Mvsic

Some Pieces you may enjoy listening.

Gregorio Paniagua, Musique de la Grece Antique.

The original LP of this revelatory recording had some of the best and most extensive liner notes I have ever seen, regarding the music on the recording, the way the performers decided to arrange and treat it, and the great variety of instruments that the ancient Greeks used. The liner notes of this CD are missing nearly all of this material. Thus, the listener is unable to follow all the nuances of how and why the performers "breathed new life" into this ancient and often fragmentary material. Sometimes they used silence, sometimes notes, sometimes dissonances to fill in the lacunae; and without the original liner notes, one finds it hard to follow where history ends and creativity begins.

Nevertheless, the rendition of this music is not as speculative as Paul Yost would have one believe. The notations used in the source material have their difficulties (one of which is that theory and practice didn't always coincide in the use of the notations); but there is no serious disagreement as to how the melodies should read, and the performers take care to draw on authoritative renditions. The reconstructed period instruments are well-made and have fascinating tone colors; and they are very similar to those heard on "Music of the Ancient Greeks" by Pandourion Records (which I recommend for a different treatment of the melodies). Of course one may always arrange these melodies in various ways, but the Greeks surely did no less (being attuned as they were to perfecting the *melos* or combination of words and melodies).

Marguerite Yourcenar, Memoirs of Hadrian.

Both an exploration of character and a reflection on the meaning of history, Memoirs of Hadrian has received international acclaim since its first publication in France in 1951. In it, Marguerite Yourcenar reimagines the Emperor Hadrian's arduous boyhood, his triumphs and reversals, and finally, as emperor, his gradual reordering of a war-torn world, writing with the imaginative insight of a great writer of the twentieth century while crafting a prose style as elegant and precise as those of the Latin stylists of Hadrian's own era.