I’ve been away for a while!
The end of undergraduate senior year does that to a person, really.
Regardless, I’m back, more or less. I’ll be spending next year being a hermit in New Hampshire and applying to Ph.D. programs in linguistics, both of which should be different kinds of exciting. In the mean time, I hope to be posting here a bit more. I hope to get up a few left-over posts about the end of the conlang seminar, along with more about 8’0i (my consign) soon; I hope to resume (by which I mean begin) the Monthly Conlang project hopefully starting in July; and I’ve got some new music that I have to get up and post about.
Most immediately, though: I’m about to leave on a two-week-long drive across the country, from San Francisco to Dublin, NH. I’ve included my itinerary, below: As you can see, I’m taking a rather southern route, so that I can swing through Alabama for the National Sacred Harp Convention, which I’m very much looking forward to.
I’m sure that I’ll be tweeting, and possibly posting, from along the way.
A new shapenote tune! Finally!
I’ve been working on Catalina off and on for many months; the final breakthrough (though not actually the completion of the tune) happened down at All-Cal, where I generally had gorgeous views of Catalina Island from the hostel where I was staying.
We sang through the last draft at the last Swarthmore sing, and despite some serious typos in that draft, I was fairly happy with it. Can’t wait to sing it at the Western Mass. Composium in a few weeks. I’m still trying to figure out exactly what to say about the text: I took an Isaac Watts text (from 515 in the S.H.), but modified it heavily (most notably so that it went from being in Long Meter to being decidedly Particular – 8,8,8,8,8,8,8,6, to be exact).
I’m particularly proud of the engraving – thanks to the Fasolily list for advice and for getting together the new Sacred Harp font, which improves the look-and-feel considerably.
Hopefully soon I’ll have a new version of my Sacred Harp Lilypond template up.
UPDATE: This has been up less than a day, and I’ve already gotten good feedback and revised heavily. Changes include: A better alto line overall (with fewer fa-6s); a more reasonable treble line; a bit less dissonance in the tenor; some contrary motion added to the bass line. The link above, and also the link from the Music page, have both been changed (to version 0.9).