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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Learning Curves, Apparent and Hidden

Back when I was a music student, it wasn’t all that unusual for people–especially students–not to have a computer at home. That’s what computer labs were for, so, yeah, my first few years of internet-use all took  place in campus computer labs. Campus computer labs tended to have only the sort of software everyone needed, so while the music notation software Finale has been around for ages, I never really learned to use it properly: the only computer I knew that had it installed was a tiny little Mac Classic in the “electronic music lab”–a tiny, windowless room mostly taken …

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A Serving of Links

A sampling of what I’ve been digging into lately. Books: Remember Choose Your Own Adventure books? Remember how those Fighting Fantasy books by Steve Jackson & Ian Livingstone added die rolls and character information to that paradigm? Now imagine reading one and not having to flip from one page to another. Imagine one that takes advantage of all the possibilities of ebooks. Is this new version of Dave Morris’ classic Heart of Ice what you imagined?  (I haven’t read it yet, but it’s getting rave reviews, and I plan on checking it out.) R.H. Kanakia presents: a Taxonomy of Readers. I’m …

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