News to me: iTunes ships the CD booklet with full album purchases. It opens up in Preview / Acrobat Reader / whatever you use for PDF. Yet another reason to buy CDs evaporates into thin air.
I just bought Hilary Hahn’s latest album, which includes recordings of several Mozart violin sonatas. It’s Mozart’s 250th birthday this year. Which is more amazing:
- Mozart was born 250 years ago – just think how much has changed since then, and yet his music is still universally loved; or
- Mozart was born only 250 years ago – he was a young man during the American Revolution – younger than Ben Franklin, for instance – and only 19 years older than Jane Austen.
I was just thinking how amazing it is that virtually no music written before the Reformation exists and is played today. With the staggering amount of culture developed by e.g. the ancient Greeks, it’s tragic that so little of their music survives. But that’s a digression for another day.
It has a lot to do with oral tradition I think. Many of the songs/poems of the pre-reformation were very much frowned upon by the general clergy/governments that were overrunning the countries. Hence not many people wanted to be caught with the music etc. Also, probably people had more time for writing music etc after the Reformation.
Don’t know, but those seem like logical choices.
That would make sense if not for the fact that so much else did survive – things like the philosophy of Plato and Aristotle were assimilated by the church thinkers, but others like Pythagorus and Zeno were certainly not. The epics of Homer and Virgil are with us, as are the plays of Aeschylus, Euripides, Sophocles, and Aristophanes. Writings of Cato, Seneca, Scipio, Julius Caesar, Livy, Marcus Aurelius and tons of other Romans survive. Herodotus, Thucydides, and others produced the first histories and survive mostly in tact.
I think the lack of music is special. I expect that part of it is attributable to a lack of a consistent notation system, but the Greeks were pretty bright; surely someone had to have thought of writing down music. Pythagorus did tons of research and thinking – and writing! – about music, yet he left (almost) no actual music for us.
[...] Charles Petzold, everyone’s favorite programming book author, reviews Hilary Hahn’s recent Carnegie Hall appearance. Hilary Hahn is an amazingly gifted violinist. I’ve been enjoying her recent Mozart release for a few days now. If you’re into classical music, you probably already know who she is. If not, she’s worth checking out. If you’ve never loved violins before (??) she’ll convert you. [...]
Intersting perspective. Do you think today’s rockstars would be happy to know that in 200 years no one will care who they kissed or what they showed on TV?