me:mo is made possible by your support! To become a patron, see: www.patreon.com/musicamemo For more information visit my website: www.musicamemo.com me:mo is hosted by Lukas Henning.
Welcome back, Lucas! After such a long season of me:mo-starvation, you outdo yourself with this remarkable episode to break our fast. The rich repast is not easily ingested, however, nor do I think you wanted it to be. Some of it goes down smoothly, other parts remain stuck in my teeth: your title for a start. Your underlying premise seems to be that polyphony's object is not at all enjoyment in any abandoned sense, but rather the satisfaction of bridling the beast and slowing him to a dignified and reasonable walk. I think that was--and is--actually true. But I must except myself from the "we" who may find polyphony boring, because I simply never have. I came to polyphony young, too young to grasp it with anything but my heart. Religious values were involved, something you don't touch upon, indispensable though they were for the age which gave polyphony to the world. For me they still are, since this music is what has kept me somehow connected to what some might call God, in the absence of what most would call Faith. One searches in vain for that kind of connection amid Zarlino's learned demonstrations. Still less is it to be found in (as another commenter put it) "the geometry of the melodic lines in terms of the hexachord." But it remains immanent in the music itself; for music, however rational its purported rules, is always its own critique of that 'vanitas vanitatum', pure reason.
It's very rare to find videos with such a high level of thoughtfulness, taste, and dank memes all mixed together seamlessly. Very glad I found this channel, keep up the good work.
I've watched this four times now and occasionally come back for small quotes too. great, I appreciate this a lot, and have tremendous respect to you, Sir...
You are perhaps the most interesting man on youtube. This is a most extraordinary presentation on the subject of early music. It reminds me of the BBC series "Connections". I am completely hooked. Well done.
Fantastic as always! The connection between music, art, and architecture was masterfully woven and made polyphony easier to understand. There's so much to learn from and digest, I'll be re-visiting this video.
All this talk of art depicting ruins of buildings reminded me of Megadeth's Peace Sells... But Who's Buying album cover which depicts the ruins of the United Nations building. Dave Mustaine got the idea for it when sitting in front of the building imagining it blown up. Great episode as always!
Wow! I think this may be the best ME:MO yet. I have watched it twice and I will be coming back many more times. I love singing and playing polyphony, and now I will also be thinking about how it is “also, somehow, made to be ruined.”
Hey me:mo, I really enjoyed the video. Altough I am not a musician or any art expert and this could interfer with my following question, I still posit it: what is the link between the ruins aesthetic/architecture in the paintings with the polyphony? I mean, polyphony, because of its neatly and tidy nature, looks more related to the paintings in the time they were all composite and solid than scrambled and destroyed, even though this "destruction" looks organized and porpotionate.
Hi Gabriel, thanks for the comment! You raise a good question, since it has to do with an important point I didn’t explicitely talk about in the video itself. We have to be aware of how we differentiate when comparing works. In architecture, what even is the »work« we are discussing? The architect’s drawing? Or the actual building - life size in brick and stone? If we say it’s the former, then why even bother with buildings and just look at the drawings instead, that, neat and tidy as they are, presumably provide the most immediate impression of the architect’s intent? We can ask a similar question in regard to music: What is this »music« we are talking about? The score? Or what we hear when someone plays the composition? There are musicians who can perfectly imagine a piece of music just by looking at its score. So why even bother performing it with everything that can go wrong: Mistakes, imperfect intonation, all kinds of mannerisms a musician might introduce into the performance, only clouding our impression of what the composition is in an ideal sense. The »ruination« I mean happens not on the composition-level but in that intermediate step between the drawing and the building, between the score and the performance. My argument is that exactly because the Renaissance aesthetic is so neat with all its restraint and proportion, the introduction of a human element, of human error, has the potential of elevating instead of negating it. That’s why people keep pointing out that Bach’s music seems to work no matter how many times it is re-arranged and re-worked for different instruments and mixed with different styles. It’s timeless because it still operates in the contrapuntal framework formulated in the Renaissance. Playing his prelude in C major unevenly with missing notes on a marimba can still yield something new and interesting. Instead of endangering it this performance realizes a potential inside the composition. A piece outside the contrapuntal idiom, say a Rolling Stones song, played straight on a harpsichord with no drums or vocals will fold in on itself immediately because the Stones song is about its groove and attitude, not so much its structure.
Thank you David, and for your amazing support always! The piece I wrote myself, with the idea of somehow illustrating that Zarlino idea a bit. So I went for this somewhat unorthodox soggetto, the repeated notes with syncope in the middle.
Hey thanks, and thanks for being there in Warsaw. The CD with that program is underway - recorded in April, now it's in production. Sending all the best!
fantastic! very insightful, on the other hand i love the sequence from Fassbinder's Martha! one of my favorite scenes about my favorite kind of music ( polyphony) and its strange power to oppress who don't like it
