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Well, there are a lot of questions like that. Take the Greeks: their main creative period was prior to the birth of Christ, even the Alexandrians, like Euclid, were mainly scholars and systematizers; the core German concert tradition flourished for about 100 years, from Bach to the death of Beethoven; the core opera repertoire was created in about the same period; the French have never recovered the glory of the period from, say, David to the death of Picasso, less than two centuries, with most of the "news" from the Salon des Refuses to the death of Matisse, about a century. The Irish monks were not even particularly creative, but they preserved learning when the Vikings were creating chaos in Northern Europe, in their schools and scriptoria. It was a case of right place, right time, I suppose........ |
