Still going after all these years.
Another quick link check round:
On Tuesday I wrote about Dave Brubeck’s Christmas recording recalling holiday traditions of people gathered round the piano in the parlor, playing and singing. As I did so, I reflected that this probably isn’t a tradition for everyone. Our family is atypical in a bunch of ways, notably in having musical talent on both sides.
Then again, we’re also atypical in our taste in holiday music. For about twenty-five years, one of our favorite holiday recordings has been an odd record of carols by the Boston Camerata. The repertoire includes Middle English carols (yes, Chaucerian English, and Latin as well) that span the 12th through 15th centuries, and a rich selection of 18th and 19th century carols from England and America. The performances were recorded during a crossroads in early music, when popular performance practice was still introducing primitive instrumental accompaniment (typically viols and rudimentary wind instruments) to choral music that originally would have been performed unaccompanied. But, as on the pivotal Music of the Gothic Era recording, the voices take center stage. Even without understanding Middle English (and the diction here is impeccable), the listener is carried away by the sheer energy and enthusiasm of the singing. And the early American tunes have the same propulsiveness; the shape-note carol “Sherburne” can ring your room and rattle your rafters if you’re not careful.
There are only a handful of carols that will be familiar to most listeners on this disc, including “Sunny Bank” (“I saw three ships”) and “The Coventry Carol,” but the performances are so compelling that you may want to learn Middle English or the Sacred Harp singing style to pick up some new favorites. My friends in the Suspicious Cheese Lords and I did just that with “Nowel, Owt of Your Slepe,” “Nova, nova: Aue fitt ex Eva,” and “Sherburne,” all of which we performed several times during my tenure with the group. A holiday essential that reaches back to earlier times and brings them vibrantly to life. That ever was thralle, now ys he fre; That ever was smalle, now grete is she; Now shall God deme bothe the and me Unto his blysse yf we do wel. Nowell!
(Incidentally, the Camerata’s web site includes a discography page with lo-fi MP3 previews of some of the tracks from this album.)
Weblogs.com hit a new high water mark yesterday; at the peak during the day, 4,851 weblogs updated in a three hour period.
Note the high R-squared value (0.953) for this log normal plot, based on fitting the data with an exponential curve. Compare against the linear R-squared value from the last high water mark in October, which had fallen to 0.784. Based on the data and the steadily decreasing R-squared value for the standard linear regression, I think it’s now safe to say that the data confirms that the high water mark grows at an exponential rate. Source data, as always, is available here under a Creative Commons license.