Shakespeare’s first performed plays occurred in the late 16th century, the colour television was first demonstrated in 1928, the first YouTube video (‘Me at the zoo’, uploaded by co-founder Jawed Karim) was released approximately 23 years ago, and the modern social media titan, TikTok, was created approximately 10 years ago. The final marked an important, dangerous and disquieting epoch in entertainment. Though the claim that human attention span has dropped under that of a goldfish remains an incontrovertibly proven fallacy, in the past 20 years alone, the average amount of time a person can spend focused on a task digitally has plummeted from two and a half minutes to just 47 seconds. 47 seconds before we check the time, fiddle with our phones and lose our train of thought. Addiction to short-form content as such has greatly contributed to this collapse. To put it plainly, attention is a digital drug. It harnesses mass amounts of political, economic and social sway. For...
MR B. F. EASTLEY, MATHEMATICS TEACHER This essay provides a brief overview of a fascinating period of musical development during the latter half of the fourteenth century, during which some of the most sophisticated music ever written was composed and performed. The ‘Ars subtilior’ or ‘subtler art’ (a 20th century musicologist’s title) is a repertory of several hundred songs by French, Italian, Flemish, and Spanish musicians. This music is quite distinct from other contemporary compositions due to its dazzling complexity in all aspects – particularly rhythmic – but also harmonic, textual, and sometimes visual.