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Thanks for the chemistry and archeo links. Very interesting!

Re Bach's French connections...French composers from the Baroque to those who link to the Baroque seem to have horror vacui in spades (how's that for mixing?) ... Sur incises is a recent example ... Debussy can be quiet...he can't be silent... Is this a translation into the sonic/temporal domain of Cartesian vortices? With some kind of historical turning point away from the Baroque coming at the time when E. du Chatelet translated Newton - about a decade before Le devin du Village?

The two note pairings in Scarlatti are dictated by phrasing, no? Or maybe 'phrasing' is the rubric (topos) under which a lot of this falls...with different meanings at different times

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