So tomorrow night, I'm going to an open reading of a most interesting piece of music, Spem in Alium by Thomas Tallis. This is for unaccompanied voices, forty in number, organized as eight 5-part choirs (soprano, alto, tenor, baritone, bass). It's legendary, in part because getting 40 people together who can sight read is a bit of a bother. So a bunch of folks from numerous choirs around Bostonia have answered the call, and, just for the fun of it, will spend 2-3 hours working on this almost unique piece of music. Should be fun.

The question of how to write out the music is non-trivial; but fortunately the Choral Public Domain Library, a sort of wikipedia full of PDFs of public domain musical scores, has it in several forms. One is 40 individual lines; I suppose it must look a lot like an orchestral score. Another is per-choir only (so since I'm in choir 6, it has only the five choir 6 parts). And yet another has all that, plus (on 2 staves each, as cues) the other 7 choirs' worth of music. I think that's the one I'll be trying to use, since it gives you some idea of what-all is going on. There's a lot of antiphonal kinds of echoey stuff. I gather from the notes that it was first performed in a large octagonal room in a manor house in England, which has 4 balconies. So there is echoing between north and south, east & west, up & down, and then imitation going around the room and back. Should be fun.

What else? Finally ordered a fence to replace our tumble-down picket fence. Should be here in late September or early October. I'll go get the neighbors on board soon-ish.

And it's getting to be nearly time for the church choir to re-start for the fall. I do hope we're doing some good stuff this year. I'm told we'll be doing evensong on Sunday October 29th. Some of you will remember we did that during the Boston HusiMeet in March of, um, 2004, i think it was. Dunno what the musical plate has on it, for that.

Also, the other choir I'm in is doing a "best of" concert, with music selected from the playbills of previous years. I think this is the 9th season. We're going to give several concerts locally in January 2007, and then cut a recording. Should be exciting.

There are some good entries in the Writing Fun Challenge this time around. I'm looking forward to the last-day entries, now that we have the deadline settled.