DSD

Tonight I had the amaz­ing expe­ri­ence of singing a con­cert with Blue Heron, one of the pre­mier early music choirs in the country.

I had an unusual week, attend­ing lec­tures on topo­log­i­cal field the­ory and writ­ing about neu­tri­nos by day, get­ting into the 1430’s groove in rehearsals by night. And the music wasn’t easy. Many of the pieces were thick with cross-relations, rhyth­mi­cally com­pli­cated, and gen­er­ally funky. I’ve had a few night­mares where I stop con­cen­trat­ing, and either I sing an incor­rect B-flat, or the see­saw mech­a­nism stops working.

Early Music Nerdy

The pro­gram was a selec­tion of 15th cen­tury motets and songs by Dufay, Bin­chois and oth­ers. Who on earth are they? Well, these peo­ple:

Oh… right! See­ing these guys, I feel right at home. Why? Because an enor­mous needle­point of this pic­ture hangs above the fire­place in the house where I grew up. Is that early-music-nerdy? Oh yes. Is it also early-music-nerdy that I hap­pen to have a t-shirt that says “Happy (600th) Birth­day Dufay” on it? Yeah.^[1]

So I was strangely and nerdily con­nected to tonight’s^[2] pro­gram. The con­cert went well, and the mem­bers of Blue Heron were won­der­fully wel­com­ing. I had an awe­some time.

[Update 3/16/09: A nice review of the con­cert from the Boston Musi­cal Intelligencer.]

1. This t-shirt is beige. I used to wear it with khakis… because I did not own jeans. The result was both early-music-nerdy and very beige. Very. beige. [↩]
2. I’m almost cer­tain that no one in New Hamp­shire reads this blog. But in case I’m wrong, we have one more per­for­mance on Sun­day the 15th at the Cur­rier Museum of Art in Man­ches­ter. [↩]