennsic were, as far as I can tell, announced only on Facebook. (I've checked my email back to the beginning of April, so no I didn't just forget.) And thus I did not bring a contribution for your pot-luck. I do not feel guilty about that.

• The Debatable Choir performance went very well. I conducted a quartet singing Sicut Cervus (by Palestrina), which I think went well. Two of the four singers had not previously done a "one voice to a part" song with the choir, and I'm proud of them for stepping up and doing a great job. I hope we got a recording.

• I went to a fascinating class on medieval Jewish astrology (taught by Yaakov in persona). I've seen zodiacs in ancient (and modern) Jewish art and in synagogues, and a part of me always wondered how this isn't forbidden. It turns out that astrology is more of an "inclination", a yetzer, than a hard-and-fast truth -- there are stories in the talmud where astrology predicted something bad but the person, through good deeds, avoided the bad outcome. Also, in case you're wondering (like I did, so I asked), the zodiac signs get some solar smoothing, so if there's a leap-month (Adar Bet) there's not a 13th sign in those years.

• Our camp has two wooden buildings (besides the house on the trailer, I mean), which we wanted to sell this year because we're making a new kitchen trailer that will replace both of them. We succeeded in selling the larger one (yay!). Maybe we'll be able to sell the other next year. (We'll set it up and use it for something else, because potential buyers would want to see it set up.)

• Overall the weather was good. There were big storms on the first Friday ("quick, grab snacks and alcohol and head for the house!" is our camp's rallying cry), but only occasional rain after that and it wasn't sweltering-hot, which makes a huge difference.

• The last headcount I saw was around 10,500.

This was my 32nd Pennsic. As best I can recall, we had the best weather I've ever had at Pennsic. That is the opposite of what I was anticipating; late July in western PA is usually hot and sticky, except for brief interludes where downpours turn dirt roads into mud (but with no lasting relief from the heat and humidity). And yet, the weather was nearly perfect -- highs mostly in the 70s (sometimes low 80s), lows mostly in the 50s (maybe upper 40s one night; you did bring blankets, right?), a little rain but nothing severe or that killed a whole day. Nice!

Several friends I enjoy hanging out with didn't attend this year for various reasons, and I never managed to connect with osewalrus (who was there) and his family. Drat!

Attendance was just under 10,000 this year, for the first time in (I'm told) almost 20 years. Between being a week earlier and being truncated (see later in this post), I'm guessing that people for whom it's a significant effort or expense decided that this was a good year to skip.

There were some fun moments and "quotable quotes" in camp this year, all of which I am currently failing to remember. Maybe later.

Performances

I saw performances by three commedia del'arte troupes this year. I Verdi Confusi, the newest (I think this was their third Pennsic), had an ambitious plot. It's good to reach beyond your grasp; it's how you grow. I look forward to more growth. Their Capitano had the audience reciting his trademark long name along with him (multiple times), which is a good sign. I Sebastiani went in a different direction than I'm used to from them -- more slapstick and an all-out food fight at the end. The chef was a new character and well-done; did they invent that character or is it a stock commedia character I haven't seen before? I'm guessing the former. I Genesii gave a really good performance, and I'm not just saying that because they're the local troupe. They've really gelled as a company and their show was a lot of fun.

The Debatable Choir concert went well, I thought. (There exists a recording, though I haven't heard it yet.) We had one song that, in its original form, was theologically problematic for me (a messianic text in past tense, from some gospel), but fortunately we were able to change two syllables to make it future tense instead. (Thanks baron_steffan for the Latin assist!) I figured that was a good solution as everybody who believes in a messiah at all believes one's coming in the future, though it might have offended some Christian purists. Since it makes the difference between me being able to sing it and not, I can live with that.

I've never sung in the Known World Choir; there's almost always at least one religious piece that I would have a problem with, and while I can negotiate such things with the choir I sing with every week, I'm not going to try to deal with that for a once-a-year choir. It turned out that this year's concert, as best I could tell, contained absolutely nothing objectionable (some pieces weren't translated but sounded secular). And they even did a Salamone Rossi piece! (Though not one of his better ones.) So I should have sung, had I but known. But on the other hand, this year's director made the justifiable-but-inconvenient decision to forbid gender-inappropriate voice parts, meaning no women singing tenor. (I get it; it's a timber thing. Male and female voices just plain sound different, with vanishingly few exceptions.) I usually sing tenor because that's where my comfortable range is, but also because many alto lines are uncomfortably high. (Why is it ok to expect altos to hit a high D but not ok to expect a high A, a fifth higher, from sopranos?) So eh, but lesson learned -- I'll check out the music next year and consider singing. Meanwhile, I enjoyed this year's concert.

Last year I sang in Chorulus Pennsicus, a new, by-audition small group that practices and performs at Pennsic, so I was minded to sit out this year (not be greedy) unless this year's music really grabbed me. It didn't, so I sat out, which should let me join next year (depending on music, of course). I enjoyed listening to them, though I don't envy them trying to learn that big long French piece with animal sounds in just a few practices. :-)

Scheduling

In addition to being a week earlier (one-time change) this Pennsic was also shortened by a day at the end. I failed to judge just how much this would affect things; by the time I got there (Thursday of the first week -- only Thursday!) classes that looked interesting had already been taught and wouldn't be taught again. It used to be that many classes taught in the first few days were repeated later.

There were also effects at the other end. Since the event closed (a) on Saturday and (b) at noon on Saturday (rather than the 3PM that is the traditional close time), a lot of people left on Friday, some on Thursday, and even on Wednesday the patches of brown grass where tents had been were appearing. (Noon isn't late enough for canvas to be dry before packing -- no small matter if you're going to drive all day to get home.) I always leave on Friday due to Shabbat, but this year we packed the camp on Friday. It felt weird.

There's also something abut this change that angers me (even though, as noted, I wouldn't be there on Saturday anyway). Everybody has been assuming that this one-day shift came from the Coopers, because of the convention coming in after us (that also led to Pennsic being a week early). But no, that's not it at all -- the Pennsic staff decided to end the event a day early, and did nothing to correct the popular misimpression. That's poor form: they should own their decision, first off, and I think they also owe the attendees and all the people who work hard on the event an explanation. There is a rumor going around that they intend for this to be a permanent change; I'll be writing to the seneschals of the three governing kingdoms about that, and I hope others will join me.

Finally...

There was a really gorgeous sunset one night in the second week. These photos don't do it justice (there was less yellow and more orange), but have some pictures anyway:

The baron of our local SCA group runs an occasional open-mic night at a local club, so he asked our choir to perform tonight. We said "renaissance choral music? really?" and he said yes, so we went and sang five short songs (two in English, three not). I couldn't actually see the audience very well (dark club), so I don't know how much of the enthusiastic response we got was due to local shills and how much due to the regular crowd liking this change of pace. But either way, that was fun.

There are some unwritten rules of these sorts of things. One is to support the other performers -- stick around, applaud, consider buying a CD (especially if they bought yours). When we walked in the act then on stage was not at all to my taste and I wondered how typical that would be, but it turned out there was a wide variety and many of the performers were very good. I've forgotten most of their names (I need to ask the baron for a list), but one of the surprises of the night for me was Double Shot. I don't even know the name of that genre and it's not something I would normally listen to, but the singing was good and their stage presence was excellent. Cool. There were also a few singers with guitar (one reminded me, stylistically, of Michael Spiro in his college-circuit days), a band with guitar, bass, and drums, an a-capella singer doing folk songs, and others. (We heard people call it "a-capella night", though as noted there were instruments.)

During the show I found myself thinking of songs I'd like to perform there and wondering about standing up a group (On the Mark or otherwise) for the occasional night like this, but it'll probably never happen. The performers there were mostly regular performers doing a circuit or with other gigs, while what I'm thinking of would be targetted -- get good musicians together on a Sunday, learn three songs or so, and perform them the next night; that sort of thing. I don't know if that could get traction with either other musicians or the people who run open-mic nights.

I also realized belatedly that attending this sort of thing has only become really feasible for me in the last several years, since Pittsburgh banned smoking in restaurants. On the Mark did a few coffeehouses/clubs/etc back in the day, and while the music was good the environment was sometimes toxic. I love music, but not enough to sit in a cloud of smoke for a night.

This year at Pennsic the Debatable Choir will celebrate our 25th anniversary. Wow. No one has been a member for all 25 of those years, but we have some long-time members and three of the founders are still around. It pleases me that even with the weight of that much tradition, we add new members fairly regularly -- along with the dinosaurs we have people who've only joined us in the last year or so.

The Pennsic performance includes a bunch of our own favorites, and I think it's going to be a blast. Anyone who's sung with us in the past is invited to join us for one song; I know a few of my readers are past members, so y'all come. :-) (Email me to find out what song.)

And this month we're recording a CD. Our first recording session is next week. I think we sounded really good at practice tonight; of course a recording reveals all, but I think we've done a good job of preparing. I'm really looking forward to this.

This Pennsic the Debatable Choir will mark its 25th anniversary. (Whether this is actually the 25th anniversary depends on how you count some early proto-choir formations, but this doesn't really matter. It's 25th anniversary observed. :-) ) We've started working on the music for it and I am jazzed. This is going to be fun, and is looking to be a longer concert than we usually do, which makes me happy.

ariannawyn asked me to direct one piece, which we started last week. Somewhere around a third of the choir (maybe a little more) has sung it before though not recently, and at least one person who hasn't is an excellent sight-reader, so after two practices at which we also did other music, people know it well enough that we can start putting some shape to it next week (dynamics, paying attention to what the words mean, that sort of thing). Except I short-changed the altos this week on going through parts, so I'll have to make it up to them.

I've lost track of how long I've been in the choir. I was one of the original members, but I took two breaks. I think I've been there for about 20 of the 25 years, but it never seemed important back then to track such things. There are two other original members, also with gaps (for moves to other cities, in their cases). But we manage to have a good supply of newer members too, so even though the choir is approximately a quarter-century old, we have plenty of vim and vigor and lots of fun.

But I must admit that even after that many years of choral singing, I just cannot wrap my head around French. Italian? Sure, no problem -- I don't speak the language at all but I don't think you'd know that from my singing of it. Latin? I understand a little of it but it's basically like Italian in my brain. Hebrew (we're doing one Hebrew piece)? I understand what we're singing; no problems there. English? Mostly fine; the 12th-century stuff is rough but we're not working on any of that right now. German? Eh, I can make it work. But French, on the other hand, to my brain is nothing but a sequence of random-ish phonemes with "eur" sounds mixed in. Memorizing French songs really challenges me. I don't know why. Fortunately for me, currently the Italian songs outnumber the French ones in the concert list. :-)

Last night at choir practice a member asked me to sing in a subgroup that she'll be directing. Naturally, much medieval and renaissance music is religious (particularly Catholic), which poses problems for me, so when I was handed music without a translation I knew I'd have to do a quick check. The process went something like this:

Language: Latin or Italian. I don't recognize most of these words and I don't see any of the markers that would tell me it's Italian. (That doesn't mean it's not; I only know either language to sing, really.) Skim skim skim... aha, there's an "aleiluia" [1] at the end; suspicion is Latin and sacred. Nope, still don't see any obvious problems like references to Jesus or the trinity or Mary. Still don't know Latin. Ok, off to Google.

Oh! Yes, sacred, but it would never have occurred to me that John Dunstable would set this popular passage from Song of Songs. Ok, I can work with that. :-) (But wherever did they get that translation? Here, try this one. Are we seeing the effects of two other languages between the Hebrew and English? Does the Latin really say what CPDL says it does?)

The performances I've heard of this song are somewhat ponderous and somber, not at all matching the text (either version :-) ). I'm not sure how much of that is driven by the music itself and how much by performance decisions. (I haven't started to learn it yet, but I did download the Encore source so I can play with it.) I wonder what we'll do with it. It should be fun.

[1] In Latin texts we sometimes see "Alleluia" and sometimes "Hallelujah". I can see how a listener could get the former from the latter, since a leading 'h' is pretty weak, but this is not an oral tradition. Is there some semantic difference between the two?

And now for something completely different...

The husband of a member of the Debatable Choir posted video from our Pennsic performance.

I didn't know enough chemistry to fully parse this geeky comic by ohiblather, but I still laughed out loud when I saw it.

xiphias reports research that seems to be begging for an IgNobel award. As he points out, it's worthy because first it makes you laugh and then it makes you think. I mean, what publishable conclusion would you expect from researchers doing an MRI on a dead salmon?

I feel fortunate that "talk like a pirate day" fell on Rosh Hashana, meaning I was shielded from most of the antics. But I enjoyed top ten halachic problems for a Jewish pirate, forwarded by dglenn. Should I be worried that I have defensible answers for several of them?

Fun website mash-ups from metahacker and others. From one of the comments: "OKAmazon: People who had sex with this person also liked..."

Signal boost: kyleri makes hand creams, lip balms, soaps, and similar items, and she is currently having a sale. I bought some of her creams at Pennsic and am happy with the results.

I haven't turned off the spelling checker in Firefox on this machine yet because I do sometimes make typos that it catches, but this post almost made me do so. :-)

I don't know when I'll get around to writing a fuller report, but here are a few bits. (Pictures will definitely have to wait until I get back from NHC.)

( Read more... )

I've mentioned before that my synagogue maintains a freezer of donated, cooked food to have on hand for houses of mourning, families where someone's sick, and similar acute cases of need. I think this is a great idea; if you're cooking anyway you can cook a little more to donate and help someone out. Yesterday I got email from the person who monitors this saying they're low on meat and pareve dishes, so tonight I'm roasting an oven-full of chicken to take over (less one meal's worth for ourselves this week), and tomorrow night I will make some vegetarian soup. I love being able to help in this way.

Speaking of soups, recently Dani and I were at a restaurant where I had a really fabulous butternut-squash soup. This one was dairy (I detected cream), and I couldn't identify all the spices. Web-surfing has led me to some promising recipes; I'm open to specific suggestions. I have now procured one butternut squash with which to experiment.

I'm about 40% of the way through the second book of His Dark Materials. I am pretty sure I know what the deal was with Grummon (the explorer Asriel went off in search of). So either I'm right or the author is being clever and has something up his sleeve. It feels pretty darn obvious, so I'm not ruling out the latter. (No, please don't tell me; I'll know on my own soon.)

The local SCA choir is singing at an event this weekend. I think we sounded really good at Monday's practice; I'm looking forward to the performance. We'll also be doing one piece jointly with our instrumental group, which is nifty. We haven't done that in years.

Jericho returns for a short second season (half-season?) next week. I really liked this show, so I'm glad to see it unharmed by the writers' strike. Whether it is harmed by its network is yet to be seen. (They cancelled it and then responded to a fan campaign.)

Assorted links (most sources lost, sorry):

Baby dos and don'ts. That the site is not in English really doesn't matter.

Surfing cat. It's not entirely clear to me that this is the cat's idea.

Joel on Software recommends Tripit for keeping track of the assorted confirmation numbers involved in travelling. Sounds useful especially for us infrequent travellers who don't have the routine down already.

Bruce Schneier on security versus privacy. Too many people think it's a zero-sum game; it's not.

Bookmarking (haven't finished reading yet): Rands in Repose on preparing presentations. It's odd: in most contexts public speaking is, ahem, not my strong suit. Really not my strong suit, even in fields I know very well. I get nervous and fumbly-mouthed. The exception? While I'm not as skilled at the mechanics yet as I'd like to be, giving sermons or divrei torah does not make me nervous.

I pass this on too late for voters in half the primaries in the country, but even so, there's a general election coming, so: jducoeur nails what's really important in choosing a candidate. (PA doesn't vote until late April. It's possible we won't actually be irrelevant this time, but we'll see how today turns out.)

George Bush v Mohammed ibn Tugluq by David Director Friedman, on whom the law binds.