Concordia cum veritate
I'm truly glad there are people out there who enjoy solo performing, not to mention grateful for their efforts, but I'm just not one of them. Me, I like playing/singing with others, and preferably for an audience who's dancing or otherwise engaged rather than sitting there staring. Playing with friends is, of course, best of all.
Last Saturday my timing wasn't perfect for some of the afternoon music-making that happened, but I still got to sit and listen to siobhan1214 and scaharp singing medieval carols in two-part harmony in their beautiful, mutually complementary voices, and then I got to twine a recorder line in through their singing. It was just so pretty, and I was so glad to be able to take part in that, even briefly!
That Sunday, shalmestere and Dr. Science came down and we spent the afternoon playing really neat 14th- and 15th-century stuff: Italian canonic pieces, some Dufay, some Binchois, mostly on alto-tenor-tenor recorders with occasional deviations into configurations involving sopranos or two altos. That was heavenly. It's hard, the polyphony -- I have to be on top of the counting every single split second along the way, otherwise my Playford-trained brain starts listening to what sound like entry cues and messing me up, and I have to (attempt to) be equally on top of my intonation for the funky intervals -- but wow, the results!
Musicians can be a humongous pain in the neck (and I certainly include myself on that count). Instruments are expensive and a hassle and prone to letting you down right when you most need them. Half the time people don't appreciate or can't be bothered to listen to what you're doing. Practice is tedious, getting things wrong with a small group is embarrassing and screwing up during performance is utterly harrowing. But still... it's so worth it, worth all of it, to be one small part of the experience when the dancers get that extra bounce in their step in response to the band's energy, or the weird angular polyphonic lines come together in perfect harmony, or the voices lift up and ring through the hall. That? That's the best feeling in the whole world.
Last Saturday my timing wasn't perfect for some of the afternoon music-making that happened, but I still got to sit and listen to siobhan1214 and scaharp singing medieval carols in two-part harmony in their beautiful, mutually complementary voices, and then I got to twine a recorder line in through their singing. It was just so pretty, and I was so glad to be able to take part in that, even briefly!
That Sunday, shalmestere and Dr. Science came down and we spent the afternoon playing really neat 14th- and 15th-century stuff: Italian canonic pieces, some Dufay, some Binchois, mostly on alto-tenor-tenor recorders with occasional deviations into configurations involving sopranos or two altos. That was heavenly. It's hard, the polyphony -- I have to be on top of the counting every single split second along the way, otherwise my Playford-trained brain starts listening to what sound like entry cues and messing me up, and I have to (attempt to) be equally on top of my intonation for the funky intervals -- but wow, the results!
Musicians can be a humongous pain in the neck (and I certainly include myself on that count). Instruments are expensive and a hassle and prone to letting you down right when you most need them. Half the time people don't appreciate or can't be bothered to listen to what you're doing. Practice is tedious, getting things wrong with a small group is embarrassing and screwing up during performance is utterly harrowing. But still... it's so worth it, worth all of it, to be one small part of the experience when the dancers get that extra bounce in their step in response to the band's energy, or the weird angular polyphonic lines come together in perfect harmony, or the voices lift up and ring through the hall. That? That's the best feeling in the whole world.