In college, as a kind of performing adjunct to said specialists and scholars, I encountered the monumental Syntagma Musicum - Praetorius's attempt to write down all that was known about music and instruments - and got to know some of the imposing polychoral motets from Musae Sionae, part-writing that stood in the same relation to Es ist ein Ros" as Rodin's Gates of Hell does to a Meisen figurin