including headings Dance and music, Solo flute, Scrapers, roarers and rattles, Woodwind and strings, Harp, lyre and lute, ...
It is unlikely that any human society (at any rate until the invention of puritanism) has denied itself the excitement and pleasure of dancing. Like cave painting, the first purpose of dance is probably ritual - appeasin...
The discussion in Munich between Hitler, Chamberlain, Daladier and Mussolini lasts a little over twelve hours, beginning in the middle of the day on September 29 and ending with the signing of an agreed document at 1.30...
The director of music at the court theatre is a German composer, Christoph Willibald Gluck. In partnership with Ranieri de' Calzabigi, a librettist critical of Metastio's conventions, Gluck devises a form of opera in whi...
The director of music at the court of Mantua, Claudio Monteverdi, presents a festivity before Lent in 1607. His entertainment adopts the latest musical style, that of opera, which is just ten years old this year. La F...
William Herschel is a musician from Hanover, earning a successful living as an organist in Bath. But his private passion is the construction of ever larger telescopes with which to search the heavens. By 1774 he has made...
Sensing an opportunity to give up music and to make his private passion his future career, Herschel takes the prudent decision to name his discovery after the monarch. He calls it Georgium Sidus (Georgian Star) in honour...
The Pythagoreans can show, for example, that musical notes vary in accordance with the length of a vibrating string; whatever length of string a lute player starts with, if it is doubled the note always falls by exactly...
The temple has 1000 Brahmin priests and 600 musicians, dancers and other attendants. Countless pilgrims bring it vast wealth (the removal of which adds to the pleasure of pious indignation). When Mahmud arrives to destro...
Pipes of varying sorts are among the earliest of musical instruments, and pipers must often have imagined a pipe too large for human lungs. A scientist in Alexandria, by the name of Ctesibius, is credited with being the...
Section three is the encyclopedia, with entries on such subjects as music, ritual, astronomy, the calendar and economics. The fourth section gives the histories of the rival kingdoms during the long Zhou dynasty.
