Jeffrey’s Reviews > How to Listen to and Understand Great Music > Status Update

Ch 13 oratorio
Messiah (not the messiah, just messiah) has been continuously performed since it was first staged in 1742. The only Baroque piece to do so.
During hallelujah chorus , King George the 2nd was so moved by the “King of Kings” that he stood, and we still do so today

Aria - music not the words is the expressive vehicle

The Florentine Camerata(Italian: Camerata Fiorentina), est ~ 1570s, also known as the Camerata de' Bardi, were a group of humanists, musicians, poets and intellectuals in late Renaissance Florence who gathered under the patronage of Count Giovanni de' Bardi to discuss and guide trends in the arts, especially music and drama.

Ch 9 Nationalism
German tight , reformed personal expression constructed around a gutteral syllabic language

Italian - flowing melismatic melodic music of enchantment and sensual delight built around a language of vowels , lots of them, made to sing and hold and deliver via aria

I back tracked a little; Rondo for very comforting and illustrative of the cycles that pervade matter, our lives, the seasons, the world and the universe - the cycle of the familiar and the new. I love cycling between these two extremes, up down, this way and that. Too long in the familiar makes you itch for the new, too long in the new makes you ache for the familiar.

Review Cantatas and passacaglia - beautiful and the example from the Lecture (15) of dido’s death passacaglia is esp moving while i am reading the Aeneid, remembering their Love (hers)

Madrigals lead to opera as rag lead to jazz