Diversions
Music
The year 1685 saw the birth of no fewer than
three baroque geniuses: Johann Sebastian
Bach (1685-1750), Georg
Fredric Handel (1685-1759), and the lesser known, but equally brilliant
harpsichordist, Domenico Scarlatti
(1685-1757). It's quite common now to hear the music of these three composers performed on
"authentic instruments", which usually implies not only the use of original
instruments or copies of them, but also an ensemble of appropriate size, fidelity to the
composer's tempi and dynamic markings, and the tuning pitch used at the time. For an
easy-to-read discussion of the ingredients and merits of "historically informed
performances", see the articles by Lampson and McComb. The PIPE List is a compilation of
period instrument performance ensembles. It also has links to the home pages of many of
these ensembles; see, for example, the home pages of Tafelmusik,
Les Violons du Roy, and Christopher Hogwood and the Academy of
Ancient Music.
Lettering Arts
Long before Arrighi and Palatino became well known (and ubiquitous too, in the case of the
latter!) as fonts and typefaces, they were first and foremost writing masters, engravers
and calligraphers. Although there's not much about them on the Web, there are a
lot of resources on illuminated manuscripts and incunabula. Visit, for example, the
WebMuseum where you'll see Les tres riches heures du Duc de Berry.
A few pages from the Book of Kells
can be found at Trinity College Library in Dublin; a
small part of the British Library's incomparable
collection can be seen in the Treasures of the British
Library exhibition; and there's also a wide-ranging exhibit at the National Library of the
Netherlands. The World
Wide Scribe provides a good starting point into the lettering arts, as does the Manuscripts, Paleography,
Codicology page at Georgetown University. For a contemporary slant on calligraphy (and
a nicely designed home page), see the Chicago Calligraphy Collective.
And finally, the fonts used to write B-A-C-H above are freely available from any CTAN (Comprehensive TeX Archive Network)
site.
Books
The Gutenberg Project is an ambitious
endeavour that aims to put as many texts as possible on line. Most are text whose
copyright has long expired: Darwin's The Origin of Species, Alice's Adventures in
Wonderland and many, many others. The Children's Literature Web Guide is
an extremely comprehensive guide to Internet resources dealing with literature for
children and young adults. Many individual authors also have home pages; see, for example,
the page about Salman Rushdie.
This page is still under construction.
Last modified on 29/03/00 by Aloke Phatak
Aloke.Phatak@cmis.CSIRO.AU