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BFRC

I am posting this as a benchmark, not because I think I'm playing very well yet.  The idea would be post a video every month for a ye...

Friday, July 17, 2020

Antonio Eximeno

I found out today about a Spanish Jesuit musicologist who wrote a treatise, in Italian while in exile in Rome when Carlos III kicked out the Jesuits from Spain, in which he says that music is derived is derived from language and prosody and not from mathematics. Holy shit.  This is the kind of thing that gives me goose bumps.  WHY DID NOBODY TELL ME ABOUT THIS BEFORE!!.  Obviously, well, because probably other people don't know it either. I only found out by accident, when I was trying to see when the term ethnomusicology was coined. I followed a link to him, and then found his entire treatise on line. He is mathematician too, so there are some formulas I don't wholly understand. Of course I don't understand the whole debate in 18th century music theory that I would need to master before I saw the significance of this work in its proper context.

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