In paragraph 23, chapter 4, page 58 of On playing the Flute Quantz writes on intonating:

“The flute has the innate defect that some of its notes when sharpened [playing sharps] are not quite true, some being a little too low, some a little to high. For in tuning the flute you must first see to it that the natural [diatonic] notes are tuned truly in accordance with their proportions. The faulty ones you must, as much as possible, seek to play in tune with the help of your embouchure and your ear.â€?

This is a little note to those who claim that you should play any instrument as is and that some instruments can never be played in tune. Many other instruments have the same problems (i.e. saxophone and recorder) and the players of all the instruments that have these problems should seek to play them as well intonated as possible.

In paragraph 16 he writes: “This defect can be easily remedied, however, if the player possesses a good embouchure, a good musical ear, a correct system of fingering, and an adequate knowledge of the proportions of the notes.â€?

Now, if you’ll excuse me I have to go practice playing in tune

I just found the page of a guy called Geejay who obsesses over the recorder. A fun read. Speaking of fun, what a concert this must have been:

Note to self: use delicious tags such as photoblog-posts for my photoblog.

Funny thing, I’ve found two other blogs called The Early Music Blog 1 and 2. 1 is Italian and hasn’t been updated since september and 2 is a republished version of Goldberg Magazine. These two and other blogs I found or are emailed to me will be put in a feed and new updates from these blogs will be posted in the right-hand sidebar so that you can always have easy access to updated early music blogs (hopefully with original names, though, or we’ll have to come up with some kind of numbering system )

Today I threw out 1576 pictures (6,6Gb worth) of iPhoto 2. That means I only have 3166 (or 13,3 Gb) of them left on my computer. I bought iPhoto 5 being reasonably happy with iPhoto 2 but being promised better performance. Now that didn’t turn out well. (yes, it was faster, but it should handle the photo collection of an average DSLR amateur) iPhoto is the program that crashes most frequently on my computer. Only reason for going with iPhoto was that f-spot wasn’t stable on OS X, and last I checked about a month ago it still wasn’t. I’m recompiling now, though, hoping that OS X stability comes around soon. (It’d be awesome having it included with fink) This guy won’t be upgrading to iPhoto 6 anytime soon. Apple hasn’t taken a single bug report regarding iPhoto 5 seriously. No stability patch has been released. Bad enough it being dreadfully slow. Sorry Apple, you had my money, leave photography for the rest and build those wonderful computers you’re so good at.