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