Woods & Strings

There are a few factors at play here. You have to first recognize that the music industry in the first half of the 18th century was not what it is today. In order for a composer’s music to become well known, a pair of factors needed to come into play: First, that composer had to have a great publisher. Publishing was expensive in those days, and involved very careful and painstaking engraving of each note and staff. It was even more costly than printing text, and significantly more expensive than hiring a team of copyists to do it by hand. So, the publisher needed a really REALLY good reason to run things to print and distribute them. Oh, also, distribution was a horse and carriage. So again, really expensive. And SLOW. By the time Bach reached his apex as a composer, there were composers of secular music (Vivaldi, Handel, et al) who had better publishing deals and better court appointments. Bach was a church musician first and foremost, and by this time the style he was using for chur...

Here's another thing I learned last week... I'm a Taurus. Now, people who know me, and who know things about that kind of thing, know that I'm just about the most Taurus Taurean there is. While I may not personally put a lot of stock in the notion that stars billions of light years away control our destinies, there's no denying that people born at certain times of the year tend to  have certain traits or quirks that line up with their star sign. It was probably the other way around and misattributed to the stars. We'll probably never know. But never mind that part. There's something else interesting that falls under the banner of comparative mythology. Notably, this sign: Any guesses as to what that might be? Sure, it looks like a bull's head. And it is, in fact, a bull's head. But it's not a Taurus symbol. It's actually the glyph for the Slavic god Veles. Veles was one of the principal gods of the Slavic pantheon. His brother, Perun, was the god...

 Here's a thing I learned this week... As we all know, ancient Europe was often a very mobile set of populations. Between the end of the last Ice Age and the rise of Roman dominion over the continent, things get a little murky archaeologically speaking, when it comes to figuring out who lived where and when. This is especially true in the mid and far north, where climate and a lack of writing tended to make things less stable and knowledge less transferable. We have to rely on artifacts, and these can be spread far and wide too. Of course, we have a pretty good timeline for major groups, including the early induction of the Corded Ware culture that, in the west, became the foundation of the Germanic tribes. Somewhere between the arrival of the Indo-Europeans and the spread of the Germanic peoples was a period known as the Nordic Bronze Age. This period lasted from about 3700 to 2500 years ago, and was situated in southern Scandinavia (roughly the area of Denmark and Northern German...