Largo, ma non troppo? Tempi of a Career in Music

Barely had Evan Kreider begun to settle into what he mistook for academic tranquility at UBC when he was overtaken by rumours that his beloved field of Renaissance musicology was undergoing a revolution. Used to scores being engraved onto copper sheets by aging craftsmen in rural Italy, he was soon startled to learn he was required to produce them himself by computer software that was not quite up to the challenge. And then, just as he was beginning to dream again of a stable academic life (now as a full professor), he was yanked into the dark side of the academy—administration—and a role for which no seminar could ever have prepared him. Meanwhile, the music of another administrator, Hildegard von Bingen, who ran a Benedictine monastery in the twelfth century, was becoming all the rage through recordings. But would she, if she could hear them, have even recognized the sounds?