The Code of the Soul. 1898 Music Theory Manual St. Petersburg Imperial Russian

by Russian Empire, Спасская

$1,898 · Offered by eBay

Put your coffee down. You are not buying a piece of decaying paper. You are looking at a mathematical artifact of a vanished civilization that survived the meat grinder of the 20th century. Rare, pre-revolutionary Russian manual: "The Guide to the Elementary Theory of Music" written by the pioneering female music theorist Anna Spasskaya, published in St. Petersburg by the legendary "W. Bessel & Co." exactly in the year 1898. But look closer. Look at those manic, desperate, beautiful handwritten notes in pencil. On the cusp of a terrifying new century, a human being —whose name is long forgotten — sat under the dim light of a lamp and tried to decode the Universe. They drew a piano keyboard. They wrote down the laws of scales (C-dur, G-dur, d-moll). They were trying to grasp the absolute harmony of Bach and Pythagoras while their physical world was about to turn into chaos. This book, printed in 1898, survived: The collapse of the Russian Empire. Three revolutions and two World Wars. The total erasure of the old alphabet (look at the dead letters 'Ѣ' and 'Ъ' frozen in time on these pages since 1898). The Soviet era, the Cold War, and the digital dawn. The paper is fragile, stained, and torn. It is a "shabby thing". The physical body of this book is dying. But the mathematical code of music inside it—the frequencies, the intervals, the pure ideas that Plato talked about—remains absolutely untouched by time, fire, or rust. As Socrates once said, learning is nothing but rememberi

• Publisher: Издание В. Бессель и К. Российская Империя
• Year: 1898
• Condition: Fair

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