Welcome to the Early Music Blog. This project was started by Niklas Saers after discussing it with a couple of friends and will hopefully be a place where people interested in early music will post their thoughts and stories and link up other early music blogs. I hope that you will find this site interesting and participate throught commenting and posting your thoughts and ideas.

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In this first post I'd like to talk about Pierre Philidor's notation of ornaments and what this might mean. The ornament in question is the grace note leading up to the second quarternote in the third bar:

Seeing just the upper voice and that second bar, I'd think this is inégal. However, as this is french late baroque music, we would assume that inégal would be written in quavers like the fourth bar in the bass line. But if we can expect a regular inégal, why would Philidor then in the next system write the dotted figure seen in the upper voice first ...

In this last quote Mattheson's Der vollkommene Capellmeister, we go back to religion. There are just a few things that a good capellmeister cannot afford not to know:

"...to God even a thousand years is like the day which passed yesterday, and the angels' days are years, as is known by the theologians." Mattheson quotes Luther here from Daniel.

But let's return to the origin of music: "Angels, though they are spirits, can assume bodily for, can use instruments and appear in flesh and blood, as Michael did, as often as they want. And since in the hereafter we redeemed men like them will be in body and soul, it is easy to divine what a magnificent quality the harmony of these heavenly musicians must have had.

Thus it is not true that vocal music is actually and originally older than instrumental: for all ...