Lost 17th Century Music Lives Again With Musician & Historian Team

This is so cool!

Musical Passages is a collaborative endeavor by Laurent Dubois, David Garner, and Mary Caton Lingold to document, explain, and recreate examples of Jamaican music as it was played in the 1600s. As they explain:

Enslaved Africans and their descendants revolutionized global music, but historical records tell us far too little about their earliest practices. In this site we offer a careful interpretation of a single rare artifact, from Hans Sloane’s 1707 Voyage to the Islands of Madera, Barbados, Nieves, S. Christophers and Jamaica. Tucked away in this centuries-old book, are several pieces of music that make it possible to hear echoes of performances long past.

The website functions as a minature interactive exhibit where you are invited to listen in on a musical gathering that took place in Jamaica in 1688. These three songs, 'Angola', 'Papa' and 'Koromanti', performed at a festival by enslaved African musicians and copied in musical notation by a Mr Baptiste, are the first transcription of African music in the Caribbean. Thanks to the preservation of this amazing work, the entire world can now listen to traces of music performed long ago and maybe even begin to imagine what it meant for the people who created it.

Science YouTubers' Tribute To Hamilton

No, no, not not the politician Hamilton-- the scientist Hamilton. They do use a pretty awesome homemade acapella cover of the first song from the play Hamilton to do it, though. It's arranged well and diversely cast, too, Check it out!




So what did William Rowan Hamilton discover? He discovered quaternions, which are an extension of complex numbers: rather than just one number (i) that equals -1 when squared, these use thee (i,j,k). Also in that formula, multiplication is no longer commutative (the order in which things are multiplied matters, so a times b is not the same as b times a). They can be used to represent rotations.

Historical Fiction, Cultural Revolution

Photo credit Joan Marcus

Let me tell you what I wish I’d knownWhen I was young and dreamed of gloryYou have no control:Who livesWho diesWho tells your story?

--"Who Tells Your Story", Hamilton

My interest in historical biographies, the meta-ideas behind historically-based fiction, and whose voices and contributions are remembered or ignored was sparked over the summer and fall by the hottest musical on Broadway: Hamilton. I fell in love with the soundtrack, and then had the mind-blowing opportunity to actual see it in person this past fall. So much of the musical as it is written and cast is relevetory: a story about the Founding Fathers in general and Hamilton in specific. It stars a cast that is predominantly people of color, drawing from African-American pioneered and influenced styles from Dixieland jazz to hip-hop. As Disha Jani writes in “Who Tells Your Story?”: Historical Fiction as Resistance" for The Toast, there is an important difference in historical fiction. She believes it has the power to change not just historical narratives but cultural ones as well.

...historical fiction can be a form of resistance to a homogenizing view of our world and our past. There are certainly more immediate and material ways to resist oppression — legislating, organizing, protesting, boycotting, and mobilizing are very powerful ways — but sometimes, just existing and living your life, having your story told, can have an impact. 

...People have always found ways to live and find meaning and challenge oppression, and part of our job is to seek them out and tell their stories. They existed, and it’s our job to find some way to understand… 

When these same narrative and imaginative tools are used by historians, it can help deliver a blow to the insidious assertion made in nearly every grade-school classroom – that we’re supposed to relate exclusively to dead rich white men because they created everything of value. Sometimes we do relate to them, because our experiences meet somewhere in the space between the living and the dead. At other times, we yearn for someone to relate to who is a little bit more like us, whatever that may mean. To find them, we may have to first find an interlocutor – an historian, or filmmaker, or composer – who has decided to reveal this someone to us. If the interlocutor cannot find the kinds of records that are left behind by the lettered, important few, they rely on other sources.

The entire article is brilliant. Read the whole thing!