Things have continued to be odd around here, to the extent that I haven’t given my tuthree readers adequate notice of this: on Friday, I’m going to the US for a week. I’m spending the weekend in Irvine; then I’m travelling to DC for the ADL Learning Content Registries and Repositories Summit (see my position […]
I’ve had an odd week, and as revenge against the elements, I’ve done a slightly odd thing. It’s Greek National Day, and Greek bloggers turn their thoughts to debates on nationalism. The Magnificent Nikos Sarantakos’ Blog was no exception, and during the discussion that developed, I made a glancing mention of the Cretan Muslims, a […]
Le basile, like Pluseurs gens voy, counts as Ars Nova rather than Ars Subtilior, and there aren’t the rhythmic games hallowed in Subtilior. The rhythms are still wackier than Pluseurs gens: there is enough syncopation across barlines to justify the Mensurstich notation, and there is confusion about whether voices are off by half a bar […]
With Pluseurs gens voy, we’re backing away from the crazy of Ars Subtilior, going back to what the Ars Subtilior was a mutant offshoot of: the Ars Nova of Machaut. Accordingly, there is less weirdness about the notation in this ballade; the one exception is in the middle section, where the Cantus, and possibly the […]
This is the third of the Solage ballades, and the tricks of notation get worse and worse. We have one voice in a different metre than the other two (6/8 vs. 9/8, 3/4 vs. 2/2)—and not with the same measure length either; so the bars in the three voices coincide only every three or four […]
Calextone has some polyrhythm going on, but the disruptions are localised—they resync after a couple of bars, and the metres are displaced by a beat or a third of a beat, which makes for some very pleasant syncopation. Calextone also has some interrupted half bars, but blink and you’ll miss ’em: there’s only a couple. […]
The Ars Subtilior was a brief period in the end of the 14th century, when composers went nuts. The Ars Subtilior composers wrote music that was more complex that anything heard before—and often anything heard centuries since in Western music: more modulations, more polyrhythms, more music scores shaped as eye music. It was a short-lived […]
As I gaze across the grey waters of Lake Wakatipu, and the soggy car park in between, I think I wouldn’t mind right now being in the 43°C weather of Melbourne. I’m wrong: I’d be cursing my lack of effective air conditioning; but I’m bummed out anyway at Nature’s air conditioning here, of three days […]
I was struck with awe—in fact, terror—when I pulled up at 6 PM to Queenstown, tourist haven of the South Island, to be greeted by a young man impersonating a moose in front of a moving bus. It wasn’t Janet Frame’s awe at the big smoke’s granite and bustle. It’s an altogether more dysfunctional awe, […]
The rains caught me at Dunedin, and I didn’t walk around much. Even if the rains hadn’t caught me, I wouldn’t have walked around much. Dunedin is the one New Zealand city that the Lonely Planet does not include a walking tour for, and there’s good reason for that. Dunedin is absurdly hilly. I had […]