Monday, November 06, 2006

Low Volume

And I mean, amount of weekly posts. Interestingly, we usually associate this phrase with sound intensity. It comes from the Latin word which signifies a series of pages of writing, in the Book Volume sense, and I suppose it made its way to Quantity after that - it does mean that though now as well: quantity, how much of something there is. I suppose that the Sound Volume evolved from the Quantity Volume, which evolved from the Book Volume, which did not evolve, but was created directly, because books are angelic beings.
I spent a weekend up in the woods up in the mountains with 12 other poets. We read poetry and ate hummus and sat on big rocks. It was good life. It didn't help the already pressing problem of weekly time management. Hence and thus, last week's low volume.
Speaking of low volume, we need to choose the weekly composer. Guillaume de Machaut must make way for another man who was writing in France, a hundred years later, in the 15th century: Johannes Ockeghem. He was a Franco-Flemish composer, and I think that since I have so little on his two Franco-Flemish neighbors, Guillaume Dufay before him, and Josquin des Prez after, I will talk about the three of them together. Yes, this is 15th century Franco-Flemish week. I'm listening to the Kyrie from Ockeghem's "Missa L'homme Arme" right now - definitely some polyphonic refinement on the music of Machuat. A little of that Franco-Flemish polish.

1 comment:

Ryan Hofer said...

do you think the universe is analog or digital?