At 7:00 PM -0500 3/6/08, Christopher Smith wrote:
On Mar 6, 2008, at 6:16 PM, Kim Patrick Clow wrote:
Some even suggest that the concept of the album is pretty much dead.
Oh, I forgot to add:
In the case of jazz albums, some of the most accurate and
well-written jazz scholarship appears (appeared?) on album covers.
Reducing these albums to collections of mp3's reduces their value
considerably for the usual well-informed jazz listener who considers
the reading almost as important as the listening! Personnel lists,
dates, producer notes, technical notes; all these are invaluable
information that is largely lost to the mp3 generation.
Yes, and literary scholarship is changing as well, as authors adopt
word processing rather than making longhand drafts, and earlier
drafts are trashed or overwritten. Same thing with composers, at
least those who now work directly to their computers. The times,
they are a-changin', and these are minor adjustments that go along
with those changes (although they might not seem so minor to
specialists!).
Case in point. I just did a program of music from the Roman de
Fauvel of 1316. That was a bitterly satirical poem first written in
about 1310. It survives in 12 copies, each hand-written of course,
and each having differences from the others, some minor, others
including entire new sections. But the single manuscript from 1316
is unique in also containing over 120 musical examples, carefully
chosen to comment on and amplify the story line. The invention of
printing started us on the road to standardization, and mass
production technology took us further along that long road.
Don't even get me started about all the varying versions of the books
of the Bible, from which the present "approved" books were selected
by a committee in the 4th century, and even then the Hebrew,
Catholic, and Protestant versions have significant differences.
John
--
John R. Howell
Virginia Tech Department of Music
College of Liberal Arts & Human Sciences
Blacksburg, Virginia, U.S.A 24061-0240
Vox (540) 231-8411 Fax (540) 231-5034
(mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED])
http://www.music.vt.edu/faculty/howell/howell.html
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