The United Nations + Vocabulary Test = FreeRice.com.
For each word you get right, we donate 10 grains of rice through the United Nations to help end world hunger.
There are apparently only 100 manuscripts of Ambrosian music, a style of medieval liturgical chanting, still in existence, and they recently discovered a new one. To listen to the music, click here.
Medieval history comes to life at Harvard University on Oct. 18, when students and guest musicians collaborate in the North American premiere of an 800-year-old chant repertory from Harvard’s Houghton Library.
One of the chants that will be performed was recently discovered by Thomas Kelly, Morton B. Knafel Professor of Music at Harvard, in a collection bequeathed by Philip Hofer, founding curator of the Houghton Library Department of Printing and Graphic Arts.
“I was looking through several stacks of manuscripts to explore which would be good subjects of study for a graduate seminar, when I opened one and said, ‘Wait a minute…’” Kelly explains.
It’s a good thing he did. The manuscript turned out to be a book of Ambrosian chant, dating from the 14th century. Kelly estimates that there are only 100 complete manuscripts of Ambrosian music still in existence.
Ambrosian music is a style of liturgical chant that was practiced in Milan for centuries. The chant is named for St. Ambrose, the bishop of Milan. Although Gregorian chant is more familiar today, Ambrosian chant remained an important part of the medieval cultural scene well into the 15th century.
“We misrepresent medieval chant if we say it was all Gregorian,” Kelly says. “Ambrosian chant survived the spread of Gregorian chant, so it has a larger significance in understanding how music spread throughout the medieval world.”
[link updated]
One very cute cartoon from xkcd. Always, always sanitize anything you input into a computer.
