Oates for Tanger
Thu, 27 Jun 2002
Bakson
I'm on holiday until the 15th july. Net connections will almost certainly be so spotty as to be not worth bothering with. I've packed a traverso, the Boismortier suites, the Hotteterre Airs and Brunettes, Ardal Powells new book, Bukofzers very old book, a history of the Enlightenment by Roy Porter and I'm ready to roll!
Posted at 21:46 #
Greater precision, or energy of my fingers.
"We shall conclude these observations on practice, with the following hints. - That a knowledge of fine effects, and elegance of arrangement, is only to be acquired by a certain gradation, which, however, will be greatly accelerated by our being as little as possible conversant with those that are vulgar, inelegant, and
unscientific; and by our being as early as possible introduced to those that are not so.--That there is naturally something so flattering to ourselves, in our first productions in the fine arts, whether in versifying, drawing or fiddling, if I may be pardoned the expression, that unless we exercise on them the more rigid judgements of criticism, and good taste, we shall greatly over-rate their merit: hence the number of musical, as well as other coxcombs.
A young performer would be least liable to be the dupe of this self-complacency, who should repeatedly enquire within himself, whether there be any defect in his production, that can be mended; or, if he prefer the expression, whether it be possible to heighten, or superadd to any of its beauties: by these means, he will make important discoveries, and arrive at greater excellence.
Thus the flute-player, after having reduced a given musical phrase into tolerable good time and evenness of tone, may ask himself - Can there be any greater exactness of time given to any one of these notes? Are they all equally perfect, in respect to tone? Do they possess that quality which the French call perlé, as if the passage had all the roundness, smouthness, and brilliancy of a string of pearls? Can I, by any greater precision, or energy of my fingers upon the holes, produce that beautiful addition to sound, called resonance? What will be the difference of effect, betwixt this passage, done in piano, and forte? Can I play still more piano, without altogether stifling the tone? Is this piano clear and resonant? Does it expire on the ear? Does it possess that softness and sweetness , implied in the word dolce? Are not the upper notes rendered confused, in so great a quickness of succession, by being too strong and resonant? Are they not much more distinctly heard, by the sound being reduced? What will be the effect of beginning this phrase, or passage, very softly, increasing the sound, and then diminishing it? At what part of the the phrase should it be increased and diminished? Are there any certain rules for this sort of management of sounds? But I am insensibly anticipating the little I have in my power to say, on the delicate, but important subject of the next Chapter."
John Gunn, The Art of Playing the German Flute, chapter VII.
Posted at 22:50 #
Where we are reminded that 18th century spelling was still fairly flexible.
Gunn's "Dothell" seems in fact to be "Dôthel" at least in the SPES editions of the work Brian Berryman kindly pointed out to me.
In answer to the question about similar studies Ardal Powell wrote "Other studies or caprices in lots of keys include those by Blochwitz, Zimmerman and Ruge. They are all published by SPES too." Phillipe-Alain Dupré adds the méthode by Peraut. Links on the right under 'flute'.
Posted at 22:13 #
Reading The Art of playing the German Flute by John Gunn.
Gunn says that he "has published a small work being the only thing of this kind I have met deserving attention, viz. the Cappricios of Dothell, originally intended as practice for a command of the flute in all keys, major and minor. They are written in a masterly, and not inelegant style; ..." (page 22)
The Capprices are also mentioned on the title page:
"Dothell's Twenty one Capprices or Preludes in all the keys being a Supplement to the examples in this work"
I've not been able to find them though so perhaps they haven't survived. I've posted to early flute so we'll see if anybody there knows.
Posted at 19:09 #
Back to school
Jane Boland's tutor for the baroque flute gives an excellent list of the most important 18C century tutors. This persuaded me to order the facsimile of John Gunn's The Art of Playing the German Flute (1793) which arrived today and is indeed fascinating. The new facsimile collected methods from Fuzeau are apparently an excellent piece of work as well but i've so far only had a tantalising glimpse of them. They haven't updated their site yet though and the "Méthodes et Traités" page doesn't mention the new volumes for Traverso and Recorder.
Posted at 23:17 #
Windows-NT vs. CP/M
A comparison of the two rival operating systems.
"Two systems were selected for this comparison. The CP/M system is a Kaypro-II running a 2MHZ Z80, with 64K of memory and dual 360K 5-1/4 floppies. The Windows-NT system runs quad 500 MHZ Pentium Processors, with 2GB of memory and 1TB of disk space." Guess which one won :-)
[via Haddock]
Posted at 11:10 #
The Ik puppet
This describes itself as "The IK puppet: an experiment in inverse and forward kinematics." I'm sure it is but it's great fun as well. [via Doc Searls]
Posted at 12:18 #
Home on the web
I've redesigned the main page for my home domain to reflect the fact that Palamede and the member chess sites are the most important thing here now. My chess graphics site which is part of Palamede is staying here but i'm not updating it anymore. This site is now my home on the web.
Posted at 23:42 #
More pencam sites
I'm still obsessing about pencams.
Posted at 13:32 #
Referrers, parsers and pencams.
If you link to this page then a link back to your site will automatically appear in the link back menu section on the right. Thanks a lot to Stephen Downes for the script.
This page doesn't parse as valid html any more. Unfortunately if I correct the errors in the previous posts the weblog software will promote them to the top of the page and screw up what little narrative logic they have. I intend to pursue the opposite course of just leaving them to drop off the bottom of the page and fester in the archives.
I hope i'll soon be able to get my hands on an Aiptek mini pencam 1.3! Then we can perhaps have some pictures on this site. Interestingly, while looking for pencam sites, I found Daypop more usefull than Google as it pretty much eliminated all the commercial sites and did a good job of turning up the interesting weblogs. Hencio is one of my favourites but don't miss the links to others at the bottom of that page.
Posted at 22:45 #
Summer is upon us, or will be soon
Following is a copy of a mail i wrote in reply to a query from a friend about summer courses. If the french leaves you cold just follow the links, the sites themselves are all in english. No courses for me this year, we're off to Aix en Provence where my wife has to take an exam.
Le site de la stage que j'ai fait en autriche est ici http://www.alte-musik.music.at/ - donc à Zell an der Pram. comme tu verras cette année c'est Gertrud Wimmer qui s'occupe du traverso pas Kate. Elle a l'air très bien aussi mais je ne la connais pas du tout. Pour le reste le stage était excellent, super bien organisé, tout le monde très sympa, hébergement excellent, bouffe oui .. très moyen. c'est correctement servi, on meurt pas de faim mais on est content de rentrer en france après. :-) Public principalement germanophone avec un bon mixe jeunes/étudiant/adulte/amateur (selon moi). Le schloss est dans un tout petit village tranquil, saut interessant à faire (en train) à Passau (églises baroque etc) probablement à Linz aussi mais j'ai pas eu le temps. Access facile par train ligne Passau - Linz, mais de strasbourg le train de nuit de retour était un vrai parcours de combatant avec reveil tout les deux heures pour changer .. très dur. Néanmoins j'y retournerais volontiers.
Je me suis souvenu que l'année dernière Kate Clarke avait aussi fait une stage à Valtice en Czekoslovakia. En cherchant j'ai trouvé leur site web à http://www.hudebni.mladez.cz/chs/
Alors là aussi il semble qu'elle ne vient pas cette année. Par contre elle est remplacé par Nancy Hadden.
Or, Nancy Hadden faisait une stage à Edinburgh en Ecosse l'année dernière que Jean-François Alizon m'avait chaudement conseillé.. apparament elle est très très bien.
Effectivement elle anime de nouveau une stage à Edinbourgh cette année - détails ici http://www.nhadden.freeserve.co.uk/Edinburgh.htm Ca a l'air vraiment bien.
Je t'ai parlé de Stefano Bet. son site est ici http://digilander.iol.it/bestiofante/ et la stage est à Bolzano dans le Tyrol italien (j'ai regardé un peu, ça a l'air très beau) site est ici http://www.istitutomusicale.bz.it/musant.htm
Je te conseille vivement son disque - c'est excellent. Flute seul(!) sur plein d'instruments differents, beaucoup de musique de la renaissance. Vraiment interessant. C'est pas distribuée en france mais si tu lui envois un cheque il t'enverra une copie.
Posted at 22:15 #
Hostile environments
This started out as a baroque flute players site and I'm determined to get back to my original idea, .. at least as soon as I finish installing Mozilla 1.0 everywhere (Well done everybody).
In answer to my last post our Zope lecturer reminded me sharply that the user workstation is a hostile environment and it's better to stay in the cosy world of servers. Sissy.
He did manage to make me want to try Python though. Back with Rael Dornfest I'm starting to play with blagg and peerkat.
Posted at 23:52 #
Heavy
Should have had a recorder lesson with Mark today but couldn't because of the Zope training. CMF and workflow, which somehow left me vaguely uneasy. I have more taste for Jabber,Gnutella and Radio than for these heavily centralised systems with their sophisticated permissions management and heavy analysis needs. Hopefully we can discuss that tomorrow.
Posted at 23:04 #
Relink
The format of the link metatag has been changed. Done.
"And I am realy a blond!" Watching Wenders "Bis ans Ende der Welt" on the other monitor, one of my favourite movies by one of my favourite directors.
Posted at 22:44 #
Zope
Managed to organise a few days zope training and it's looking very very good. Enjoying it even more than I expected. DTML still feels like a bit of a kludge, but lets not jump to conclusions.
On a related note the BBC have news of a major win for Linux in Germany. IBM Germany also has details.
My brother in law Jean-Luc Roos phoned to ask if I could find any mp3s or cds of a Uraguayan singer called Jaime Roos who he says is excellent.
I also did a quick scan for what my mother calls "bird pudding" as they seem to be absolutely voracious at the moment.
No flute tonight then :-(
Posted at 21:40 #
Flûte seul
Worked again today on the first of the Boismortier Suites pour Flute Traversière seul. Must learn it by heart.
There are a few posts on the earlyflute list about finding a facsimile of the ornamented version of the Hotteterre Opus IV suites. Phillipe Allain-Dupré suggested searching RISM to find the original. I tried but RISM gives no results at all for Hotteterre. Don't understand that. Looking through my links though I found the amusingly named Catnyp which turned up at least one possible version.
I would have worked on this site as well if the server hadn't been unavailable for most of the day.
Posted at 23:47 #
I hereby name this ship RSS discovery
The tech sites are alive with RSS discovery via the <link> tag. Seems like a good idea so i've added it to this site. Still sounds like a ship to me though.
Posted at 23:42 #
Surveying the cowderoy acres
Or doing a few window boxes for the balcony if you prefer. The Portulaca has arrived at the local horticultural market stalls and you need to catch it while it's there. For those not familiar with it, it's an unprepossesing looking plant with flowers in a great variety of colours and that seems to positively enjoy being baked on my rather exposed third floor balcony.
Posted at 12:54 #
