Aidevah (u/Aidevah) - Readit News

Aidevah commented on Two recently found works of J.S. Bach presented in Leipzig [video] youtube.com/watch?v=4hXzU... · Posted by u/Archelaos

reactordev · a month ago

I cut my teeth on Bach on Cello when I was 7. By the time I was in high school I could play all the instruments. I still don’t consider Bach to be the genius everyone says he was. He was a nepo baby with a big purse. His brothers, his family, all musicians of note for prominent figures of society. However, his leaning on his long history of music within the family helped polish his work as structured which helped sell it. Now, Jean-Babtiste Lully was a character…

Aidevah · a month ago

>He was a nepo baby with a big purse.

Interesting interpretation of "he was orphaned at 10 and left with nothing and had to go and live with his brother".

Aidevah commented on Ask HN: Where to begin with "modern" Emacs? · Posted by u/weakfish

Aidevah · 2 months ago

A lot of modern packages which began outside emacs have now been gradually been merged into the main emacs tree and come pre-installed (use-package for clean per package configuration, eglot for LSP support, tree-sitter, which-key etc). So you just need to learn how to configure them.

The most important packages which make emacs feel "modern" that are still outside the emacs tree for now are the ones which makes completion better, both in the main buffer and also in the minibuffer (what others may call your "command palette"). They are

- consult: search and navigation commands, provides candidates for...

- vertico: vertical display of candidates in the minibuffer

- marginalia: annotations for the candidates

- orderless: orderless fuzzy match for candidates

- embark: right mouse context menu for candidates

Getting these setup would make your whole journey onwards much smoother.

Aidevah commented on Why is choral music harder to appreciate? marginalrevolution.com/ma... · Posted by u/surprisetalk

haberman · 4 months ago

I completely agree that one-per-part singing really brings out the beauty in 16th century choral music. I sing in a choir that specializes in music of this period, and while our live performances usually use two singers per part to fill a room, our recordings are more often one-per-part with relatively close micing.

We do record in churches because we like the reverb, so it's not quite the dry studio sound you're describing, but we do prioritize a clear sound stage where all of the parts can be clearly heard.

We've found that a Blumlein mic configuration (two figure-8 pattern microphones placed at a 90 degree angle from each other) helps to create this clarity of texture, where all the parts can be heard individually across the stereo image, especially when listening with headphones. I can't take credit for this idea though: we learned it from the sound engineer who records the Tallis Scholars, who told us that they record in this configuration.

Here are a couple examples of tracks recorded using this style:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IZgo2Z17nNQ

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6r0iyq7AvaU

Aidevah · 4 months ago

That Byrd is very nice! The individual voices came across very well on my IEMs.

I'm used to reverb as well, and the complete lack of reverb in these recordings still sound a little weird to me, as if they are singing in a closet. But even in the 15th and 16th century vocal polyphony was likely performed (often?) in places other than the resonant nave or choir of a large church. I read that aristocratic (or ecclesial) patrons would have singers perform in private chambers, and performance of votive masses at a private chapel to the side of main space in the church would have very different (and quite dry) acoustics.

Aidevah commented on Why is choral music harder to appreciate? marginalrevolution.com/ma... · Posted by u/surprisetalk

dhosek · 4 months ago

I think there’s a big issue with the recording style used for choral music. It tends to be recorded with a far mic in an echoey room which gives the experience of hearing it in church, but I think close micing the individual sections would give more of a sense of being in the choir and really help make everything more distinct. I don’t know any choral music recorded this way, but I know that one of Tony Banks’ (keyboard player for Genesis) orchestral suites was recorded this way which I think worked well.

Aidevah · 4 months ago

A recent recording of Obrecht masses had close mic, recorded in a studio usually used for pop music with very little echo, with one voice per part [1]. The effect really is quite startling. The last time choral music was recorded like this was (coincidentally another Obrecht mass) more than 30 years ago [2].

I think a lot of vocal music written around 1500 would benefit from this approach. It has been remarked that this is really a sort of sacred chamber music rather than music requiring a huge choir. The music moves too fast and it's very difficult for a big choir in a very resonant space to do Obrecht, Josquin and friends full justice.

[1] https://hyperion.lnk.to/cda68460 [2] https://www.medieval.org/emfaq/cds/dvg102.htm

Aidevah commented on 1910: The year the modern world lost its mind derekthompson.org/p/1910-... · Posted by u/purgator

GOD_Over_Djinn · 4 months ago

I thought this bit was fascinating:

> Blom begins with Stravinsky, whose famous orchestral work The Rite of Spring was inspired by ancient Russian dance rituals. A melange of old folk music and arresting dissonance, the piece’s first performance in Paris 1913 triggered one of the most infamously violent reactions of any concert-hall audience in history. As Blom puts it bluntly, “all hell broke loose”:

> “During the first two minutes the public remained quiet,' Monteux [a musician] later recalled, “then there were boos and hissing from the upper circle, soon after from the stalls. People sitting next to one another began to hit one another on the head with fists and walking sticks, or whatever else they had to hand. Soon, their anger was turned against the dancers and especially against the orchestra... Everything to hand was thrown at them, but we continued playing. The chaos was complete when members of the audience turned on one another, on anyone supporting the other side. A heavily bejewelled lady was seen slapping her neighbour before storming off, while another one spat in her detractor's face. Fights broke out everywhere and challenges to duels were issued.”

There’s something about the image of a concert hall full of rich, fancy people erupting in a melee that is just delightful

Aidevah · 4 months ago

The main reason for the commotion during the Paris premiere seems to be the publicity which whipped up the audience on both sides and made a clash inevitable. The Russian ballet had been playing the snobbery of the Paris audience for Stravinsky's two previous ballets, but misjudged the response in the third.

The subsequent performances, the London premiere, and the Paris concert premiere in 1914 all went off without a hitch. And the status of the Rite has only steadily increased ever since.

As Taruskin says, the music of the Rite is actually not very difficult to appreciate[1]:

> While it was at first a sore test for orchestra and conductor, and while it took fully half a century before music analysts caught up with it, The Rite has never been a difficult piece for the audience.

> The sounds of the music make a direct and compelling appeal to the listener’s imagination, and the listener’s body. In conjunction with Stravinsky’s peerless handling of the immense orchestra they have a visceral, cathartic impact. They leave—and to judge from the history of the score’s reception, have always left—most listeners feeling exhilarated. It is only the mythology of The Rite that would suggest anything else.

[1] https://avant.edu.pl/wp-content/uploads/Richard-Taruskin-Res...

Aidevah commented on Remembering Alasdair MacIntyre wordonfire.org/articles/r... · Posted by u/danielam

cm2012 · 7 months ago

“After Virtue” annoys me because it basically argues that morality only makes sense within cultural traditions, as if we’re all just trapped in our local narratives with no access to universal truths. MacIntyre romanticizes ancient communities and traditions, but ignores the fact that plenty of those upheld horrifying practices—like slavery, misogyny, or human sacrifice—and calling those ‘virtuous’ just because they fit a narrative feels like moral relativism in disguise.

I get that modern ethics can feel fragmented, but the answer isn’t to retreat into tribalism or pretend reason can’t give us shared values across cultures.

Just because some people are bad at finding moral clarity doesn’t mean it’s impossible or meaningless.

Aidevah · 7 months ago

> Universalism: that is the intellectual realm abutting utopianism and ethnocentrism. "There are universal values, and they happen to be mine," was Stanley Hoffman’s delightful definition of the latter. Like utopianism and ethnocentrism, universalism normalizes, excludes, and shouts down. If “universal” does not mean universally accepted, then it means nothing. Those who do not accept must therefore at least be marginalized, and if possible stigmatized.

-- Richard Taruskin [1]

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/1995/09/10/arts/the-new-seasonclassi...

Aidevah commented on Mexican Navy ship crashes into Brooklyn Bridge leaving two people dead theguardian.com/us-news/2... · Posted by u/teleforce

haunter · 7 months ago

You can see on the video that all masts were fully manned. RIP

https://reddit.com/r/interestingasfuck/comments/1kp9sxn/ship...

Aidevah · 7 months ago

Looks like the crew were manning the yards[1] as they went out to sea.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yard_(sailing)#Manning_the_yar...

Aidevah commented on Show HN: Sheet Music in Smart Glasses · Posted by u/kevinlinxc

Aidevah · 7 months ago

Great job! For converting music to readable images, the latex of music typesetting is lilypond, which has the ability to create legible music at any size by scaling the notational glyphs accordingly[1]. This sounds like what you were trying to achieve achieve with opencv.

With that being said, although lilypond is very intelligent about all sorts of typesetting minutiae, but it's probably difficult to wrangle it to run on smart glasses.

[1] https://lilypond.org/doc/v2.24/Documentation/essay/engraving...

Aidevah commented on Pope Francis has died reuters.com/world/pope-fr... · Posted by u/phillipharris

fforflo · 8 months ago

In 2021, during a visit to the Greek island of Mytilene, Pope Francis delivered one of the finest speeches I've ever read:

> This great basin of water, the cradle of so many civilizations, now looks like a mirror of death. Let us not let our sea (mare nostrum) be transformed into a desolate sea of death (mare mortuum). Let us not allow this place of encounter to become a theatre of conflict. Let us not permit this “sea of memories” to be transformed into a “sea of forgetfulness”. Please brothers and sisters, let us stop this shipwreck of civilization!

> We are in the age of walls and barbed wire. To be sure, we can appreciate people’s fears and insecurities, the difficulties and dangers involved, and the general sense of fatigue and frustration, exacerbated by the economic and pandemic crises. Yet problems are not resolved and coexistence improved by building walls higher, but by joining forces to care for others according to the concrete possibilities of each and in respect for the law, always giving primacy to the inalienable value of the life of every human being

Worth reading in full https://www.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/speeches/2021/de...

Aidevah · 8 months ago

Isn't Mytilene a city while the island itself is called Lesvos?

Aidevah commented on Conversations are better with four people thetimes.com/article/why-... · Posted by u/nomilk

po · a year ago

I suspect this is related to why a string quartet is the right number of musical voices. Two violins, viola, and cello give you a very fulfilling number of separate ideas to track without overwhelming you.

Aidevah · a year ago

I recall that Charles Rosen wrote somewhere that one of the reasons the string quartet took off in the classical period was that it allowed the playing of all the notes in a dominant seventh chord without double stops. Although this was probably a better explanation for the relative paucity of string trios in the output of Mozart (1) and Beethoven (0). The establishment of four parts as the "standard" scoring for vocal ensembles can be traced back to the 15th century.

On the other hand the second and more famous dining (and conversation) club founded by Dr Johnson had originally 9 members, and gradually grew from that to dozens. Although many including Johnson may have not been entirely happy with the expansion.