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Category: Music
Solage: S’aincy estoit
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 […]
Solage: Corps femininin
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. […]
Solage: Calextone qui fut dame terrouse
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 […]
Bach/Göncz, completion of BWV 562.2 and Contrapunctus 14
Amazing what you find in the googles. I googled idly at work to see if any of the completions of Bach’s Contrapunctus 14, from the Art of Fugue, are online. If you don’t already know about it, you may not care to find out, but the final fugue in the Art of Fugue is incomplete, […]
Authenticities and Cretan Musics
I’m not posting about Quebec or Acadia for a while, for absence of stimulus, and seasonal illness: I’ve stayed home sick three days so far this month, and those days have not been spent blogging (nor reading those books on Acadian I’d borrowed.) I’ll still post on identity construction, closer to home; and the emphasis […]
Mr Bach has an off day
The good thing with having a complete collection of an artist’s works is, you get to hear their crap works as well as their masterpieces. In fact the crap works throw their masterpieces into relief. Masterpieces do sprezzatura to excess: they sound effortless and inevitable. It’s only when you see how art can go awry […]