Tuesday 11 February 1661/62

Annotations

• N daniel on Fri 11 Feb 2005, 11:06pm. Flag this

  Musique

  Sam’s apllying himself to the art of music making is quite admirable. I will cite this week’s entires to my own music students as how devoted practitioners should spend their time.

• N Todd Bernhardt on Fri 11 Feb 2005, 11:41pm. Flag this

  re: Clerks

  Why is Mr. Turner “much troubled at” Sam’s activities surrounding his clerks? You’d think that Sam’s efforts to settle things “to the advantage of [his] clerks” would please Turner, unless Sam’s stepping on his toes in some way … is Turner supposed to manage the clerks?

• N Bradford on Fri 11 Feb 2005, 11:51pm. Flagged

• N tld on Sat 12 Feb 2005, 12:33am. Flagged

  Clerks

  I read this line that Sam has been reassigning or assigning duties and / or small perks of the office to his clerks at some expense of Mr. Turner and / or his

• N Pauline on Sat 12 Feb 2005, 02:00am. Flag this

  “…I hope by degrees to bring it to it…”
  I suppose we all do this????

  I hope by degrees to bring “quiet” to “my mind”?

  I would say that Sam is trying to work ahead of the clerks and take full responsibility for his job in every detail so that Turner can’t bad mouth him with any sucess. His unquiet of mind is less clear; perhaps he is unhappy in having to play office politics against Turner? He may wish that he could allow Turner to do his part without Turner continueing to resent Sam having the better job and job title, but realizes that now he has to act to secure his own position.

• N Bullus Hutton on Sat 12 Feb 2005, 02:47am. Flag this

  Musique..
  You’re quite right, Daniel. Sam’s devotion to his music is quite marked in recent posts. He is still a young man, bemused by the vagueries of his world and often not to happy about the direction of his life.
  Had he but stumbled into his own Paul McCartney at this time, he might have said to heck with it all and taken a flagelot band on the road (perhaps to Hamburg) and we may never have had the diary!
  

• N Wim van der Meij on Sat 12 Feb 2005, 09:34am. Flag this

  ‘Gaze not on Swans’ was also set to music by H. Lawes in his ‘Ayres and Dialogues’, 1653.

• N Mary on Sat 12 Feb 2005, 09:37am. Flag this

  “Gaze not on Swans”.

  (per L&M footnote) This was largely Birchensha’s work; presumably showing Sam how to go about the process by example.

• N Wim van der Meij on Sat 12 Feb 2005, 10:07am. Flag this

  Googling I found the following: http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/B0000D0W3G/ref=pd_rhf_p_1/202-2563574-0518263

• N Mary on Sat 12 Feb 2005, 05:15pm. Flag this

  “brother Tom …… has no mind to marry”

  So the earlier overtures that were being made on Tom’s behalf were presumably all the family’s idea, and not prompted by Tom himself.

• N Ruben on Sat 12 Feb 2005, 07:52pm. Flag this

  I think SP writes most of the time about areas of tension in his life. In the beginning of the diary he was busy with his servants. It was a new experience for him to be in charge of others. It is a long time already that we read nothing interesting about the service people. Same for the link-boy or the coins they charged for this service and he had to pay. Remember first time he had the barber coming to his place? Well, today he has settled in his new position so this has become irrelevant to be remembered in the diary.
  Instead of writing about the former, we get lately a lot of information about painting and music, signaling his passage from his original position in society (and money solvency) to his actual position, where money is of course still important, but much bigger amounts of money!
  

• N language hat on Sat 12 Feb 2005, 10:47pm. Flagged

• N Pauline on Sun 13 Feb 2005, 02:09am. Flag this

  Ruben, good points
  He does stew and worry over life’s mid-sized tensions. What we are getting now is the tensions of how to wrestle respect from the Sir Wms and various other soul-searching to be “big” enough for where his expectations have landed him. That his conclusions embrace hard work, keeping distractions at bay, and thinking it all through, endears him to me. He seems to have quite an aesthetic sense and enjoys the decorating and portrait-making that his money can buy. But the music has been with him (and with us) from the diary’s beginnings.

• N Ruben on Sun 13 Feb 2005, 01:31pm. Flag this

  Pauline:
  to Pauline: you expressed better than me what I intended to say.
  Music was always there, but now he can afford to treat his teorbo to a costly overall, has a composition teacher and pays another teacher to teach him and his wife to sing; and we dont know how much all that costs because this expenses have become small money for him.