Choir week

I have spent a little time trying to put together some of my drafts and scraps of thoughts from real paper notebooks. As usual, interesting though writing is at forcing me to think things through, the graveyard of unposted notes grows faster than what I can keep up with forcing me to discard all old stuff. So, this week’s posts are inevitably going to be brief and without much in the way of thought.

Over the last week, we have spent a lot of time in the choir rehearsing, and have just finished this afternoon before leaving for Holland in the morning. I have nowhere near done all the things I wanted to do in Cambridge, and some of the choir music is still a little frightening when the polyphony looses its crispness. Last year, the quotation for the rehearsal week was Matthew’s insistent “Palestrina masses are easy”, and this year at least we agree with him. It is amazing how much difference a second year of Renaissance music has made to the choir, and we are really enjoying all the harder works (Byrd, Dering, Gibbons). Our sight-run of This day Christ was born (Byrd), which is one of my favourite of his anthems after the Easter companion Christ rising and Ad Dominum cum tribularer, was a high point of the week as Matthew exclaimed the had officially run out of music too hard for us to sing.

Croquet has been a feature of the week too, and much eating of left-over pasta in Fen court. Between the choir, each person brought a bag and we had rather an excess. The plan of doing more bible study and discussion this week has not particularly worked out, but I will have some time to work out what to do and how before the tour itself.

On an unrelated note, the other day I tidied a few stray lines of code on the new beta DMS for this site, which is nearly ready to run. Extensive documentation of my design processes in a tedious stream will soon issue forth.