Incunabulas

I've often thought about what to rename this blog.  The big names are all gone, like Salon and Volkoh, and here I am with Opusonemedia. But, like anything, it has to start somewhere.

Incunabulas mean just that, the very start.  If you had musicology training - study of music history - you were treated to studying manuscripts.  Back when I was doing that in school, I spent a large amount of time physically copying old music; transposing it from the old notation into something modern. We armed ourselves with manuscript pens (mine was green) and bottles of ink to dip in, blank pages and a ruler to draw the lines and off we would go.  The "fraternity" of grad students was always recognizable because we had little indents on our middle finger from holding the pen at the best angle and our fingers themselves would be ink stained from the dipping process.

After you dipped the pen, to remove the excess (ink), you made a little "scribble" to get rid of it and to keep from having a blob of ink fall on your manuscript paper.  That scribble, the very first scribble was an "incunabula"....the very very very beginning of your work.  There are actually people who studied incunabula, made collections of it.  We think of it as doodles and not just the cleaning of the pen tip and some of them were pretty interesting...not just scriggles but words, pictures, etc.. They had a life of their own; an arcane life but a life.

So my new blog will be Incunabulus or very beginnings. Seems appropriate. I'll keep writing this one of course, but the Incunabulus BlogSpot, coming this week, will deal with some of the stuff I don't deal with here. 

I'll let you know when the incunabulum is dry.