Today's Arts: 26/06/2025

A CALL TO CREATIVITY

Hello and welcome to The Looking Glass, WBGS' very own Academic Blog. This year we are planning to breathe new life into this amazing blog as the Academic Head Boy team for 2025- 2026! However, at the Looking Glass we need your help to catapult this blog into it's GOLDEN AGE. We need your articles, your essays, your opinions and your finest work to MAKE THE LOOKING GLASS GREAT AGAIN! If you have read something interesting or watched something that sparked a thought on social media - WRITE ABOUT IT! If you entered a competition, however big or small - WRITE ABOUT IT! If you are interested in a specific field, issue or period - WRITE ABOUT IT! If you have produced artwork, a piece of music or creative writing - WE WILL PUBLISH IT! Your creative skills have been called to action - now we must muster to create, discover and explore. You are the creative minds of the future. The Plato's, the Newtons, the Angelo's, the Nietzsche's. This is your calling. This is Y...

Clair de Lune: The history of the world’s most overplayed piano piece

CHAMOD SAMARASINGHE Classical music is an unusual art. It is dominated by a few pieces which are far more popular than everything else which has been composed within the past few centuries. When compared to Beethoven’s fifth symphony, Bach’s toccata in d minor, Handel’s messiah and fur Elise (and a few others), everything else is a comparative blur to most. Scholars could argue that this is due to their memorable nature and overall simplicity (for the listener, not the composer), but there is one notable exception to this rule: Clair de Lune by Claude Debussy. While the opening melody is certainly ear-catching and repetitive, everything else seems deliberately ambiguous, perfectly melancholy, and at times downright unusual.

Complexity for complexity’s sake? The Ars subtilior repertory

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.

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