My writings

Monteverdi (1567-1643) and the Birth of Opera

(chap 20)

Claudio Monteverdi, a chapel master of Saint Mark’s in Venice, was the greatest Italian composer of the early seventeenth century as well as the first master of the baroque music-drama. He wrote religious music like ballets, madrigals and operas. He also set aside the original way to write Renaissance chamber music and made it much more dramatic, with contrasts. He wanted his music to express much more than music was expressing until that time. He associated specific sounds with specific emotional states: anger, for instance, with the high voice register, moderation with the middle voice register, and humility with the low voice register. Because he was so concentrated on music as well as speech, he finally gave birth to a new kind of music which is called opera: a form of theater that combines all aspects of baroque artistic expression- music, drama, dance, and the visual arts.
Opera was used to revive the music-drama of ancient Greek. However none of the humanists were able to put a sound on the Greeks music which led them to only imitate the ancient unity of music and poetry. The first performance of an opera was very similar to what was the Renaissance masque, a form of musical entertainment that included dance and poetry, along with rich costumes and scenery. But what mostly differentiated operas from masques was the music complexity and dramatically cohesive. By 1700 in Italy, there were seventeen opera houses built, the first one being in Venice. As we can see, operas became very popular. Some of the opera houses were magnificent with their life-sized sculptures and illusionist frescoes, which were aesthetically indistinguishable from Italian baroque churches and chapel interiors.
Monteverdi’s first opera (full-length) was called Orfeo which he composed in 1697. The text for the opera, called libretto, wasn’t written by him, but by Alessandro Striggio and was based on the descent of Orpheus (the Greek poet-musician to Hades).

Emperor Akbar (at the top of this image in

a white gown) directs building work at

Fatehpur Sikri. (1570 - 1574 AD)
Absolute Power and the Aristocratic Style in India

(chap 21)

It is in the sixteenth century that the Muslim dynasty called the Moguls (name deriving from “Mongol”) has united all of India. Before that, Muslims ruled only some parts of the country for almost a century. Moguls managed to rule India as absolute monarchs from 1526 to 1707. As Louis XIV imported Italian culture into France, the moguls imported the Persian culture and language into India. The new Indian cultural style was a mix of Muslim, Hindu, Turkish, Persian, Arabic, and African traditions. There was also an aristocracy in India, similar to the one of the Sun King ( served as an adjunct to majesty).
Akbar was a thirteen year old boy that came to the throne and was the founder of the Mogul empire. Since Emperor Asoka, Akbar was the most dynamic ruler. Because India wasn’t united and different religion groups lived in all India, Akbar was tolerating the religions practiced. He even finally took the time to bring in to his court learned representatives of Christianity, Judaism, Hinduism, and other religions to debate with the Muslim theologians.
The lower class of India was very poor because they had to pay enormous taxes to finance all the luxuries of the upper-class elite. But India was the wealthiest state in the world; they surpassed France’s revenue by ten.
One of the Mogul innovations was the recording and illustrating first-hand accounts of specific historical event as a miniature of the birth of Akbar’s son (The Humanistic Traditions book 4 48). These kinds of miniatures representing an event are still present on Asian carpets.

Agra, Red Fort, Jahangiri Mahal (1565 AD)

Agra, the new city, Fatehpur Sikri (1570 AD)

Bach and Religious Music

(chap 22)

Very near the castle in Eisenach where the first transcript of the Bible in German was written by Martin Luther was where Bach was born. Bach wrote music to God, he was asked to compose music for each Sunday services at the Lutheran Church of Saint Thomas in Leipzig and also for all holy days. Bach himself even dedicated his works “to the glory of God” because he got his inspiration from Luther’s teachings and Lutheran hymns tunes. Bach did not travel very far during his life, a couple of hundreds miles was the further he got from Eisenach. Bach was known as the finest of organ virtuos and was a consultant for the construction of baroque organs which were the glories of the Protestant churches thanks to the ornately embellished casings.
His vocal music were oratorios, Masses, and cantatas. The cantata is a multi-mouvement work with a text in verse sung by chorus and soloists and accompanied by a musical instrument or instruments. As is the oratorio, cantatas may be sacred or secular in subject matter and lyric or dramatic in style. Bach has 195 cantatas that survived and they were usually inspired by the simple melodies of Lutheran chorales. The basic of his instrumental compositions were also taken from religious work, the Protestant chorales as well as the 170 organ preludes written to precede and set the mood for congregational singing. Bach’s music invested Protestant Christianity with a sublime and deeply personal sense of human tragedy.

One of Bach's preludes bwv995

Bach's traveling map

Baroque Instumental Music

(chap 23)

Instrumental music became much more popular, not surprising after the writings of some of the earliest composers which led to the improvements and refinements in tuning. It came to the point that composers where composing even more instrumental music. The principal instruments that were perfected were the violin, viola, and the cello, as string instruments and the organ and harpsichord. During the early eighteen century equal temperament was adopted by musician. The equal temperament is a system of tuning in which the octave was divided into twelve half-step of equal size. Well-Tempered Clavier, Bach’s fugues and his collection of preludes showed how Bach could use that tuning system and create sublime music with it. He wrote two pieces in every possible key. All these efforts to improve the quality of music of the instruments as well as the techniques mirrored the efforts of scientists and philosophers of the time to bring perfection and uniformity also to the tools used as well as the scientific inquiry.

stradivari violin

The world center for violin manufacturing during the seventeenth century was in northern Italy. Great quality violins were made at that time. Some of the names are The Amati, Guarneri, and Stradivari families of Cremona. They had their techniques that became famous, because violinists playing in the greats courts of Europe have purchased those kinds of violins. The techniques used were kept very secret, it only passed from father to son and even to this day, violin manufacturers cannot imitate them. It has always been unsuccessfully. As for other instruments, around the year of 1650, they were standardized and refined. The instrument known as the shawm wasn’t going to be unique anymore, all of those instruments became the modern oboe.

The Encyclopedic Cast of Mind
(chap 24)
In the eighteenth century there was something that had a huge impact on the culture of the time, it was the Encyclopédie. However it wasn’t understood by the majority, rather the minority of the people, it fostered an encyclopedic cast of mind. All work done from that time, was stored, accumulated, preservated which had a direct link with the Scientific Revolution and to the Enlightenment “bible”, Newton’s Principia.
Chemistry, Biology, Electricity and medical sciences were the fields which have known enormous amounts of advances during the eighteenth-century by scientists. What had appeared in society’s everyday lives? The mercury thermometer, the stethoscope and an introduction to the science of immunology to the West - about 7 centuries after the Chinese.

Antoine Lavoisier (1743-1794) - the Elementary Treatise of Chemistry, chemistry which was an exact science
Carolus Linnaeus (1701-1778) - systematic method for classifying plants
Georges Luis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon, French naturalist (1707-1788) - made landmark advances in zoology

In the domain of arts, the same strategies were adopted - accumulating and classifying knowledge. The first dictionary of the English language was published by Samuel Johnson (1709-1784) as well as the first Western dictionary of music by Rousseau. As for the social sciences, in 1756, a seven-volume general history written by Voltaire was considered as the new model of history-writing. Voltaire recognized that Europe had a debt to Arab science as well as Asian thought. He was a very critical man when it came to the role of the Catholic Church in Western history, he rejected explanations based on faith and not rationality. Edward Gibbon (1737-1794) went to the point to say that Christianity was to blame for the collapse of the Roman Empire. His interpretation of ancient cultures was later on written in The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire in 1776.
In the East however, these “encyclopedias” weren’t comprehensive collections of contemporary knowledge, but anthologies of the writings of Chinese artists and scholars.