It appears that travel is heating up again. I’ll be in Maryland (Rockville) for the week. Hotels are just stupid expensive there! The cheapest non-motor-lodge (internet and a workout room are required) I could find started at $179 a night. That’s obscene.
I’ve been on a quest for the bottom of my email INBOX for the entire morning. I think that I may see it soon.
Weekend was really good. sacredangle was up from Baltimore, and we saw one of my favorite musical ensembles in the entire world: The Tallis Scholars. Also attended the pre-concert talk by the conductor … which was enlightening. He’s perhaps THE world authority on renaissance vocal music, and he had no time at all for formality, rules, or even a structure in which I could stash my limited understanding of what he does.
Asked about pythagorean (perfect) vs “well tempered” tunings, he said: “That only really applies to instruments. You have to tune the piano once and then play it in all the keys … and if you just listen to it you can hear how out of tune everything is. Singers can adjust and adapt to each other to truly be in tune. So, that’s it. We just try to sing in tune.”
Yeah. Sure, maybe *he* can “just hear how out of tune it is.”
He made an interesting comment about performing old vocal music, that you can pick up a “period” instrument, play it, and infer some things about how it would have sounded, back in the day. You can’t do that with singers from hundreds of years ago. We’ve got histories, performance venues, and stories … but it’s all guesswork. I suppose that it makes sense, then, that he goes by ear and performs in a way that sounds good to him.
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