> >In that case EVERYONE was a government employee! (Except maybe pirates and >highwaymen!)
No, the peasants were not, nor was the small middle class. The peasantry of course comprised a heavy majority of the population, otherwise the system wouldn't have worked. >But I'm curious, Andrew. You seem to have had someone in >particular in mind. Who, where, and when? > >According to the record, Guido was not motivated by any "mandate >originating at the very highest level." Rather, he was looking for a more >efficient way to reduce the 10 years he said it took him to teach the >choirboys all the chants they needed to know. I was talking about the origins of music *notation*, with wh. Guido had nothing to do. There are no specific names to name, because the creative work involved was almost entirely anonymous, and took place in parallel at a number of different centers. Music notation arose because of a memorization crisis arising from the liturgical standardization imposed under Charlemagne (the "highest level!") with the cooperation of the papacy (ditto). Formerly, chant had been largely improvised according to a variety of formulas, but now it had to be fixed and invariant, which meant that the whole huge body of it had to be memorized. Notation began as a vague aide-memoire that gradually became more and more precise and detailed, until it eventually became capable of carrying all the information remaining in the by then much reified chant. All the people involved in this work were scribes and choir directors in the employ of the Catholic Church, paid, housed, and often fed from mandatory public contributions. -- Andrew Stiller Kallisti Music Press http://www.kallistimusic.com _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
