What do you want to be when you grow up? As an “art kid,” I was obsessed with drawing, painting, creating, building. I even remember cutting out stories and headlines from the newspaper and pasting them up on my own paper. Layout, right out of the gate.
The #NCGreatPerformances project—the Newberry Consort’s pandemic-inspired YouTube series—works like this: David and Ellen select a concert to highlight, choose the pieces to include, and create an audio master of the excerpts; David sends me the audio; I’m off to the races.
Here’s Anonymous 4’s CD The Second Circle: Love Songs of Francesco Landini. As you’ll recall, Landini is the blind virtuoso and composer most associated with the Italian ars nova. Consider the image on the cover.
This New Year’s gift of music by Holborne, Kapsberger, and Loesser is accompanied by two seasonal tapestries designed by the Master of the Months of Lucas around 1535. Winter (from the “Seasons of Lucas” Series) is crowded with all manner of people enjoying winter pastimes or doing winter work. Images of children playing and just…
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It’s the organological details on the cats-n-dogs-ichord that get me: paws coming out the front, helper grabbing tails at the back. Does the player touch the paws or the keys? Is the tail-grabber like the guy who works the pumps on an organ? See the whole thing at the Rijksmuseum here.
