His father had lots of children, 4 of which became musicians, of which JSB was the last child, the baby. Barbara Margaretha tried to take the family purse (having already been twice widowed). JSB was “orphaned” but his older brothers were adults. Let’s be real.
At the time, many people. Death stalked the land, children were lucky to reach adulthood, women were lucky to survive childbirth, and almost everyone experienced grief and bereavement.
It's all in his music - the manic passion of trying to master a craft against that background, a burning faith in a better future, against constant reminders of the horrors of the present.
It's not just four part counterpoint. There's a lot more going on.
A lot of modern packages which began outside emacs have now been
gradually been merged into the main emacs tree and come pre-installed
(use-package for clean per package configuration, eglot for LSP
support, tree-sitter, which-key etc). So you just need to learn how to
configure them.
The most important packages which make emacs feel "modern" that are
still outside the emacs tree for now are the ones which makes
completion better, both in the main buffer and also in the minibuffer
(what others may call your "command palette"). They are
- consult: search and navigation commands, provides candidates for...
- vertico: vertical display of candidates in the minibuffer
- marginalia: annotations for the candidates
- orderless: orderless fuzzy match for candidates
- embark: right mouse context menu for candidates
Getting these setup would make your whole journey onwards much
smoother.
I second this approach. After setting these ones up, together with lsp-mode and company-mode (I like experience better than eglot), my configuration stayed mostly the same. I also kept adding new shortcuts for functions I needed (like symbol rename or function list), and am currently at a point when Emacs became a very efficient editor for me personally. I also moved most of these shortcuts over to yyIntelliJ editor at work where Emacs is not very practical due to lack of convenient debugger (C++, Unreal Engine).
A recent recording of Obrecht masses had close mic, recorded in a studio usually used for pop music with very little echo, with one voice per part [1]. The effect really is quite startling. The last time choral music was recorded like this was (coincidentally another Obrecht mass) more than 30 years ago [2].
I think a lot of vocal music written around 1500 would benefit from this approach. It has been remarked that this is really a sort of sacred chamber music rather than music requiring a huge choir. The music moves too fast and it's very difficult for a big choir in a very resonant space to do Obrecht, Josquin and friends full justice.
I completely agree that one-per-part singing really brings out the beauty in 16th century choral music. I sing in a choir that specializes in music of this period, and while our live performances usually use two singers per part to fill a room, our recordings are more often one-per-part with relatively close micing.
We do record in churches because we like the reverb, so it's not quite the dry studio sound you're describing, but we do prioritize a clear sound stage where all of the parts can be clearly heard.
We've found that a Blumlein mic configuration (two figure-8 pattern microphones placed at a 90 degree angle from each other) helps to create this clarity of texture, where all the parts can be heard individually across the stereo image, especially when listening with headphones. I can't take credit for this idea though: we learned it from the sound engineer who records the Tallis Scholars, who told us that they record in this configuration.
Here are a couple examples of tracks recorded using this style:
That Byrd is very nice! The individual voices came across very well on
my IEMs.
I'm used to reverb as well, and the complete lack of reverb in these
recordings still sound a little weird to me, as if they are singing in
a closet. But even in the 15th and 16th century vocal polyphony was
likely performed (often?) in places other than the resonant nave or
choir of a large church. I read that aristocratic (or ecclesial)
patrons would have singers perform in private chambers, and
performance of votive masses at a private chapel to the side of main
space in the church would have very different (and quite dry)
acoustics.
Ha, I don't know much about Dolby Atmos and spacial placement. But from prior experience I'm somewhat skeptical about what this kind of clever DSP can do for choral music.
For example, when I learned about convolution reverb, and how it should theoretically be able to simulate the unique reverb pattern of any room, I was initially excited about the possibilities. But after trying it I was underwhelmed.
That said, I'm open to being convinced. If you know of any compelling demos of this kind of spatial placement, I'd be interested to see.
I had not heard of Nonsuch Palace, despite having a passing interest in Henry VIII and certainly a large interest in Tallis! Is it thought that Spem was performed there?
Atmos on earphones is done by manipulating the waveform that reaches the eardrum to reproduce the distinctive impulse response due to the sound bouncing off different parts of the ear as it arrives. (Come to think of it I guess that's really also a form of convolutional reverb.) I think it's cool that it can be done on earphones at all, and with head tracking the effect can be noticeable at least, but I don't think it really adds much. I find earphone listening sort of envelopingly directionless in a special way of its own that I enjoy anyway.
On a multi-speaker separates system, though, I think it's done simply by attenuating the signal to each speaker. Whether it's just that or something more sophisticated, the effect is much stronger and adds a lot more to the experience. A good system can place sounds clearly anywhere within a full dome enclosing the listener. The problem is that very few people have such a system, so the audience isn't huge. (That said, Apple Music heavily promotes spatial audio, so an Atmos Spem in Alium might reach more people just from search placement...)
What Atmos adds beyond surround sound (which itself offers untapped opportunities for Spem in Alium) is:
* It carries independent position data for up to 100 tracks, which can be edited (so you could experiment with the placement).
* It adapts to the set of speakers available at playback, rather than having a fixed track per speaker.
* It works on earphones, to some extent at least.
* It has vertical as well as planar positioning, so the "balconies" would work.
I don't know of any renaissance choral music available in Atmos. Most of Deutsche Gramaphon's new recordings use it, so there might be some good classical examples there. A listening room should have general demos that would show the effect off.
I think the Nonsuch Palace thing is just a suggestion rather than anything strongly historical. Wikipedia mentions it [1]:
> This account is consistent with the catalogue entry at Nonsuch Palace: Arundel House was the London home of Henry FitzAlan, 19th Earl of Arundel; Nonsuch Palace was his country residence. Nonsuch had an octagonal banqueting hall, which in turn had four first-floor balconies above the ground floor; on this supposition it could have been the case that Tallis designed the music to be sung not only in the round, but with four of the eight five-part choirs singing from the balconies.
I want a recording of Spem in Alium done with a mic per singer, placed spatially using Dolby Atmos and arranged as they might have been in the octagonal banqueting hall of Nonsuch Palace: surrounding the audience (in the round) and with four of the eight choirs up on balconies.
(Say what you want about "spatial audio" on earphones - if you're lucky enough to have a good home cinema separates system it's awesome, and this would be the ultimate application for it IMO.)
The main reason for the commotion during the Paris premiere seems to be the publicity which whipped up the audience on both sides and made a clash inevitable. The Russian ballet had been playing the snobbery of the Paris audience for Stravinsky's two previous ballets, but misjudged the response in the third.
The subsequent performances, the London premiere, and the Paris concert premiere in 1914 all went off without a hitch. And the status of the Rite has only steadily increased ever since.
As Taruskin says, the music of the Rite is actually not very difficult to appreciate[1]:
> While it was at first a sore test for orchestra and conductor, and while it took fully half a century before music analysts caught up with it, The Rite has never been a difficult piece for the audience.
> The sounds of the music make a direct and compelling appeal to the listener’s imagination, and the listener’s body. In conjunction with Stravinsky’s peerless handling of the immense orchestra they have a visceral, cathartic impact. They leave—and to judge from the history of the score’s reception, have always left—most listeners feeling exhilarated. It is only the mythology of The Rite that would suggest anything else.
> Universalism: that is the intellectual realm abutting utopianism and ethnocentrism. "There are universal values, and they happen to be mine," was Stanley Hoffman’s delightful definition of the latter. Like utopianism and ethnocentrism, universalism normalizes, excludes, and shouts down. If “universal” does not mean universally accepted, then it means nothing. Those who do not accept must therefore at least be marginalized, and if possible stigmatized.
Great job! For converting music to readable images, the latex of music
typesetting is lilypond, which has the ability to create legible music
at any size by scaling the notational glyphs accordingly[1]. This
sounds like what you were trying to achieve achieve with opencv.
With that being said, although lilypond is very intelligent about all
sorts of typesetting minutiae, but it's probably difficult to wrangle
it to run on smart glasses.
Technically yes, but they're used interchangeably nowdays. Plus, the official transcript mentions "Mytilene" so I wanted to follow that. Although I use Lesvos myself.
I recall that Charles Rosen wrote somewhere that one of the reasons the string quartet took off in the classical period was that it allowed the playing of all the notes in a dominant seventh chord without double stops. Although this was probably a better explanation for the relative paucity of string trios in the output of Mozart (1) and Beethoven (0). The establishment of four parts as the "standard" scoring for vocal ensembles can be traced back to the 15th century.
On the other hand the second and more famous dining (and conversation) club founded by Dr Johnson had originally 9 members, and gradually grew from that to dozens. Although many including Johnson may have not been entirely happy with the expansion.
> Unless you’re doing some fairly exotic things where you’re finding yourself saying things like
>> Oh yeah the OCR on Japanese driving licenses pops out things like “平成 8”, that’s just how they sometimes say 1996 over there. That’s why we have this in the parser: eras = { "大正": 1912, "昭和": 1926, "平成": 1989 }
>> One of these days we’ll need to add "令和": 2019, but it hasn’t come up yet.
Taiwan also uses the ROC calendar[1] which is directly descended from the regnal calendars of imperial china.
But it's quaint that the Japanese name their year after one person, while us enlightened westerners simply use a calendar where it's simply the 2024th year of the, erm, hmmmph...
Interesting interpretation of "he was orphaned at 10 and left with nothing and had to go and live with his brother".