The Music Will Never Stop 7

January 20, 2014:

Okay, back to classical — “Eighteenth-Century Italian Harpsichord Music,” by Luciano Sgrizzi. Nonesuch, of course.

There are a couple of faint scratches, and just enough warping that I had to cue it up by hand instead of using the turntable’s automatic systems, but mostly it’s clean and clear.

Audacity crashed twice while I was transferring it, though.

Still, it’s done, and it’s good.

January 21, 2014:

Followed by “Quartet Music of the 17th & 18th Centuries,” by the Stuyvesant String Quartet, 1966.

Don’t know what to say about it.

January 22, 2014:

And now “Baroque Music for Recorders,” by the Concentus Musicus of Denmark, 1965.

This is an interesting one because it starts out with a dozen assorted “dances” — honestly, some I think are too short to actually dance to, being under forty seconds — which are simple and straightforward, and then it gradually works through fancier stuff until it finishes up with a sonata for recorder, oboe, violin, harpsichord, and bass by Fasch that’s quite complex and beautiful.

I ran into a problem trying to MP3ize it — there’s a gap in the data, for some reason, between the third and fourth movements of a Handel sonata, so that it crashed repeatedly when I tried to do that bit. I eventually wound up working backward from the end of the album for everything after the bad spot, and that worked — the missing chunk is from the three-second break between tracks, not the actual music, so I was able to work around it and just not transfer those three seconds.

Don’t know how that gap happened. I get an error message, “Missing data,” when I try to play that stretch, and then Audacity freezes and I have to reboot it.

January 23, 2014:

Julie thinks I’m insane to bother copying this one: “Environments Disc 1,” by Syntonic Research, 1970.

One side is thirty minutes of seashore ambiance; the other side is chirping birds.

Audacity crashed the first time I tried, but the second attempt worked fine.

January 24, 2014:

“Four Centuries of Music for the Harp.” Back to Nonesuch. Nice stuff.

January 25, 2014:

“In A Medieval Garden.” Which is nominally by a lute ensemble, but in fact some pieces have recorders, krummhorns, viols, or even percussion in the lead. It’s a surprisingly varied collection, really, with a couple of fun, bouncy numbers mixed in with the more contemplative stuff.

It’s deliberately mostly secular music, from the 12th through the 16th centuries.

I like this one — but it’s really short; only about twenty-eight minutes for both sides together.

January 26, 2014:

Josquin des Prez’s “Missa Ave Maris Stella” and Four Motets, by the University of Illinois Chamber Choir.

I went through a brief period of fascination with Josquin des Prez, and how he fell between medieval and renaissance styles; this was one of the two albums I bought during that period. (The other is coming up soon.)

It’s lovely, but seems pretty conventional compared to the “Medieval Garden” record.

No problems recording or editing it.

January 26, 2014: (From this point on it wasn’t unusual to do more than one in a day.)

“Voices of the Middle Ages,” by Capella Antiqua of Munich. Well-done but largely undistinguished church vocal music from the 13th through 15th centuries.

I had a weird problem with this one — Audacity crashed repeatedly when I tried to play back track 8, “Der Tag ist so freudenreich,” after converting tracks 1-7 to MP3. So I started working back-to-front, from track 20 backward, and when I did it that way track 8 worked just fine. Audacity can be very quirky.

There’s some surface noise on this one; I played it a few times when it was new, and not on a really good system. Mostly it’s fine, though.

January 27, 2014:

And now I’ve squared away the other Josquin Desprez album, “Chansons, Frottole & Instrumental Pieces.” It’s a rather scattered collection, but good stuff.

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