On Fri, Apr 17, 2009 at 2:32 AM, <chriswi...@yahoo.com> wrote: > > --- On Thu, 4/16/09, David van Ooijen <davidvanooi...@gmail.com> wrote: > >> And think of how the French revolution >> killed it, >> among other things, by spreading liberté, égalité and >> fraternité. >> > > Certainly not. Unwritten unequal rhythms (and all sorts of other time > liberties) were alive and well throughout the 19th
Disclaimer! (Before we start a whole thread on something I never intended.) I thought the pun was clear enough to see, but true enough, you cannot see my face when I'm typing. I should have added a ;-). ;-) The unequal performance of equally notated notes has been a feature of music throughout the baroque, and before as well as after, in many national styles, not just in France. That this practice is today often referred to with the French label of inégalité, and therefore presumed to be an exclusively French baroque thing, has more to do with the fact that the French baroque people loved to write about it more extensively than for example the Italians. Modern musicians, with their love for classifying, making tables, pigeon holing and the like, have taken up these French sources with a relish. At my conservatory we had a subject called 'historical documentation', that could easily turn into hysterical documentation with a distorted view of the past if only the readily available sources where used. An absence of sources does not mean an absence of practice. If we look a little closer we can find more evidence. Anyway, the revolutionaries weren't able to kill all the nobility either. ;-) David -- ******************************* David van Ooijen davidvanooi...@gmail.com www.davidvanooijen.nl ******************************* To get on or off this list see list information at http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~wbc/lute-admin/index.html
