Sublime

infinite gradations of sound, and not just twelve notes in a scale.

The Western performance tradition of the last two millennia has been shaped by practitioners who conceptualized music as a system of notes—of discrete tones, tuned in scales with twelve subdivisions.

although it would then not have been done in theoretical formulas, but in practice on the cembalo, lute, or flute, or with the voice.

each era had different restrictions on how one note could move to the next. In a sixteenth-century crackdown, for example, the Church’s Council of Trent warned that harmonies “must not give empty pleasure to the ear” and ordered priests to “banish from church” all sounds “that are luscious or impure.”