It’s a catchy song, too. The intervals are reminiscent of a natural horn, which gives it a martial feel.

I got a chance to listen to that Scarlatti recording and I’m blown away. What a great album! Thanks for sharing it, I’ll definitely be listening again.

Oh I can see how electronica and baroque music could be interesting for similar reasons, with the emphasis in both being on repetition with variation.

I’ve come at it from kind of the opposite end: I’m a folk musician who became fascinated by early music. I’ve been playing and listening to a lot of medieval and Renaissance music for the past five years, and lute music in particular. And of course if one is learning about counterpoint then Bach is going to come up. I’ve listened to more of his string compositions than his keyboard stuff, but I really enjoy it all. The recording that I’ve probably listened to most is Evangelina Mascardi playing his lute suite in E major; it’s a perfect piece in my opinion.

Lately I’ve been really into Handel, and particularly his operas. There’s some incredible music in those.

They’re still open! I watched a production of Handel’s opera Giulio Cesare that they did, and I loved it.

I’ll have to check those recordings out, thanks for the recommendations! I’m still relatively new to baroque music, although it’s been a bit of an obsession lately.

My preference is towards performances on period instruments, and I found this video of Aya Hamada on harpsichord to be a great listen.

Good news, there’s a vacuum leak.

What a stupid video. Guess they had to make up quotes by a Christian who understands that Christian Nationalism is a stupid worldview for fragile control-freak dipshits who think the world revolves around them.

Calling this “satire” is the funniest part of the video.

You should definitely read the book if it’s a topic that interests you; it’s the best overview of conservatism that I’ve read. I’d say you’re pretty well aligned with what he wrote within, too.

But I’m not sure how to reconcile that with modern “rightists” who want to burn down the system and aren’t conservative in the lowercase-C sense.

The Republican party (and conservatism as a movement) are full-blown reactionaries. I like this passage from Corey Robin’sThe Reactionary Mind:

People who aren’t conservative often fail to realize this, but conservatism really does speak to and for people who have lost something. It may be a landed estate or the privileges of white skin, the unquestioned authority of a husband or the untrammeled rights of a factory owner. The loss may be as material as money or as ethereal as a sense of standing. It may be a loss of something that was never legitimately owned in the first place; it may, when compared with what the conservative retains, be small. Even so, it is a loss, and nothing is ever so cherished as that which we no longer possess. It used to be one of the great virtues of the left that it alone understood the often zero- sum nature of politics, where the gains of one class necessarily entail the losses of another. But as that sense of conflict diminishes on the left, it has fallen to the right to remind voters that there really are losers in politics and that it is they— and only they— who speak for them. “All conservatism begins with loss,” Andrew Sullivan rightly notes, which makes conservatism not the Party of Order, as Mill and others have claimed, but the party of the loser.

The chief aim of the loser is not— and indeed cannot be— preservation or protection. It is recovery and restoration.

And from another section:

There’s a fairly simple reason for the embrace of radicalism on the right, and it has to do with the reactionary imperative that lies at the core of conservative doctrine. The conservative not only opposes the left; he also believes that the left has been in the driver’s seat since, depending on who’s counting, the French Revolution or the Reformation. If he is to preserve what he values, the conservative must declare war against the culture as it is.

I should check out Orlando Furioso at some point. I saw Handel’s Alcina this weekend, which is based on another section of the poem in which a sorceress seduces Ruggiero with magic so he has to be rescued by his fiance Bradamante.

Depends how old. If it’s a Shakespeare play, I like to have read the play beforehand so that I can understand the nuance in the performance. If it’s an opera, I’ll probably read a synopsis beforehand. If it’s a stage play in English written since the 19th century I’ll probably have more fun going in without prior knowledge.

And I don’t give half a fuck what you think.

Where did I say every single Republican is a fascist? But you know what? A whole lot of them are, or don’t care enough to be against it. You’ve said nothing of substance and misrepresented every person you’ve talked to in this thread; why would I care about your vapid opinion?

That was rhetorical. I’m not going to be responding.

You sure got me! Yeah. I fuckin’ hate fascists. Apparently that’s a controversial opinion with you.

No, because most people understand those are bad things that should be stopped, and there is one party in particular pushing that fascist shit.

This reads like someone who is privileged enough that they don’t have to worry about being abducted off the street by government men in masks, or have their healthcare restricted by religious fundamentalists, or their drivers license being stripped by the state for ideological reasons.

The Reactionary White Christian Nationalists are against fundamental human rights; that’s what makes them bad people.

And they think everyone who is against their backwards cultural conquest and restrictions on foundational freedoms is an agent of Satan.

It was customary in baroque opera to do rapid scene changes with the curtain up. Here’s a great example of the spectacular effect.

It was customary in baroque opera to do rapid scene changes with the curtain up. Here’s a great example of the spectacular effect.

Painted for the 900th anniversary I suppose.