Essay length: about 19 minutes.
How do we know how modern music came to be? We tell stories and imagine clear evolutions, but the process of cultural change is rarely simple enough to track with such straightforward tools. And yet we find them irresistible. The stories of the great innovators of centuries past, who laid the foundation for the modern musical world, have echoed throughout history, and they're great stories, but what do we do when we don't know what's true? One of the greatest figures in European music history is Guido d'Arezzo, the famed inventor of modern solfege... Maybe. It's actually a lot more complicated.
Script w/ sources: https://tinyurl.com/yz9htbyu
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