gardano

Here's one thing that has bugged me for a while. Why is it said that the great red spot is around 500 years old? How do we know that it hasn't been around for much longer?

Do we have before/after evidence that at one point it didn't exist, and then around 500 years ago it existed?

Folks… despite the 'dreadful' link baiting in the title, this is a pretty great article.

Picture a piece for 3 players -- 2 soprano instruments and Basso Continuo (a bass instrument + let's say, harpsichord). It's a piece with a recurring harmonic structure; say, Passamezzo or ciacona -- think Pachelbel Canon.

The BC in this particular instance might only have barlines every 8 measures. The soprano parts might have barlines every 8 measures too, but might also have them where a significant change to their melodies change. Like, when a flurry of 16th notes begin to crop up.

Now, this isn't always the case -- it's definitely inconsistent, but such things show up enough that those hints cannot be discounted at all, and seem to be enough of a performance hint to at least be noted and appreciated by the performer.

No, bars were not standardised at all!

One could interpret placement of barlines as something close to paragraph markers -- not all the time, but often enough that they seem to indicate specific intent.

Musician checking in. Reading music in the original notation I have found to be particularly enlightening.

Where the manuscript writer (or print publisher) chose to put bar lines, for instance, can give clues as to intent in performance. I'm thinking specifically about Venetian publishers in the 17th century -- but there are plenty of other examples.

Notation can be incredibly important when trying to discern intent in some disciplines.

It's great for me to hear that Grendel's is still there. I used to love to go there for their Sour Cream Chocolate cake.

I don't imagine Elsie's diner is there (and also Tommy's). I loved to get bagels at Elsie's of a morning, knowing that the bagel would be infused with whatever else was on the grill that morning.

Wow, how is this not a thing?

Great idea.

I used to hang out there all the time in the '80s. My most memorable moment would have to be the time I complained to the waitress about the cockroaches that scurried from beneath my plate. Her answer?

"What do you expect from a restaurant that's in the f*cking basement?"

Strangely, that experience didn't stop me from returning to Algiers…

I guess my uninformed concern is… if I write an app that has an interface that manages a device that is suddenly embroiled in a class-action lawsuit, what are the chances that I'd be sucked into that lawsuit?

Are any developers avoiding working on IoT devices/interfaces because of the uncertainty regarding the security of these devices?

I have no idea of the liability of developers in this space, but the fact that the question even comes up in my mind certainly gives me pause.

Watching this made me nostalgic for world.std.com, in Boston -- that was many folks' first dialup ISP.

To be clear: It's a reed organ kit enclosed in a box that looks like a bible.

Your comment brings up a good question. Would a spanish-speaker transliterate those terms into a musical context, or into a language context first, since the words themselves are pretty equivalent?

I am thinking it's a question of filters. I first encountered 'despacio' in a piece of music. Now that I'm living in a spanish-speaking country, whenever I come up to that word, the first filter is that piece of music; the second filter is the actual meaning of the word.

As a musician, I've often wondered how a performer whose native language contained such words as "allegro", "largo", "andante" interpreted those markings vs me, whose native language does not contain those words.

To me, "allegro" is a tempo marking, not a state of being, for the most part.

I'm not actually sure who is getting the short end of the stick, in this particular instance, to tell you the truth.

It's got more to do with the tuning system.

Think of it as '6 degrees of separation'. The further away I am away from the starting point, the more alien the tuning would be, and therefore the more startling the sound.

During this period in music, the ideal was to make the 'home base' key to be as perfectly in tune as possible (making adjustments of course).

Michelangelo Rossi is playing with this, and is pushing the boundaries of those assumptions. William Byrd did much the same in England at pretty much the same time.

It makes me wonder if the hyper-specialised quarter-tone composers of our day might have had a better time of it if we had never adopted equal temperament as the standard…

Your comment makes me think of playing catch. Do we really calculate parabolas in our brain when choosing how to catch a ball?

Take a gander at an actual 17th century composer playing with that idea in a most audacious way [0]. The section of the piece I'm referring to begins around 3:26.

The idea seems to be, keys that are foreign to the piece should sound dissonant.

[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BbrrMtWICs4

Back when I was still a student (of music), I read The Inner Game of Tennis and found it to be incredibly useful!

I also recommend it.

I continue to be impressed by the Jazz Crusaders, with their incredible melodic/rhythmic hooks. Those are works of genius.

     * the Major Scale, 
     * the Standard Chord Dictionary, and 
     * the difference in feeling between the Major and Minor Triads. 

• Major scale... in what musical period?

• Standard Chord Dictionary. What does that even mean? Please map that onto gregorian chant or even Monteverdi Vespers of 1610.

• As I've indicated elsewhere, a Major 3rd in 13th century France is actually a discord, not a resolution.

If the author had indicated that he was only referring to 19th century European classical music, I'd have been cool with it. But the author isn't even referring to the European musical tradition in general.

Hmmm… would you rather hear your uncle tell his joke repertoire over thanksgiving dinner, or would you rather hear Louis CK at a theatre?

Music isn't just a series of clever notes, strung together. Sure, it's that too, but there's so much more to it than that.

I agree with what you're saying here.

You know -- you're right.

Music is incredibly complex, and I'm so glad to have a conversation about it. Perhaps I've been too strenuous in my objections to the article, but at the same time, music to me is an intersection between theory and practice; science and art, and I just hate to see it simplified on one side or on the other side.

I look forward to the day where theory and practice can be brought together. It will take someone smarter than me to do such a thing.

I'd argue that in baroque music, much of the notation is a scaffold upon which to build the performance.

Often it's forgotten that articulation, ornamentation, and improvisation are all supposed to be assumed in baroque performance practice. And that in many cases (nowadays), all three of the above are tossed aside (thankfully, less so nowadays -- with performers skilled in performance practice).

Remember: Bach was much better known as a performer/improviser rather than as a composer in his own days.

Combining the complexity of Bach's compositions with the complexity of his (or someone else's) actual performance just adds additional layers of the type of sophistication that you're speaking about.

I remember the story my composition teacher told…

He was at a raga concert, and admitted to feeling totally lost. As the piece progressed, about 30 minutes into the performance, everybody in the audience sighed a breath of satisfaction, and nodded and smiled to each other when the cycles had reached conclusion.

At that moment he realised that there was so much more to music than he realised, and that the audience was much more capable of concentration, too.

I loves me some Thielmann Susato as much as the St John Passion. Both occurred before the US Constitution and deserve to live on in our cultural memory. I couldn't agree with you more.

That's a good question. In most cases, no.

I'd counter that Sidney Bechet or Muddy Waters 12-bar blues can be sophisticated without being complex

Take a gander at (classical Indian) Raga. It's not harmonic-centered, but it's incredibly complex.

Yeah. I'm definitely a western-music oriented person, but the assumptions baked into this article just made me see red.

I'd love to read a paper that modernises pythagorean music theory with modern mathematics. However, medieval music theory would balk at modern piano tuning -- much less 2nd Viennese School compositions -- so at first blush, I can't see how that could be done.