Indeed, unless you set your lutes on fire, the Baroque flamboyant has
little to do with the history of music.
I have been personally guilty of over simplification, mostly because I
had to organize my computer folders according to some kind of scheme. I
won't go into the kind of geographical distortion I had to apply to the
European continent for similar reasons. My current scheme is based on
tunings: Renaissance G-tuning, transitional, baroque D-minor, ...
Romantic guitar, but it obviously leaves something to be desired.
Theorboes don't fit in and would require more disk space.
Classification is important as a matter of practical interest, but its
connection to reality remains anecdotal. Jorge Luis Borges said it
better than I in one of his stories. He was a librarian by trade, so he
knew what he was lying about in terms of classification. As long as you
don't confuse your own fictions for reality, you should be fine.
Unless you meet a classical guitar player who insists on saying he is
playing "Baroque guitar music" -- meaning a transcription of a piece for
harpsichord by Handel adapted for the 6-string Spanish guitar by some
post-Modern era dude. Then, dialog could become murky. But that is what
we invented quotation marks for.
Incidentally, in literature, the Baroque is just not relevant as a
period or a useful concept. Amazingly, English majors have survived.
In conclusion, put quotation marks around everything, you hopey-dopey
changey full-time lutenists, preferably with those crooked fingers of
yours, and hope that somehow somewhere it will make sense to someone out
there. Or just use the good old alphabetical order and leave out Chinese
music -- if you don't have a good grasp of Unicode and the pipa.
On 01/21/2016 09:28 PM, howard posner wrote:
On Jan 21, 2016, at 9:16 PM, howard posner <howardpos...@ca.rr.com> wrote:
"Baroque" is a n art historians’ term
I decided to abort that message, but hit send instead of delete.
I was going to [not] point out that "baroque music” means no more than “music
written during the period that art historians, for reasons that have nothing to do
with music, have named “baroque.” I suppose you can find the occasional “distorted”
or “bizarre” music from this time, but it’s not the most useful way of thinking of
music written between about 1600 and about 1750 (nor do I think Jim meant to say it
was, which is why I reached for the delete button in the first place); and would be
misleading in most cases.
Carry on. Don’t mind me.
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