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First I have a confession to make. I plan to do an episode regarding a musician every day, but my right hand started hurting and I mean excruciating painful. I worried about what to do, and realized if I continue to overdo it on an already injured hand/ I would have serious problems. I thought about giving up this podcast altogether but eventually decided to take a day by day approach. It seems to be getting much better than it was yesterday, so if I notice improvement I will certainly do a podcast/. I have already written the Scripps with voice control on the Macintosh, so I didn’t really need to use my hands that much in what I consider the hardest part of doing a podcast, but there’s no way that you can really use Voice control with an audio program.  So I’ll just take it one day at a time, and I’m asking you to bear with me.

Second,When I recorded my episode on Monteverdi, something unexpected happened. I’d worried I might not have enough to say, but as I began speaking in his rhythm — my approximation of his  lilting Italian cadence — the words seemed to sing themselves. I found myself moving my hand in slow circles as I spoke, and somehow the motion gave the voice its own kind of melody. The pauses stretched naturally, almost like rests in a score. What I thought would be a short reflection became nearly forty minutes, not because of the facts or analysis, but because Monteverdi’s spirit reshaped the way I spoke.

That experience stayed with me. It reminded me that a voice can be musical, even when it isn’t singing — that the phrasing, the breath, the stillness between words are as expressive as the words themselves. And that’s the insight I’ve carried with me into Purcell — another composer who understood that silence, rhythm, and human feeling are inseparable.”

Today, we move forward in time — from Venice to London — to meet another spirit who carried that torch into a new century. Henry Purcell took the lessons of Monteverdi and shaped them into something deeply English yet profoundly human: the marriage of reverence and drama, sacred and stage.

If Monteverdi taught us how to breathe through music, Purcell teaches us how to speak through it — to find the eternal note that echoes across time.

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