Chris (![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} simon_stylites) wrote,@ 2009-03-22 00:33:00 |
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inbetweenness
This is probably the wrong blog for this post.
So, I caught a performance of Monteverdi's Vespers of 1610 tonight. Fellow student K. was singing in it, and zomg she has a magnificent voice, supple and friendly and all that. But yes: It's a very, very strange piece. Or maybe it isn't, maybe I'm just unfamiliar with music from that period. It's hard not to listen to it teleologically: It sounds like it is knee-deep in late Renaissance music, but it's striving to become Bach. There are the melismas of baroque music, but they overlap each other in these odd Renaissance polyphonic ways, rather than the more typically baroque intermeshed gearworks.
But then! So this made me think about paleography. Because the prof really likes showing us all the various stages between what we might call one script and the next. He is trying to make a point, that the scrips don't spring out fully formed from the head of Zeus, but rather develop over time. But this slow morphing actually makes it kind of impossible to distinguish the A script from the B script -- even though, if you took away all the intermediary steps, they'd look utterly distinct. It's a little frustrating, pedagogically.
But then again! Is it not sort of arbitrary that we pick A and B to be the defining positions, and think of the in-between stuff as being in-between? Couldn't we also think of Bach as this awkward stage between Monteverdi and Beethoven, rather than thinking of Monteverdi as this awkward stage between Desprez and Bach? Well, ok, that's not quite a fair comparison. But it was very difficult for me to stop thinking of the piece as being a curious mashup of two more familiar styles.
Anyway I work on the middle ages, which I assure you is not a mashup of Classical and Renaissance modes, nor is Monteverdi just a weird mashup. There was some pretty excellent music even within the frameworks established by the piece, as far as I could make it out. Or, I liked it, anyways. Plus there was a whole section that involved echo puns. Who doesn't like echo puns? ("...solamen (Amen!)" or "...vita (Ita!)").
This is probably the wrong blog for this post.
So, I caught a performance of Monteverdi's Vespers of 1610 tonight. Fellow student K. was singing in it, and zomg she has a magnificent voice, supple and friendly and all that. But yes: It's a very, very strange piece. Or maybe it isn't, maybe I'm just unfamiliar with music from that period. It's hard not to listen to it teleologically: It sounds like it is knee-deep in late Renaissance music, but it's striving to become Bach. There are the melismas of baroque music, but they overlap each other in these odd Renaissance polyphonic ways, rather than the more typically baroque intermeshed gearworks.
But then! So this made me think about paleography. Because the prof really likes showing us all the various stages between what we might call one script and the next. He is trying to make a point, that the scrips don't spring out fully formed from the head of Zeus, but rather develop over time. But this slow morphing actually makes it kind of impossible to distinguish the A script from the B script -- even though, if you took away all the intermediary steps, they'd look utterly distinct. It's a little frustrating, pedagogically.
But then again! Is it not sort of arbitrary that we pick A and B to be the defining positions, and think of the in-between stuff as being in-between? Couldn't we also think of Bach as this awkward stage between Monteverdi and Beethoven, rather than thinking of Monteverdi as this awkward stage between Desprez and Bach? Well, ok, that's not quite a fair comparison. But it was very difficult for me to stop thinking of the piece as being a curious mashup of two more familiar styles.
Anyway I work on the middle ages, which I assure you is not a mashup of Classical and Renaissance modes, nor is Monteverdi just a weird mashup. There was some pretty excellent music even within the frameworks established by the piece, as far as I could make it out. Or, I liked it, anyways. Plus there was a whole section that involved echo puns. Who doesn't like echo puns? ("...solamen (Amen!)" or "...vita (Ita!)").
