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Tony's Classes

A Socratic dialogue with music as the focus. Respect all questions and ideas.

Bolivian Colonial Music

Thursday, 24. April 2008, 01:42:24

I'm interested in establishing this blog for the purposes of anybody interested in research into Bolivian Music. My own interests are related to Colonial music but don't let that stop you if your interest is something slightly different.

My life is centred around reconstructing Bolivian manuscripts that I have in digitised form from archives in Bolivia (I live in Australia and travel to Bolivia regularly).

Currently I'm completing the reconstruction of another Villancico (a festival piece for voices and accompaniment in Spanish - nowadays it applies only to a form of Spanish Christmas Carol).

Often the handwriting is the hardest bit to decipher and that's the case with the latest one. You just have to spend a bit of time with the score trying out different ideas as there are no hyphens and often the words have been truncated. They rarely effectively align making the process quite an interesting form of 'jigsaw puzzle'.

I can't claim to be an expert in Baroque Spanish - I came to this research through Latin liturgical music. So, if you're interested in collaborating - tell me!
Here's an example of the sort of thing I'm looking at.
Música52_02.jpg

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Book Review

Tuesday, 11. December 2007, 22:02:17

A new book for the shelves of anybody trying to understand why we like and seem to need music is Oliver Sacks Musicophilia. Like his other books which are made up of case studies this one is no different but the intention is as his explorations are similar to those of earlier researchers into brain function. He is getting a better picture of how we process musical ideas and sounds in a way that shows just how important music is to the human organism. Forms of aphasia tell us not only about a faulty brain but give us an insight into well ones and in this case the music is the medium through which his case studies draw out threads about our aesthetic selves.
Worth more than a look for anybody with an interest in the how and why of music.

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