Personal Highlights:

• A musical morality is introduced: the easy charm of the familiar on the one side, the hard truth of the new on the other.
• Above all, composers from the Romance and Slavonic nations—France, Spain, Italy, Russia, and the countries of Eastern Europe—strained to cast off the German influence. For...
• The advent of the recording cylinder meant that researchers no longer needed to rely on paper to preserve the songs. They could make recorded copies...

Personal Highlights:

• That as biographers we all have agendas, both known and unknown to us, does not change the value and necessity of getting back to the...
• Genius has to be founded on major talent, but it adds a freshness and wildness of imagination, a raging ambition, an unusual gift for learning...
• But the German word implies “from the house of” and therefore indicates nobility, which van does not.

Personal Highlights:

• Life expectancy was about thirty-five years, no more than it had been when Christopher Columbus was setting sail. Illiteracy rates averaged about sixty-four percent. In...
• This stems from the cello itself, which is a melodic instrument, melodic because no more than two strings can generally be bowed at the same...
• It is not quite a chord. There are numerous chords in the Cello Suites, but since a chord is formed by striking three notes at...

Personal Highlights:

• in the sixteenth century, bricklayers, wool merchants, glovers, prosperous yeomen—people who had no formal education and could not read or write English, let alone Latin—wanted...
• Protestant reformers were understandably hostile, for they wished to dismantle the traditional Catholic culture and rituals out of which these pageants arose, and they campaigned...
• The next requirement is to hide the ladder—that is, you have to pretend that you are already there. You do so, Smith notes, by acquiring...