Fructus Laborum

It is important to have things to do. A day or two of bone-idleness is enough: any more than that and you'll probably end up sitting on the sofa eating bon-bons and watching soap opera (which, it should be observed, is not nearly as interesting as real opera. When's the last time a soap opera character rode her horse onto a funeral pyre, immolating herself and destroying the world?).

My recently-concluded project, with which I occupied myself after the end of classes, was to transcribe about two-dozen Michael Praetorius scores. (I had access to both Praetorius and Finale — the score-writing program — at Notre Dame's library. It is now a four-hour commute away, which is a bit too far to justify further such endeavors there.) I did this because I someday hope to avail myself of the pieces: they're terribly practical, being based on chorales, and he wrote them for all sorts of combinations of voice parts. For the benefit of others (oh, how generous, I!) I put the scores up on the Choral Public Domain Library.