Flutes A Bec

Today’s column is later than usual. Technical issues.

I spent today at the Kansas City Renaissance Festival, both listening to musical performances and providing them.  I also had my video camera in spy mode to capture some of the footage. Since I was in performer attire, I couldn’t be seen to be obviously operating modern equipment I shouldn’t know anything about as a resident of the Renaissance.

Today’s blog is going to feature the group “Flutes A Bec”. I became acquainted with this group 3 or more years ago. They come out usually one weekend of the festival to showcase their recorder ensemble. It is made up of Channing Horner, his wife Louise (both professors emeritus of Foreign Languages at Northwest Missouri State University), their two daughters and another professor at Northwest Missouri State University. I became acquainted with them because they tended in past years to share a stage with us, and we share some of the same repertoire, and would thus sing, or play, an occasional song as part of the other group’s performance slot.

This year the Horners’ 50th wedding anniversary was this weekend, so they had a lot of other guests, and family, out during the festival, and were performing on a new stage: the Duxbury Wine Bar Patio. The stage was new, in the sense that the Bar Patio had been extended (doubled) with some new wood decking. The only problem was they didn’t add any seating yet, so people walking by who stopped to listen didn’t stay long.

My group, Madrigalia Bar Nonne, had been scheduled at the Patio a few years ago, while it was still a smaller, more crowded deck. We found it a fun place to sing, but the Patio overlooks two other performance stages, places where dramatic stories and sword fights take place, with lots of yelling and cheering, which makes it interesting when you are singing or playing less boisterous music.

I managed to get the following clips of the Flutes A Bec in performance.  You can hear a lot of that background noise in some of the clips, but you can also hear how well the flutes themselves project, and cut through the ambient noise. During one of the clips you may even catch sounds of the royal parade passing by below the stage.

(Note: Apologies for any inaccuracies or vague references to people or places.  All of this information was compiled from memory and fragmentary sources.  It is amazing what facts you don’t discuss with someone to learn about them when you meet them through a different common interest.)