Aidevah

>He was a nepo baby with a big purse.

Interesting interpretation of "he was orphaned at 10 and left with nothing and had to go and live with his brother".

A lot of modern packages which began outside emacs have now been gradually been merged into the main emacs tree and come pre-installed (use-package for clean per package configuration, eglot for LSP support, tree-sitter, which-key etc). So you just need to learn how to configure them.

The most important packages which make emacs feel "modern" that are still outside the emacs tree for now are the ones which makes completion better, both in the main buffer and also in the minibuffer (what others may call your "command palette"). They are

- consult: search and navigation commands, provides candidates for...

- vertico: vertical display of candidates in the minibuffer

- marginalia: annotations for the candidates

- orderless: orderless fuzzy match for candidates

- embark: right mouse context menu for candidates

Getting these setup would make your whole journey onwards much smoother.

That Byrd is very nice! The individual voices came across very well on my IEMs.

I'm used to reverb as well, and the complete lack of reverb in these recordings still sound a little weird to me, as if they are singing in a closet. But even in the 15th and 16th century vocal polyphony was likely performed (often?) in places other than the resonant nave or choir of a large church. I read that aristocratic (or ecclesial) patrons would have singers perform in private chambers, and performance of votive masses at a private chapel to the side of main space in the church would have very different (and quite dry) acoustics.

A recent recording of Obrecht masses had close mic, recorded in a studio usually used for pop music with very little echo, with one voice per part [1]. The effect really is quite startling. The last time choral music was recorded like this was (coincidentally another Obrecht mass) more than 30 years ago [2].

I think a lot of vocal music written around 1500 would benefit from this approach. It has been remarked that this is really a sort of sacred chamber music rather than music requiring a huge choir. The music moves too fast and it's very difficult for a big choir in a very resonant space to do Obrecht, Josquin and friends full justice.

[1] https://hyperion.lnk.to/cda68460 [2] https://www.medieval.org/emfaq/cds/dvg102.htm

The main reason for the commotion during the Paris premiere seems to be the publicity which whipped up the audience on both sides and made a clash inevitable. The Russian ballet had been playing the snobbery of the Paris audience for Stravinsky's two previous ballets, but misjudged the response in the third.

The subsequent performances, the London premiere, and the Paris concert premiere in 1914 all went off without a hitch. And the status of the Rite has only steadily increased ever since.

As Taruskin says, the music of the Rite is actually not very difficult to appreciate[1]:

> While it was at first a sore test for orchestra and conductor, and while it took fully half a century before music analysts caught up with it, The Rite has never been a difficult piece for the audience.

> The sounds of the music make a direct and compelling appeal to the listener’s imagination, and the listener’s body. In conjunction with Stravinsky’s peerless handling of the immense orchestra they have a visceral, cathartic impact. They leave—and to judge from the history of the score’s reception, have always left—most listeners feeling exhilarated. It is only the mythology of The Rite that would suggest anything else.

[1] https://avant.edu.pl/wp-content/uploads/Richard-Taruskin-Res...

> Universalism: that is the intellectual realm abutting utopianism and ethnocentrism. "There are universal values, and they happen to be mine," was Stanley Hoffman’s delightful definition of the latter. Like utopianism and ethnocentrism, universalism normalizes, excludes, and shouts down. If “universal” does not mean universally accepted, then it means nothing. Those who do not accept must therefore at least be marginalized, and if possible stigmatized.

-- Richard Taruskin [1]

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/1995/09/10/arts/the-new-seasonclassi...

Looks like the crew were manning the yards[1] as they went out to sea.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yard_(sailing)#Manning_the_yar...

Great job! For converting music to readable images, the latex of music typesetting is lilypond, which has the ability to create legible music at any size by scaling the notational glyphs accordingly[1]. This sounds like what you were trying to achieve achieve with opencv.

With that being said, although lilypond is very intelligent about all sorts of typesetting minutiae, but it's probably difficult to wrangle it to run on smart glasses.

[1] https://lilypond.org/doc/v2.24/Documentation/essay/engraving...

Isn't Mytilene a city while the island itself is called Lesvos?

I recall that Charles Rosen wrote somewhere that one of the reasons the string quartet took off in the classical period was that it allowed the playing of all the notes in a dominant seventh chord without double stops. Although this was probably a better explanation for the relative paucity of string trios in the output of Mozart (1) and Beethoven (0). The establishment of four parts as the "standard" scoring for vocal ensembles can be traced back to the 15th century.

On the other hand the second and more famous dining (and conversation) club founded by Dr Johnson had originally 9 members, and gradually grew from that to dozens. Although many including Johnson may have not been entirely happy with the expansion.

> Unless you’re doing some fairly exotic things where you’re finding yourself saying things like

>> Oh yeah the OCR on Japanese driving licenses pops out things like “平成 8”, that’s just how they sometimes say 1996 over there. That’s why we have this in the parser: eras = { "大正": 1912, "昭和": 1926, "平成": 1989 }

>> One of these days we’ll need to add "令和": 2019, but it hasn’t come up yet.

Taiwan also uses the ROC calendar[1] which is directly descended from the regnal calendars of imperial china.

But it's quaint that the Japanese name their year after one person, while us enlightened westerners simply use a calendar where it's simply the 2024th year of the, erm, hmmmph...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Republic_of_China_calendar

Yes, although they are either juvenilia or relatively small pieces that would not greatly change our understanding of the composer in question.

On the other hand there is another piece of music "recovered" this year not by rediscovery but by recomposition/restoration, and it's quite a substantial piece that should provide quite a useful new perspective on the composer[1][2].

[1] https://www.hyperion-records.co.uk/dc.asp?dc=D_CDA68460 [2] https://doi.org/10.1093/em/caad055

>Shakespeare plays were made for broad appeal (he was a professional playwright, after all). Mozart's music was made for the broad appeal.

This statement is misleading because the broad appeal of both Shakespeare and Mozart today is the culmination of centuries of attempts to understand (and misunderstand) them. Calculus can be taught to high schoolers nowadays, but how many scientists in Newton's days could understand the Principia in its entirety?

Not to mention that Shakespeare and Mozart were both able to produce works of the highest sophistication that leaves most of their contemporaries (and many today) baffled. Harold Bloom wrote that the sophisticated word play in Love's Labour's Lost was not surpassed until Joyce, and Mozart's contemporaries complained endlessly about the complex textures in his opera finales. When Mozart wrote piano trios for the public, his publisher cancelled the series after two pieces because they were judged far too difficult for the masses, and when Mozart intended to write some easy piano sonatas at the end of his life, the first (the only one he completed) turned out to be the most difficult he ever wrote.

Invoking the popularity of Shakespeare or Mozart as analogues to Mr Beast reveals a fundamental misunderstanding of the longevity of both Shakespeare or Mozart, and leaves unmentioned the extensive body of difficult works on which their reputation rests today.

>In the end, maybe the crucial difference between those who read once and those who reread is an attitude toward time, or more precisely, death. The most obvious argument against rereading is, of course, that there just isn’t enough time. It makes no sense to luxuriate in Flaubert’s physiognomic details over and over again, unless you think you’re going to live forever.

This is a curious argument. Does the author never listen to a song more than once?

It's not at all surprising since Benjamin's tract was notoriously impenetrable, even to his original examiners, which resulted in his habilitation being rejected. Not to mention that the Origins of the German Trauerspiel only received an english translation in the 70s (and also in the past few years, as your link shows). I would expect someone of uncommon erudition to have read and understood that book, so it's not surprising that the author of the article doesn't mention it. Teaching Benjamin to the HN crowd is like teaching algebraic topology to MFA students, I applaud your effort but I don't think it will have much effect.

Melancholy was quite fashionable in early 17th century England, and many songs of John Dowland were heavily melancholic. This wasn't mentioned in the article, but since it is an extract from a longer book, maybe it appears elsewhere in the book.

Very true. Here's Dr Johnson:

>What we read with inclination makes a much stronger impression. If we read without inclination, half the mind is employed in fixing the attention; so there is but one half to be employed on what we read.

The late and great Richard Taruskin used this incident to frame a book review in the New Republic[1]. Many people have commented on the location of Bell's stunt, which was chosen to deliberately make a point. I think it's more interesting that Taruskin mentioned a contrasting incident discussed in one of the reviewed books.

>With that in mind, consider Kramer's cleverly titled final chapter, "Persephone's Fiddle," which is largely devoted to--guess what?--a violinist Kramer once heard busking unaccompanied Bach in the New York subway. Unlike Joshua Bell at L'Enfant Plaza, this fiddler drew a rapt crowd:

>It was early fall, the start of a new academic semester, and the performer on the platform--Times Square, my usual spot--looked like a music student trying to pick up some extra cash for books or scores. She was young, in her early twenties, blonde, attractive, and well dressed, which may help explain the unusual amount of attention she was getting from a crowd that in normal circumstances wouldn't give a busker a second glance.

>Or maybe it was the music. . . .

>Kramer goes on to speculate about what it was in Bach that so captivated fifteen or twenty listeners in that noisy atmosphere, and moved them at the end to "a moment of complete silence followed by a smattering of applause." My question, rather, is whether you noticed the difference between the scene Kramer describes and the one that the Washington Post reporter engineered for Joshua Bell. It couldn't be simpler, or more crucial.

>Bell was playing at the entrance to the station, where trains cannot be seen and everyone is hurrying to catch one. Kramer's little Persephone was playing down on the platform, where riders are apt to be at (enforced) leisure. Little Persephone knew that she needed an appropriate location to get across her message ("Isn't this beautiful?" or "Can I have some money?" or whatever you like). The Post reporter chose the least appropriate location possible. One of them was trying to make money, the other was trying to make a point. And Bach served them both equally well.

[1] https://newrepublic.com/article/64350/books-the-musical-myst...

A fine article on the role of timbre which is indeed discussed little compared to the focus on harmony and form for classical music. Charles Rosen gave one possible reason for this neglect in his book "Piano Notes", where he traces it to a philosophical prejudice of composers from Hadyn onwards against variety in tone colour and in favour of more abstract qualities.

> The utility of the piano for composing was its neutral and uniform tone color: in theory (although not in reality) the tone quality of the bass is the same as the treble. In any case, the change in tone color over the whole range of the piano is, or should be, gradual and continuous (there are breaks, of course, when the notes go from one string in the bass to two and then to three in the treble). The monochrome piano might be used therefore just for its arrangements of pitches, and the quality of the sound could-absurdly in many cases-be considered secondary.

> What made it possible for composers to refuse to acknowledge the difference on the piano between treble and bass and leave whatever problems arose to be solved by the performer was the fact that the change in tone color over the span of the keyboard is not like the leap from a bassoon to a flute but continuous and very gradual when the instrument is properly voiced. These imperceptible gradations are the result of a deliberate policy of a unified sonority on the part of musicians and instrument makers. All attempts over the history of piano construction to incorporate anything analogous to the picturesque changes of registration in the organ and the harpsichord had little success, were not exploited by composers, and were finally abandoned. Radical contrasts of tone color were traded for the possibility of making a gradual crescendo or diminuendo. This was a decision that took place at the same time as the preeminence accorded to the string quartet over all other forms of chamber music; that, too, emphasized the importance of a unified tone color. Chamber music with wind instruments, while the occasion for several masterpieces, became the exception, an exotic form. That is why the use of colorful sonorities in the orchestra has so often been considered somewhat vulgar, as if calling attention to the sound were paradoxically to detract from the music. The prestige given to pure string sonority is part of the asceticism of nineteenth-century high culture. Contrasts of tone color were given a significantly lower place in the hierarchy of musical elements. This is one reason that only the piano repertory rivals the string quartet as the most respectable medium for private and semiprivate music-making from Haydn to Brahms.

It should be mentioned that "old" violins that are still used today have all been substantially rebuilt to accommodate later repertories. There is a lot of difference between an early Baroque violin and a late 19th century violin including the fingerboard and the type of strings, and only a few museum strads that have not been played have retained their original configuration. One benefit of the early music movement that took off in the second half of the 20th century was realising that the "old" and "original" instruments weren't actually that old or original after all, and new baroque violins had to be made from scratch to attempt to reproduce what they would have sounded back like in the 17th and 18th centuries.

The survival rate for certain 15th/16th codices in Western Europe aren't great either. From England there are only three choirbooks (Eton, Lambeth, Caius) surviving from the first half of the 16th century, when the catalogue from just a single college at one university lists tens of choirbooks. Given the sheer number of cathedrals, colleges etc which supported musical institutions in pre-reformation England, the scale of the loss becomes apparent. Similarly there is almost a complete loss of all musical manuscripts from the royal court of France, such that the compositions of the leader of its court chapel need to be recovered (incompletely) from a Vatican manuscript.

> “Almost all music is written with a strong melody line,” she said. “We call that the lead line. Then, the three parts that harmonize with that, usually they are written just to harmonize. And they do. With this dispersed music, each line is a tune unto itself. It is not written just to harmonize with the lead. It's a tune unto itself. That's why they call it dispersed harmony.”

> The light came on. Four separate melodies, sung simultaneously. Four different songs, really, but each with the same words. Which makes it an even more welcoming tradition than the one I grew up with. If you don’t like the treble line of a song that much, then sing one of the other three. Nobody cares.

This is of course more commonly known as "polyphony". Written sources of polyphony in western sacred music survive from at least the 12th century AD, and the unwritten practice must go back even further. Polyphony has been a inseparable, and some may even say distinguishing feature of western (literate) music ever since. It seems that the author and her interviewee are somewhat insulated from the mainstream of western music to be unaware of this.

This is partly true. Mendelssohn brought back the great religious works of Bach into the public consciousness (79 years after Bach's death, not 50 years). However, Bach was by no means unknown among the professional musicians, though his fame was of course eclipsed by his sons. If there was anyone who surveyed the breadth of music in the late 18th century, it was Burney, and he gave a very sympathetic treatment of Bach in his General History of Music. The young Beethoven was famous partly for being able to play the entire Well-Tempered Keyboard from memory, and his Op 120 variations were unmistakably composed with Bach's Goldberg variations in mind.

Mozart, who was himself a great master of counterpoint, was understandably delighted by the Bach fugues that Baron Van Swieten showed him. Mozart was of course very heavily indebted to Johann Christian, but several pieces were clearly homages to the elder Bach; the subject from the K. 394 fugue was clearly derived from the first of the WTK, and the K. 574 Gigue (composed in Leipzig, no less) is obviously Bachian pastiche. The armoured men chorus from the Magic Flute sets a protestant chorale (often used by Bach) in a Bachian setting. That's not to mention the string quartet arrangements of Bach's fugues that Mozart made.

LilyPond is incredible for the one purpose it's built for: engraving notated music. But music engraving is the usually the very last step of a compositional or editorial process. As such, other methods, even pen and paper, may well be superior tools for the creative process of composition (although we should also remember the testimony of Bach's sons that the elder Bach always composed away from the keyboard, and regarded the inability to compose without an instrument at hand to be evidence of poverty of invention; of course, this does not rule out the possibility that Bach tested out out his draft compositions on a keyboard).

On the editorial side, LilyPond is an incredible tool for creating modern editions of earlier music, specifically music in mensural notation. It comes with common glyphs and has full ligature support, and the separation of content and presentation means that one can reproduce the look of early manuscripts and prints while generating a modern score from the same source file. This has been really great at reducing transcription errors by easing the mental burden of transcription, transposition and note reduction, which can all be handled automatically by LilyPond. It's not perfect, but miles ahead of any alternative.

>lauded translator of the Odyssey

For comparison, here is the opening snippet of the Odyssey done by several translators:

Richmond Lattimore (1967):

  Tell me, Muse, of the man of many ways, who was driven
  far journeys, after he had sacked Troy's sacred citadel.
  Many were they whose cities he saw, whose minds he learned of,
  many the pains he suffered in his spirit on the wide sea,
  struggling for his own life and the homecoming of his companions.
  Even so he could not save his companions, hard though
  he strove to; they were destroyed by their own wild recklessness,
  fools, who devoured the oxen of Helios, the Sun God,
  and he took away the day of their homecoming. From some point
  here, goddess, daughter of Zeus, speak, and begin our story.

Robert Fagles (1996):

  Sing to me of the man, Muse, the man of twists and turns
  driven time and again off course, once he had plundered
  the hallowed heights of Troy.
  Many cities of men he saw and learned their minds,
  many pains he suffered, heartsick on the open sea,
  fighting to save his life and bring his comrades home.
  But he could not save them from disaster, hard as he strove —
  the recklessness of their own ways destroyed them all,
  the blind fools, they devoured the cattle of the Sun
  and the Sungod wiped from sight the day of their return.
  Launch out on his story, Muse, daughter of Zeus,
  start from where you will —sing for our time too.

Emily Wilson (2017):

  Tell me about a complicated man.
  Muse, tell me how he wandered and was lost
  when he had wrecked the holy town of Troy,
  and where he went, and who he met, the pain
  he suffered in the storms at sea, and how
  he worked to save his life and bring his men
  back home. He failed to keep them safe; poor fools,
  they ate the Sun God’s cattle, and the god
  kept them from home. Now goddess, child of Zeus,
  tell the old story for our modern times.
  Find the beginning.

Peter Green (2018):

  The man, Muse—tell me about that resourceful man, who wandered
  far and wide, when he’d sacked Troy’s sacred citadel:
  many men’s townships he saw, and learned their ways of thinking,
  many the griefs he suffered at heart on the open sea,
  battling for his own life and his comrades’ homecoming. Yet
  no way could he save his comrades, much though he longed to—
  it was through their own blind recklessness that they perished,
  the fools, for they slaughtered the cattle of Hēlios the sun god
  and ate them: for that he took from them their day of returning.
  Tell us this tale, goddess, child of Zeus; start anywhere in it!

I think the French Pléiade edition is a scholarly/critical edition? Montaigne himself said that the main changes between editions are additions. From On Vanity (Penguin translation):

>I make additions but not corrections: firstly, that is because when a man has mortgaged his book to the world I find it reasonable that he should no longer have any rights over it. Let him put it better elsewhere if he can, not corrupt the work he has already sold. From such folk you should buy nothing until they are dead. Let them do their thinking properly before they publish. Who is making them hurry? My book is ever one: except that, to avoid the purchaser’s going away quite empty-handed when a new edition is brought out, I allow myself, since it is merely a piece of badly joined marquetry, to tack on some additional ornaments. That is no more than a little extra thrown in, which does not damn the original version but does lend some particular value to each subsequent one through some ambitious bit of precision. From this there can easily arise however some transposition of the chronological order, my tales finding their place not always by age but by opportuneness.

Although I agree that a digital edition that allows you to toggle between the different editions would be a wonderful idea. Charles Rosen talked at length about the inadequacies of the Pléiade edition in this regard in his review[1].

[1] https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2008/02/14/the-genius-of-mo...