Understanding McLuhan/Understanding McLuhan (1996)(Voyager)[Mac-PC].iso/pc/mcluhan.dxr/08891_Field_TCGG T656.txt

Text File | 1996-04-10 | 1KB | 16 lines

     largely unconscious result of certain accidents that may
     occur in unison monophonic singing; it is certainly not
     surprising that during the later Middle Ages polyphony
     should be so deeply rooted in what are essentially
     monophonic attitudes that people of the modern world
     find it, at first at least, curiously difficult of approach. We
     know more or less what we expect from music conceived
     in “parts”, and the mediaeval composer does not gratify
     our expectations. But before we dismiss him as ‘primitive’
     or ‘tentative’ we ought to be sure that we understand
     what he thought he was trying to do. He was not really
     trying to break with the implications of the monophonic
     music on which he had been nurtured and which, as we
     have seen, symbolized the philosophy inherent in his
     world; he was perhaps trying to extend that music’s
     resources, and in so doing he quite unwittingly introduced