41–50 of 104 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> By coincidence, Goy had been looking at other documents Mozart had written for teaching just weeks earlier Color me sceptical
He was a niche-specialty career archivist, sorting through his library's collection of stuff from the right era and area. That is the discovery story behind a rather large fraction of such documents.
Turns out "technical debt" also applies to national archives.
There was a recently discovered letter, possibly to Shakespeare's wife, which would completely change our understanding of their marriage, and even the way his plays depict women. The only way to find such things is by hordes of grad students trudging their way through fragile paper and messy handwriting.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You've named one composer who is. I don't see where the inductive step applies.
The composers who didn't have neat handwriting are forgotten today because nobody could read their (musical) notes...
Let's hope it is more authentic than the Hitler Diaries[1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hitler_Diaries
Even inside the tiny niche of the classical music history world, a book of daily exercises - written for some now-obscure student, and owned by a national library - is actually a pretty minor thing. Very few counterfeiters bother doing nickles and dimes.
https://www.bnf.fr/en/actualitesEN/discovery-unpublished-aut...
I’m hoping that a full scan appears in the archive linked at the bottom of the page. I’m a composer and still hand-notate in a notebook. It’s so cool to the penmanship of someone writing in notebooks so quickly yet cleanly. In case you didn’t read, the contents are primarily exercises in composition where Mozart began a passage, the student continued, and Mozart corrected / guided the students work where needed. So there’s a higher percentage of Mozart in the pieces here than not. Like Brundlefly.
I love his handwriting style. I wonder if it was the first draft or a copy [1] [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gkqfpkTTy2w
Composers were also handwriting masters. Bach also had incredible handwriting, there's a youtube channel about it.
I can imagine that in the time of Bach or Mozart that writing was a big point of emphasis in schools.