Two Minutes to Belgium

googleberry:

These are lampshades. They used to be part of a one-of-a-kind, priceless, irreplaceable, never-gunna-get-this-shit-back Gregorian chant book.

I know that some people are weird and don’t understand history, so let’s break this down for you. Also, I will explain why I’m being ridiculously redundant.

Music has been a part of history for as long as anybody knows. But we’ve missed out on most of it because Oog and Grug didn’t have tape recorders or writing skills. We’ll never know the drumbeats of our ancestors or the songs that they sung or whether they would have used Limewire if given the chance. Just like stories, oral tradition was the only way to pass music from generation to generation for the longest time.

Then along came the Renaissance, and people were all like, “THIS SHIT IS GREAT, HOW DO WE KEEP IT!?” and they organized the standard notation system we use today: five lines, four spaces, keys and time signatures and clefs and different symbols for the duration of notes. Blah blah blah.

But you don’t just HAPPEN upon something awesome that will keep forever, you’ve got to make mistakes. Trial and error. See what works, see what doesn’t; you work with it until you get to something great.

Before we had the standard musical notation system, we had those great people who tried to convert music to something portable so it could be shared.

Churches used to be a big thing back in the day, and they were all, “OUR HYMNS. WE SHOULD SHARE THEM.” So obviously, that was a priority. Monks, being the great lonely fellows they were, set aside large chunks of their lives to dedicate to the challenge of how to write something you could hear.

Hence, Gregorian Chant books. Because monks chanted and music’d it up.

The precursor to what we use today to read and write music.

Thing is, parchment was sparse until after the Bubonic plague killed 1/3 of Europe’s population and the printing press and all. So a lot of these books didn’t make it- they got painted over and used for more important things like the king’s grocery list or something.

That we could have something so rare in our possession… We could learn their notation and hear tunes that haven’t been jammed to in 1000-ish years.

But then this such asshole came along and, *SWOOP!* -NOPE- made some lampshades.

TL;DR

This rich asshole made human history that we will never get back into a mother fucking lampshade.