04 April 2009

Divers items, 4 Apr 09

Did You Know? Dept :: Search on youtube for the phrase harp technique, and the top three-quarters of the page are all about the . . . harmonica. Was not much use as I was working on stars & guitars. Just saying.

(Not sure I would have known that harp can refer to the harmonica, if I had not seen Capt Beefheart so credited on a Zappa album.)



Unexpected Performances Dept, Sacred Choral Division :: Chanced upon the Cathedral administrator on Tremont Street this past Thursday afternoon, and learned that the St Paul’s choir will be singing the Nunc dimittis from my Evening Service in D, Opus 87, at a noon-time service for blessing the oils this Tuesday. There’s one measure which the tenors traditionally don’t get quite right at St Paul’s — it’s different to a parallel measure from earlier in the Canticle, but somehow winds up sounding the same. I will watch that measure’s future career with considerable interest.



Notation Software Labor Dept :: Officially caught the Sibelius file of stars & guitars up with the MS. this afternoon. Now think I may need to add a dozen measures to the end. I’ll sleep on it.

For the sake of reducing time & labor for my publisher (worthy fellow who needs a hand as much as any of us), I need to try to import the Finale file of Bless the Lord, O My Soul into Sibelius. It’s probably going to be an easy and smooth process. When I first bought Sibelius, I made an attempt at such a conversion, with the Finale file of the Overture to White Nights. Practically unmitigated disaster — probably a result of all the customized systems in the Finale file. (Perhaps if I had “un-somethinged” — Finale is really becoming a thing of the past, when I need to rack my brain for this specialized term — “un-optimized” all the systems, first . . . worth an experiment, I think.) This is one reason (only one) why I’ve decided to take the building of a Sibelius file of the Overture from scratch, as an exercise in learning to use the software for large ensemble.

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