Mute-you-all benefits

Four years ago, I wrote (here)

A choral singer knows he's getting on when, as for me this term, the next concert includes three choral pieces all of which he's sung before with another choir or choirs.

Well, in this brave new (lockdown)  world it's happened again. Earlier this month our multi-talented accompanist, Ben,  has taken advantage of this opportunity to use Zoom to hold a series of virtual rehearsals on the last 3 Fridays of July...

<stop-press>
(and the series goes on now, as he's holding further such rehearsals: details here)
</stop-press>

...The first was Parry's I Was Glad, which I've written about more than once (here and here, and possibly elsewhere). This was the first in the series, and I hadn't done any preparatory note-bashing...

<weasel-words reason="He would say that, wouldn't he?">
Ben was at pains to say this wasn't necessary. But we lesser mortals need to do some prep. I thought, having sung the piece many times before, I could busk it; but it's just as well that in Zoom rehearsals no one can hear anything...

<zoom-pun>
Whenever a Zoom host says "I'll mute you all" it strikes me that it's to our mutual [geddit?] benefit that we can't hear each other.
</zoom-pun>

...(except in the final sing-through, when we've got a recording to sing along to).
</weasel-words >

Next up is the dum-dee-dum bit from the Vivaldi Gloria. I've sung this more often than the Parry, but still need to do some note-bashing,  Fortunately it's in F, so I have a good chance of picking out the notes.

<autobiographical-note>

My least prepared rendition of this was towards the end of last century. One of my son's colleagues in Berkshire Youth Choir (and in a barbershop quartet it spawned) was also organist at his local church in Finchampstead. He was organizing a performance of parts of the Gloria.

As I was on taxi-duty that day, and knew the piece well, I became a singing chauffeur.

</autobiographical-note>

The last Friday session is the Hallelujah chorus, which will be in most amateur choir members' repertoire. Although I must have sung this more often than any other piece, I will still need to do some preparatory note-bashing. One stretch of repeated "Hallelujahs" always catches me out however often I rehearse it.

The swan-song of Ben's mini-season is also, as happens, a piece I've sung before, as it was one of the pieces featured in a WCS workshop some years ago (10-ish?) held by another Ben. I'm not sure I can make these sessions (and admittedly my enthusiasm for the music is not great), We'll see.

But I must put in an appearance in the land of the living. (Having been away in Norfolk for a week, I felt the need to show that the blog still has a pulse.)

b

No "the" please

from Handel's autograph score

Like Pagliacci, Messiah frequently gets an undeserved definite article (although perhaps that undeserved is coming it a bit strong, for people who believe there was only one). Handel's, though, as his original title page showed, has none:

My choir's next offering will be this old favourite – which, like many choir members, I have sung many times before.




<autobiographical_note>
At last night's first rehearsal I noticed that my score was adorned with paperclips that marked the last performance's cuts. I couldn't, for a moment, recall the last time I had sung it. But this programme fell out.

And this brought to mind the strange experience of singing with a present-day chapel choir member on either side (as we old growlers were interspersed with Real Singers – who had graduated from choir schools, where the custom had been to admit to having made a mistake by "raising your hand, boy" [so that the choir master would know, and know as a result that that mistake would not be repeated]). So whenever they made a slip (usually one that I wouldn't have noticed anyway) they had this Pavlovian twitch of the arm.
 </autobiographical_note>

<aha status="interesting but unproven">
The presence or absence of a definite article may, I have just thought, be the root of an affectation  that I have noticed among music lovers. It's Pagliacci, but Il Trovatore.  So rather than risk getting it wrong, they refer to the latter as Trovatore [tout sec – or should that be tutto secco?]
 </aha>

If lasts night's rehearsal was anything to go by, our Messiah should be well worth a night out on 24 March 2018:

Full details of the concert here

b

Tailpiece

... or, as the Italians would have it, coda. This post started out as an update to my last, but it jes' growed.

On a tour founded on an extraordinary coincidence (family members singing in the same cathedral on the very same day, but 17 years apart), I noted two other coincidences (not quite so notable, but still mildly striking).

While chatting over coffee with a fellow choir-member, I noticed a sign on a pub, pointing to the almost hidden Church of St Lawrence. By way of conversation. I observed that Lawrence was my confirmation name and my companion was gobsmacked (I think that's the word) as his confirmation name was also Lawrence.

MrsK was not deeply impressed. As myself and my interlocutor were of an age, she imagined the name Lawrence was just popular at the time. She also wanted know why we Papists had to have an extra name. At the time, not feeling it would advance the conversation, (Ils sont fous, ces [Catholiques] Romains), I didn't mention the theological background.  Confirmation marks the beginning of the first stage in one of those trinities so popular in the doctrines of the One True Church.

The three are the Church Militant (we mortals,  striving), the Church Penitent (in Purgatory), and ...

<digression type="autobiographical">
When I was first in a Spanish train I misread a sign about giving up your seat to a war-hero. I was new to Spanish and to Spain at the time, and had just started stumbling my way through a selected poems edition of Lorca, with the aid of a parallel translation. 

People who didn‘t offer their seat would be multados según la ley....(The memory came to me because the Church Penitent weren't just suffering, they were paying their fines.) But with my head filled with Lorca's evocations of the dastardly, unruly, inhuman...(etc etc) Guardia Civil as Franco came to power, I was quite ready to believe that offenders, with legal sanction, could be mutilated.
</digression>

...the Church Triumphant (reaping their rewards in Heaven). People becoming a miles [Latin, "=" soldier] needed – not inappropriately – a nom de guerre. And the confirmand – not sure if that's a word, but in any case it is now – chose it.

<digression subject "choice">
The choosing was significant. Whereas you got your first name(s) at somebody else's whim ...

<example>
In my case,"Robert" to placate my maternal grandfather [a staunchly Presbyterian Scot, kicking against the papist pricks]), and "Joseph" [to placate my father, educated by Jesuits]).

But I chose my confirmation name. (You may detect a theme here: no women were involved in the process of naming; my mother [whom Saints preserve] had no say (although she did have a role – holding the ring between her father and mine :-).)
 </example>

... the confirmand (see?) did the choosing.
</digression>

People who know me may imagine how contrary I was even at that age. Usually, people chose solid Biblical names like David or Michael or Joseph, or John or....  I knew nobody who had chosen Lawrence.

So I think finding another Lawrence was a bit of a coincidence.

The other coincidence, not quite so notable,  is that our MD had studied at post-graduate level at the same college that I had – although a good 30 years later.

b

PS
Finally, a post-tour coincidence. BBC Radio 3‘s Breakfast Show has a slot where they invite suggestions for a thematic piece. The latest  is Musical Youth. On 31 July, I tweeted this suggestion:

Later the same day, Rowan Pierce sang the same aria  on In Tune., (at about 43‘30").

PPS
(Oh, and on the subject of music  in schools, try this blog-post.)

Islands again

Some years ago I posted here about islands; it must have been quite a while ago, as it was occasioned by a visit to an Open Day at Silchester, and they have been a thing of the past for a year or two (maybe three – time gets quicker at a certain age, in an ironic reversal of an arrow [which gets slower and slower, having no doubt heard about Xeno). But I've been thinking about islands again  – in the context of elephants and Cyclops.

Somewhere on Radio 4 last week a woman spoke about dwarf elephants (and iPlayer's indexing algorithm isn't good enough to remind me of who she was).

Dwarf elephants are prehistoric members of the order Proboscidea which, through the process of allopatric speciation on islands, evolved much smaller body sizes (around 1.5-2.3 metres) in comparison with their immediate ancestors. Dwarf elephants are an example of insular dwarfism,...

Also sprach Wikipedia.

But the woman on the radio didn't mention Cyclops – a strange omission, given that the "fact" (some doubt there, I suspect?) is so succulent. Perhaps she didn't mention it because she has an academic haughtiness about the story. But Wikipedia had no such fastidiousness:

...it has been suggested by the palaeontologist Othenio Abel in 1914,^[3] that the finding of skeletons of such elephants sparked the idea that they belonged to giant cyclopses, because the center nasal opening was thought to be a cyclopic eye socket.

A studio guest asked why dwarfism happened on islands. I'm sorry to have to be so reliant on Wikipedia, but iPlayer has let me down::

...large terrestrial vertebrates (usually mammals) that colonize islands evolve dwarf forms, a phenomenon attributed to adaptation to resource-poor environments and selection for early maturation and reproduction.

... Not that "large". In 2003 a fossil was found on the island Flores. Homo Floresiensis, was known by some more fevered journalists as 'the hobbit'.

<autobiographical_note> 

In the late '80s or early '90s, with Reading Haydn Choir, I sang Stanford's The Revenge, a Ballad of the Fleet. The libretto,  was written by Alfred Lord Tennyson  (the hosts of that wiki – IMSLP  – are presumably politically hostile to all that lickspittle bowing and scraping, as they call him plain "Alfred Tennyson"; I've referred to this strenuous egalitarianism before, in connection with the word titled [see the rant in red here].)

But the opening words of that piece are "In Flores, in the Açores" (which leads me to suspect that Tennyson didn't know much about pronouncing Portuguese, FWIW), and I remember, when Homo Floresiensis was discovered in 2003, wondering if it was the same Flores. (It's not. BTW  – unless HMS Revenge was fighting off the coast of Indonesia. :-) )

In a later Reading Haydn Choir concert I sang Handel's Acis and Galatea, with the Cyclops Polyphemus represented by a very agile bass. [Keep up. keep up; I mentioned Cyclops a while back.]

</autobiographical_note>  

Homo Floresiensis is thought by some experts (I haven't kept abreast of all the arguments, though I think there are several theories [with one having Homo Floresiensis descended from an as yet undiscovered small ape]) to have been a descendant of Homo Erectus subjected to insular dwarfism.

Ho hum time for bed.

b
 PS And here's a clue:

Thus might Spooner keep the con-artist apart from the aviatrix, we hear. (8,3,5,4,3,5)

Update 2016.09.25.15:05 – Added PPS

PPS And another:

Bad-mouth trendy food shop first, with malice aforethought. (10)

Update 2016.10.25.16:25 – Added PPPS

PPS: The answers: SEPARATE THE WHEAT FROM THE CHAFF ;  DELIBERATE

Shameless plug

A choral singer knows he's getting on when, as for me this term, the next concert includes three choral pieces all of which he's sung before with another choir or choirs.

The first is Vivaldi's Gloria, which I've sung twice before, once with Reading Haydn Choir about 20 years ago, and once when I was driving my son to a concert arranged by a fellow barbershop singer (who was choir master at his local church). As I knew the piece, I became a singing chauffeur.

The other two pieces involve a setting of Psalm 110, once entirely (Handel's Dixit Dominus) and once as one of several texts in Mozart's Vesperae Solennes de Confessore. When I first sang the Handel, at the first rehearsal, somebody asked me what the opening words of Dixit Dominus meant. One word in the opening sentence was new to me, so I could only say 'The lord said to my lord "Sit on my right, until I do something jolly unpleasant to your enemies."'

The unknown word  was scabellum* – a footstool. The something jolly unpleasant was turning them into footstools (although I imagine there was an element of metaphor here  – I don't think trans-substantiation was involved).

The word 'until' seems a bit odd. Does the first lord – the speaker – mean that  the second lord can only occupy the favoured position until the enemies turn up and suffer enscabellation – thereafter to sit somewhere else (on the enemies, perhaps)? But donec, when followed by a subjunctive, usually does mean until. The bible translations listed here all use until or till, with a small handful of exceptions. Only two translate it as while, in which case donec would usually be followed by an indicative (not ponam but pono). Food for thought. But not today – I'm neglecting the cricket.

Suffice it ...

<digression> 

I refer readers to an old discussion,, in the UsingEnglish forum, where I explained: 

The fossilized phrase 'Suffice it to say' means 'let it be sufficient to say'; a more modern idiom is 'Enough said' - but, unlike 'suffice it to say', this follows the thing said: 'I shouldn't have done it. I'm sorry. Enough said'.

You'll have noticed that I keep saying 'Suffice it to say'. This uses the subjunctive, which is hardly used in informal British English. And as both 'it' and 'to' are unstressed in that phrase, they are easily heard as a single /t/ followed by a schwa - particularly by habitual non-users of the subjunctive. This form [HD clarification: the ITless form] is widely used, and has become almost as common as the fuller form: BNC has 53 instances of 'suffice to say' and 88 of 'suffice it to say'.

In COCA, on the other hand, which is based on N. American usage, has [HD correction: 'there are' (I may have meant háy)] 376 (377 if you include 'sufficeit to say', of which there is a single instance which I found by accident ), and only 97 of  'suffice to say'. And that balance makes sense, considering the relative strength of the subjunctive in American English. 

Anyway, I'm an IT-man. 

</digression>

... to say that you should put Saturday 2nd April, 2016 at 7.30pm in your diary. (More details of the concert here.)

Tales from the word-face

My android system's latest exploit in the matter of spelling corrections involve a Character Entity expressed in the Named Entity Syntax (and if you really want to know what all that means, pick the bones out of this).  My HTML code makes occasional use of &nbsp; – a non-breaking space (for use when you want to keep a space between two words but keep them on the same line).

If I used it often enough I'd tell the spell-checker to add it to my dictionary. But for now, whenever it sees "nbsp" it asks me if I'd prefer to use "tbsp", which sounds like the sort of Character Entity that'd come in useful for writers of recipe books.

b

PS Another clue:
Landlubbers' haven in heavy swell (in case of bowel-movement) (5)

Update 2016.01.27.12:15 – Added PPS

PPS
I've been thinking about the until/while problem mentioned in the fifth para. To recap: the Latin text has Donec ponam  (="until I put"), not Donec pono (="while I put"). "Until I put" involves the first 'Lord' (the speaker) in some rather strange reasoning, making the sitting at the right hand only a temporary (pre-enscabellatory) position – which I suppose I should gloss as meaning lasting only until the end of the turning-into-a-footstool [sorry about these unfeeling neologisms, but scabellum is too good a word not to have any derivatives in English]). So why is ponam not pono – unless, of course, St Jerome (or one of his predecessors) got it wrong (when translating from David's [or someone's – Wikipedia has a rather ominous  "although his authorship is not accepted by modern Bible scholars"] Hebrew)?

It would take a Hebrew scholar to take this further (and I'm working on that), but I suspect that Hebrew has a way of expressing temporal and/or conditional relations in a way that does not fit in with the Latin way – so that neither "until" nor "while" really does the job. Hmmm...

Update 2016.01.27.15:05 – esprit d'escalier in blue.

Update 2016.02.05.10:15 – Added PPPS


PPPS

When, in last night's rehearsal, we broached (and on occasion breached) the Magnificat, I was reminded of last summer's post, My soul doth magnify the problem – particularly this bit:

...the words of the Magnificat reminded me of a confusion that keeps cropping up in the life of a choral singer. In the text that that link points to you'll see in the third line of the Latin exultavit, translated in the English as "hath rejoiced". But later on the word exaltavit appears, translated in the English as "hath exalted". 

Italianate pronunciation of Latin now gets involved. Listen to this YouTube clip; the relevant word starts occurring from about 30 seconds in, and is repeated as often as Vivaldi chooses. When this vowel (not unlike the English /ʌ/ phoneme – the one that occurs in, for example, "exulted", although it is closer to [ɑ] {Update note: this is an IPA transcription})  – is heard by a strictly Anglophone ear, confusion arises.... 

 Last summer's post   

Update 2016.02.06.16:40 – Added P⁴S
P⁴S Another clue:

Surfeit of promissory notes – hateful (6)

Update 2016.02.10.09:15 – Added concert poster.

Update 2016.03.24.14:40 – Added footnote, and crossword solutions.

* By chance, flicking through a dictionary looking for something else (the kind of serendipitous Aha-provoking discovery that doesn't happen with an online dictionary – excepting artificial things like Word-of-the-day), I found that Spanish (and indeed Catalan, Provençal, Italian, French etc, I've since determined [courtesy of the wonderful Meyer-Lübcke – which I've mentioned before] all have similar words) has the word escabelo. Spanish also has a quite charming metaphorical use for escabelo (which is, on weekdays, "a little stool"); in its Sunday best, figurative, use it is a "stepping stone". Life really is just one digression after another.

Solutions: BELOW and ODIOUS.