Eileen, Sarah, and I goofed off and played marathon Boggle yesterday between breakfast and lunch. I went to the church in the afternoon while Eileen and Sarah made strawberry jam and did one last (?) trip to purchase Amurikan stuff for Sarah to take home with her on the plane today. Then we went over to see Mary and Sarah had pictures taken of her with Mary and me (Eileen took the pics. Sarah decided she had enough pics of Eileen.) It has been good to have Sarah around. I hope her trip home is as comfortable as possible.

A box of used music arrived in the mail yesterday. I purchased about $100 of old music from Craig Cramer. I began looking through it yesterday. There is some cool stuff  in this order.

At these prices I sometimes order things out of curiosity. I have never looked the music of Sharon Elery Rogers, so I ordered a couple books of her compositions (Hymn Settings for All Seasons and Solera Toccata). I read through bits of the hymn settings yesterday and found them attractive.

There is a beautiful book of Sweelinck’s work, Worken voor Orgel en Clavecimbel. It was published in Amsterdam in 1943 and edited by Max Seiffert. It’s in good condition. I already own the Dover Sweelinck so I plan to keep this beautiful book at home.

There is a performance edition published by Yale Press of three Masses by Dufay, Ockeghem, and Obrecht. They are called “Caput” masses because they all three base their mass on a snippet of an antiphon from Maundy Thursday. The text of this antiphon is Peter and Jesus talking about whether Jesus will wash Peter’s feet. You may recall that at first, Peter refuses to allow it. Jesus says that if he refuses, Peter will have “no part of me.” Then Peter says that Jesus should not only wash his feet but his hands and his head (caput). There is a long series of notes on the last syllable of “caput” (a melisma). It is part of this little section that the composers draw on to make their mass.

This music is near and dear to my heart and I am very happy to have this edition to peruse and study. The scholarship is, of course, a bit dated since this volume was published in 1964. But it was fun to see another of my treasured books, Studies in Medieval and Renaissance Music by Bukofzer mentioned in the critical notes of this edition.

I seem to have finally got hold of some decent Krebs editions by purchasing two volumes from Craig. Krebs is someone I like a lot. I have purchased editions in the past and been unhappy with them. Compositions spread over too many pages with awkward page turns and laid out kind of weird on the page. I’m glad to get some better ones.