I was thinking as I wrote a paper about Arvo P\u00e4rt about this comic below, but how it pertained to music. \u00a0When people who aren’t really informed about early classical music listen, they probably can’t tell the difference between the Ars Nova and other renaissance music (maybe not even that and medieval or Baroque!). \u00a0Even though the differences in the musics are so great, it would worse than someone listening to high Romantic music and high Classical and declaring them the same.<\/p>\n
What in writing a paper on P\u00e4rt led me to think of this? \u00a0In his work Te Deum he uses musical effects coming from\u00a0medieval\u00a0church music (responsory and chant) and the idea of drones drawn from medieval Eastern Orthodox music (mind you medieval Eastern Orthodox music was the dominant music of the Orthodox church well into the west’s Baroque period). \u00a0You might ask, “well what’s the problem, he is<\/em> using medieval music!” \u00a0The problem is that they come from very different geographies. \u00a0Clumping these two musics together is like saying Ravi Shankar and Bobby McFerrin belong in the same category of music. \u00a0Essentially because the effects P\u00e4rt is using are “old” sounding, listeners generalize and say, “Oh what wonderful medieval music!”<\/p>\n
![\"XKCD\"](\"http:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/period_speech.png\")
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