Matteo Ricci was the first Westerner to be invited into the Forbidden City in Beijing. During his years in China, Ricci wrote extensively and maintained an unprecedented dialogue with the Chinese intelligentia.
The Cozzolani Project’s latest release is the five-voice dialogue for St Catherine of Alexandria, O cæli cives (1650). As in a few other pieces, the ’singing angels’ to whom musical nuns were often compared, form one side of this dialogue, while two low voices represent the faithful on earth.
On his remarkable Galileo 1610 website, Mark Thompson writes about the role of music Gilileo's scientific work: “Thus the effect of the fifth is to produce a tickling of the eardrum such that its softness is modified with sprightliness, giving at the same moment the impression of gentle kiss and of a bite.” Music played not only a unique, but an essential role in leading Galileo to his new physics. Because it is an art demanding precise measurement and exact divisions, music reflected the spirit of Galileo’s science. One of Galileo’s most important discoveries, the law of falling bodies, can actually be traced Read More...
According to author Leo Rosten in his The Joys of Yiddish, the first printed mention of the word bagel is in the 1610 Community Regulations for the city of Krakow, Poland. The regulations state that "bagels would be given as a gift to any woman in childbirth." The ring shape may have been seen as a symbol of life. It was also in 1610 that Europe got its first taste of tea, a beverage that had been popular for centuries in China and Japan, as Amsterdam received its first shipment of the intoxicating leaves. The Dutch East India Company initially marketed Read More...
via Telegraph.co.uk The mannerist painter Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio died on July 18 1610 at the age of 39 and the circumstances of his death have been controversial ever since. It has been suggested that he contracted syphilis or even that he was assassinated but anthropologists from the universities of Pisa, Ravenna and Bologna are studying other theories – that he contracted malaria while traveling in Italy or that he suffered from lead poisoning. The anthropologists hope to prove their theory by carrying out DNA tests Read More...
In January 1610 Galileo Galilei first observed the four moons of Jupiter now known, appropriately, as "The Galilean Moons". The largest of the many moons of Jupiter, Galileo initially named his discovery the Cosmica Sidera ("Cosimo's stars") but they are now known by the names given by Simon Marius in his 1614 Mundus Jovialis: Io, Europa, Ganymede and Callisto - the lovers of Zeus. Galileo first noticed Saturn's peculiar shape later in 1610, well after the publication of his landmark book Sidereus Nuncius. The story of how he initially revealed the new discovery to his fellow astronomers by means Read More...
To mark Women’s History Month, Public Radio Exchange (PRX) has posted an hour long program celebrating some of the remarkable women in music from the Baroque, including Magnificat’s recording of Dixit Dominus by Chiara Margarita Cozzolani.
Like most I suspect, when I think of Venice I imagine a sun-baked Piazza of San Marco, but of course winter visits Venice each year and it seems that before the advent of modern heating, the experience was particularly brutal. In his engaging journals recounting his three years in Venice during the 1860s, W.D. Powell describes the attitude of the locals to winter: "The Venetians pretend that many of the late winters have been much severer than those of former years, but I think this pretense has less support in fact than in the custom of mankind everywhere to claim that Read More...
Last Sunday, I attended Artek’s performance of Monteverdi’s Vespro della Beata Vergine at the National Gallery in Washington DC. It was lovely to hear a fine performance of this masterpiece (a piece I’m thinking about alot these days) in one of my favorite buildings in the world.
Representing Magnificat, I will be attending the annual conference of the American Musicological Society in Philadelphia this later this week. It has been several years since I’ve had the opportunity to attend the AMS conference and I am looking forward to meeting old colleagues, making new friends and listening to the wide range of presentations on current work being done in musicology. The conference program is available for download (PDF) and the abstracts for papers can be downloaded here (PDF). Over the week I will be highlighting some of the sessions relevant to the music and culture of the 17th Read More...