Al Dimond's Journal: Muzak History

I had an amazingly fun night last night with someone. But that's not the point of this post. I keep a reasonable separation of webjourno and romance here. Not enough separation not to mention that I baked some pretty hilarious looking cookies last night that will be pictured here in the future.

OK, so in Music History class today I was just continually reminded of how fucked-up ancient religion was and how it really is like that today too... I'm short on time, so just one example, we're in the 4th-9th centuries now (not much happened musically then because the church supressed people trying to do anything interesting), and in the Mass of that time there's a section called Credo. Which is Latin for "I believe". A section whose exact text was debated among scholars and then made immutable for the rest of time. And this is the section of the mass with the fewest different tunes to it, apparently because its text is the most immutable.

In ancient times ideas almost never survived to today on their merits, but rather on the military strength of those pushing them. Sometimes ideas conducive to military strength, and thus survival/spreading could go on. Now ideas often survive based on their commercial applicability or in politics on their ability to be made popular... which people as a whole at least have some control over. It doesn't always produce the best, most enlightened ideas, and often creates frustrating ones, but in perspective, it's a hell of a lot better than it used to be.