Strange song for that image? Well, maybe, maybe not. The Cantigas de Santa Maria are a collection of pilgrim songs from medieval Spain, so maybe the bus stop, the road and the motorbike are not completely off.
I had a time, about 12, maybe 15 years ago, when in my voyage through musical history I had arrived at a point where I couldn’t easily go back any further. Those pilgrim songs, the songs of the troubadours, the original Carmina Burana, they all lack reliable notation. All performances are speculative. In the early fourteenth century, with the advent of Ars Nova and its notation capable of denoting rhythm, that all changed, but still, think of all the controversies about how to perform Mozart, and that although Mozart employed a rigid notation system. What could we possibly expect from the thirteenth century?
Any earlier than the troubadours and music stops being interesting to me anyway. Gregorian Chant? Sorry, it bores me to death and I find nothing that differentiates one song from the other. I admit, I didn’t try hard though 🙂
The Song of the Day is “Santa Maria, Strela do Dia” by Jordi Savall. It’s not a bad version and it’s available in my collection, as digital download and on YouTube.
Flo (tonebytone) (2012-07-08)
Just on its own, without any musical references or title concerning that, I find I'm really liking this image. The point of view is excellent. It gives us the book from the bench level and just enough of the bench to tell us the context, from the book's viewpoint. Then in the background, we're confronted with a scene from modern times, featuring a motorcycles, buildings and billboards/signs. Definitely the book is out of its element. If it really is from the era of "Santa Maria, Strela do Dia", perhaps the book feels abandoned during the centuries contained and referenced within its covers. Now it's being exposed to our modern era, although not in a kind way. But perhaps this book is just a modern telephone book and who will be interested in it in even a few years, except a historian trying to figure out who lived where during that year of the book's publication? Either way, I do not envy the book its present position.
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