In this first post I'd like to talk about Pierre Philidor's notation of ornaments and what this might mean. The ornament in question is the grace note leading up to the second quarternote in the third bar:
In this last quote Mattheson's Der vollkommene Capellmeister, we go back to religion. There are just a few things that a good capellmeister cannot afford not to know:
"...to God even a thousand years is like the day which passed yesterday, and the angels' days are years, as is known by the theologians." Mattheson quotes Luther here ...
Here is yet another of my favourite quotes from Mattheson's Der vollkommene Capellmeister:
"Others, who think they know much more about [The Origin of Song] and who maintain no small reputation to this day, seem yet more wrong to me than the previous ones: since they, with Lucretious as their leader, made the unthinking bird ...