Baude Cordier, Pando, and The Lifecycle of Radical Music

The composition on the left is “Belle, bonne, sage,” composed by Baude Cordier, a musician who fell into the “Ars subtilior” school — that is, the “more subtle” school of music, which flourished briefly right around the end of the 14th century, in southern France and Northern Spain: you’ll see some sources call that “late medieval” and others “early Renaissance,” though I think of it as the former in most terms… but in music, it’s kind of a toss-up, or rather, at that time and place, music straddles the divide between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. The comparative (“more subtle”) refers to the Ars …

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Dia-Gnosis

I mentioned having tests recently. I’m fine. The gut pain and rib pain seem, says the doctor, to be related to excessive leaning over during that editing project, and too much sitting around in front of my PC with bad, bad posture. Which doesn’t surprise me: other problems have been cropping up too — back problems, tension and even joint pain in one leg and ankle… Time to start exercising. Between Lime, the doctor, and me, there was a strong consensus that it’d be wiser to start with prodigious amounts of walking, and graduate to running later on, when I’m …

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Torke

Michael Torke, that is. I usually review music in my horrible, pages-long bimonthly (or less often) catalogues of everything I’ve been reading, watching (films, TV) and listening to. But I just got my Michael Torke boxed set, Ecstatic Collection, and I have to say, it’s pretty damned wonderful. Michael Torke is a composer who was first mentioned to me by David R. Scott, a Canadian composer who was my instructor during my first year of studying composition. I followed up, and really liked what I heard — a strange blend of occasional snatches of pop music, Stravinsky, and good old-fashioned …

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