Hello Everyone!
Blessed be the Spring and the Spring Equinox! Such a beautiful, hopeful time of year – a confirmation of light and life. The sheer numbers of birds twittering and flitting to and fro in our front- and back-yards are astounding, as are the multitude of intoxicating blooms.
Our upcoming meeting on April 5 will be the last official playing session of the season, and with it comes the annual elections as required by SRS bylaws. We’ll take a few minutes at the beginning of the April meeting to vote for three officers for the coming year. Here are the offices being filled and the candidates: President-elect: Linet Henry; Secretary: Evy Dudey; Treasurer, Richard Ginnis. Only members of the Seattle Recorder Society may vote. For folks Zooming in, you may vote by show of hands. For additional details on the election, see the article below by President Dave Gloger.
For our final April playing session we’ll warm up with some lovely madrigals that herald the Spring and earthly delights, and then focus mainly on Peter Seibert’s Fantasia on English Folk Songs, a work he wrote in 2009—a through-composed work comprising six old(e) English Folk tunes craftily woven together with “Seibert signature” harmonic bridges. So very clever! Many of the tunes can be traced back to the 18th and 19th centuries and were collected in 1952 by Vaughan Williams in The Penguin Book of English Folk Songs.
The six tunes that Peter chose to work with are: The Green Bed, The Devil and the Ploughman, Young Edwin of the Lowlands, The Basket of Eggs, The Manchester Angel, and Robin Hood and the Pedlar. If you have a moment to do a Google search on any of these titles you will be delighted to find the lyrics to these ballads that speak of the hardships of sailors, the cunning of inn keepers, the virtues of a maiden, and the strength of family bonds.
Next month our May 3 meeting will be devoted to your performances on Members’ Night, one of my favorite evenings of the year. Nancy Bent, our incoming president, will be collecting all your information and presiding over the evening, so keep reading to see her specs and deadline for signing up. We are capping the number of performances at 20 entries. Dust off those recorders, call your playing buddies and sign up! But please respect the deadline!
Zoom link and PDFs will be made available on Monday, April 1. As usual please let me (Vicki) know if you need hard copies provided. You can email me here: vickiboeckman@comcast.net. I look forward to an evening of lovely music-making with you all. Happy Easter and see you soon!