A musical greeting for April!

 A variation on Rabbit Rabbit...here is the Hare Queen and her hares, Athy College, Co Kildare, Ireland

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From "Open Culture's Newsletter" I find songs from the 1500s being shared:

In 2006, Sting released an album called Songs from the Labyrinth, a collaboration with Bosnian lutenist Edin Karamazov consisting mostly of compositions by Renaissance composer John Dowland. This was regarded by some as rather eccentric, but to listeners familiar with the early music revival that had already been going on for a few decades, it would have been almost too obvious a choice. For Dowland had long since been rediscovered as one of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century’s musical superstars, thanks in part to the recordings of classical guitarist and lutenist Julian Bream.

(It goes on to give an example of Julian Bream's work on a classical guitar.) That video is available also on YouTube HERE.

Sting had laid down his own version of “The Earl of Essex Galliard,” sometimes otherwise known as “Can She Excuse My Wrongs.” In one especially striking section, Sting takes “the soprano-alto-tenor-bass part” and records the whole thing using only layers of his own voice: “there’s four Stings here,” [music producer and popular Youtuber Rick] Beato says, referring to the relevant digitally manipulated scene in the music video, “but there’s actually more than four voices.” Songs from the Labyrinth may only have been a modestly successful album by Sting’s standards, but it has no doubt turned more than a few middle-of-the-road pop fans onto the beauty of English Renaissance music.

Here's the YouTube production. I long ago bought the album Songs from the Labyrinth and enjoyed it over and over again, without this four part version!

My personal note for today is that yesterday's covid symptoms proved negative results on the test. But I am continuing to sooth the sore throat with jelly beans. However I'm limiting the amount so my stomach upset of two days ago doesn't reoccur. I've had breathing limitations this week, so missed studio time several days.

This Spring Chicken (can't I be a Spring Bunny?) is continuing the physical therapy exercises and enjoying having windows open to 70 degree sunshine. It won't last, and I shuffle the indoor plants so they get more sun and fresh air, and tell them not yet, there well may be another freeze. Then I'll cart them all out to the front porch for the summer!

Today's quote:

“A man can always command his time under the plea of business,” 

Mary Somerville (1780– 1872) would later write in her memoir; “a woman is not allowed any such excuse.”