Cookbook challenge

And I do mean "wars" plural: we spent the weekend at the Military Through the Ages timeline event, which had military units ranging from classical Greek and Roman through the Middle Ages, Renaissance, through recent wars like Desert Storm, and current National Guard. Our group, La Belle Compagnie, presents an English knight's household in the Hundred Years' War.

The show takes place every spring at Jamestowne Settlement, in Williamsburg, VA. Which is some distance from our home in New York City. When we were younger and foolisher, we would drive it straight through (particularly if I had classes to teach on Monday), but this year I took Friday and Monday as vacation days, packed the car on Thursday, hit the road Thursday about 8 PM, and spent Thursday night at a motel in Maryland. (We would have hit the road earlier, but when we closed the garage door we realized that the newly-poured concrete floor was a fraction of an inch higher than the old floor, so the door didn't go quite as far down, so the latch no longer latched. So with the car completely packed and shalmestere sitting in the front seat, I went back into the house, grabbed some tools, and moved the latches up half an inch so I could lock the garage.) Anyway, we got to the site around 3 PM Friday, set up our pavilion and trestle-tables, and drove to the hotel a few miles away where La Belle Compagnie had reserved a couple of adjacent suites.

shalmestere and I portray household servants in the knight's household, hired for (among other things) our musical talent (our boss is rich, but not rich enough to hire servants just to play music), and we normally spend most of a show demonstrating c1400 musical instruments and repertoire for the public.

A month or two ago we were wondering what "new" we could bring to this year's show. We didn't have any new instruments suitable for a 1415 camp. There were a couple of two-part musical pieces we'd been learning recently, but they weren't off-book so we hadn't been performing them at living history shows (modern sheet music and music stands would Not Look Right). So we've been practicing them after dinner to memorize them. We'll look at the last few measures, then close our eyes and play them. Once we've got that pretty solid, we'll add the previous musical phrase, and play from that through the end with our eyes closed until it's pretty solid. And so on until we've reached the beginning of the piece. We got one of them (entitled either "Petrone" or "Retrove", depending on how you read the paleography, from the Robertsbridge keyboard ms) to the point that we played it a couple of times during the weekend. There were a few memory slip-ups, but no crash-and-burn-and-start-over episodes. Another piece from the Robertsbridge codex has no title so we call it "Robertsbridge Thingie", and we haven't quite got it good enough to try to perform off-book.

And we did the usual spiels and demonstrations involving recorder, pipe-and-tabor, shawm, citole, fyddel, and harp. I think two visitors asked me about medieval musical notation, and I restrained myself to about twenty minutes on that topic. And one asked me about the difference between twelve-tone and pentatonic scales, which led into a discussion of tuning and temperaments and difference tones, and then another member of the group who's a voice-technique professor chimed in with some comments about reinforcing overtones, and then we got into solfegge syllables (the visitor had grown up with shape-note music, so he knew some of the syllables, but had no idea that they came from a Latin chant).

Anyway, the whole weekend had pretty good weather, and a decent flow of visitors asking questions. It was warm-ish on Saturday, and warmer on Sunday, but I can put up with that as long as we don't have to pack out wet, and we didn't. The event closed to the public at 5 PM Sunday, our group was off-site by 7:00, and we all went to a Chinese buffet (where we swapped stories of "the weirdest question anybody asked you") before hitting the road to our respective homes. We had the longest drive (the voice professor had driven from Iowa, but I don't think he planned to drive back there immediately), so we got home around 3:30 PM Monday. Unpacked the car, cleaned a few things, put a few things away, went through the mail, etc. I think we'll sleep well tonight.