Category: Daily Feed

Agnus Dei, Andreas Scholl (voice)

Andreas Scholl, countertenor
Collegium Vocale Gent,
Conducted by Philippe Herreweghe
Harmonia Mundi

 

The Agnus Dei is the last section of the Catholic Latin Mass that was regularly set to music in the Renaissance and Baroque periods (c. 1400 – 1750). Agnus Dei means, “lamb of God” and was usually reserved for the more beautiful passages of music written for the different movements of the mass. This is a setting from the Mass in B minor by J.S. Bach from the later baroque period, by this time there were many instruments used as accompaniment to the singing, whereas in the early Renaissance the music was strictly written for voices only.

For more information you can find it here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agnus_Dei_(music)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_(music)

Mozart for Breakfast

With all the chaos in the world, remember to take a small amount of time each day to stop and enjoy everything that you have in life.

“Music has the power to change the way we see things, to transform our senses and our understanding: it presents itself not as a creation but as the creation.  This feeling is inextricably linked with the sense of beauty we have been exploring; somehow the internal relations of the composition and its external relation to our experience become related.  We are in another world, but through that world we seem to find our own.”

–Edward Rothstein, “Emblems of Mind, The inner life of music and mathematics”

 

Recording by Matthew Cordova

Music Manifesto

Music:

Without a doubt the most amazing creation by human beings ever.  I ask anyone to name something more profound.  How long did it take to build the pyramids?  Hundreds of years?  By hundreds of thousands?  Western music is a collective effort of every human being and every humans’ ear, evolved over the entire history and existence of humanity dating back to when we stood upright and walked for the first time.  We have evolved our ears from something that originally served to caution us of predators, into something that derives pleasure from the way sounds are organized into a system that our brain can process like a puzzle.  From that, we have organized patterns of notes and tuning systems that as humans, we can manipulate with instruments–the voice being the most basic of such–to produce notes of sound, that when played back and heard by our evolved ears, produce emotional responses by our brains that help us deal with the most basic and innate feelings of love, pain, pleasure, and happiness.  Emotions and feelings so great, that our entire existence is still unable to explain them fully.