Ongoing History Of New Music

In the winter of 1417, a young man named Poggio Braciolini was searching through a library when it found an odd manuscript sitting on a shelf…it was a thousand years old—the last surviving copy of a poem by a roman philosopher named Lucretius… What Lucretius said in this poem was radical—heretical, in fact…what it contained was against all the teachings of God and men…it was called “On The Nature of Things”… First, he posited that the universe operated without Gods and that matter was made of tiny, tiny, particles that were in constant motion… Despite the danger—this was explosive stuff in 1417—Bracciolini translated the poem…copies were carefully distributed over the next couple of hundred years…and the intellectual impact on Europe was incalculable… Lucretius’ notions inspired new ways of thinking, leading to the renaissance, the enlightenment and all that followed…Bracciolini’s translation of “On The Nature of Things” quite literally changed the course of humanity… Scholars have argued that because of