Musical continuity

[lauradi7dw]

On Monday I went to hear/see the Tallis Scholars with The English Cornett & Sackbut Ensemble



This is the 50th year for Tallis Scholars, although I am not sure that any of the original people are part of the group except founder/director Peter Phillips. He is just a couple of years older than I am. Did anything I did at that age have lasting value to the world? Maybe not. I first remember attending a concert they did in the 1980s.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tallis_Scholars
The English Cornett & Sackbut Ensemble has been around for 38 years but have also had personnel changes, including fairly recently, I think. At the time Peter Phillips was getting together a bunch of his student friends to sing, I was briefly playing sackbut in an early music ensemble. Badly. I played trombone in high school, which meant that my arm was always going to the wrong place on the slide out of muscle memory. The sackbut is different enough that it made me off-pitch. I gave up soon and went back to playing bass recorder in the group. For most of the music I was playing, the bass was just long tones while the other players were doing more complex stuff, so it was OK for me (not worrying that I would mess up) and a relief for them, because they didn't have to take turns doing the "boring" part, not that they ever expressed it quite that way.
The "see" part mentioned above was about internally critiquing their clothes. PP's looked just a little too tight. He could conduct fine anyway. One of the cornett players (there were two, and I don't know which is which) was wearing a jacket that didn't quite match his trousers. The jacket looked like it had just been tossed into a bag and then badly steamed. I probably spend too much time reading https://dieworkwear.com/
Some of the sopranos and altos had sparkly stuff on their outfits. This is not uncommon for women performing classical music, but I found it distracting.

Yesterday I was pleased to see the Keytar Bear in the Harvard Red Line station.



https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keytar_Bear

I can't prove that this is continuity - has it been the same person inside the suit for 14 years?

Comments

[sabotabby]

This is the first I've heard of Keytar Bear but uncritical support.

[matildalucet]

When I started playing bass lines for the Waytes, Udalrich was THE bass player with his trombone. The agreement was he could keep the interesting bass lines (and there are a few) and I would take the boring ones. They weren't boring for a new bassist! I still like simple bass lines so I can take in what else is going on around me. I don't mind a couple of fast bass runs in a gig, but if it were all like that, I'd be leaving out LOTS of notes on purpose.

[lauradi7dw]

The big challenge for me was that the clefs seemed to be different in almost every piece we played. I'm sure that's an exaggeration. The others would carefully tell me the first couple of notes and then since there was often one note per measure equivalent, I could generate the other notes as I went. I was only in the group because my recorder teacher insisted that they accept me, I think. There was one other undergraduate (coincidentally, both of us also rowed crew. No logical connection). Everybody else was in the music department as a grad student or instructor.

[matildalucet]

Yeah, clef changes can be rough. I have some gamba music that changes between bass clef and alto clef repeatedly within the piece. I cannot sight read those at speed, though I can handle them with practice. At speed, my brain tries to break. I know why they are notated that way; I don't always agree with the reasoning. (Some people find ledger lines harder to navigate than clef changes. I end up penciling in note names if there are two many ledger lines and carry on.)