Caroline Mimbs Nyce"... play musical instruments. The Egyptian Blue" is the oldest known artificial pigment.
Few adults play musical instruments, and even fewer do so in a group, Caroline Mimbs Nyce writes. What health benefits might they be giving up?
https://theatln.tc/oglkQfzJ“Kids receive plenty of music education, but as people get older, they fall out of practice. Many stop picking up their instrument,” Nyce writes. “This is unfortunate, in part because plenty of research shows that adults could benefit from playing music.”
Playing music helps build larger brain networks and
new pathways. “Musicians tend to have better attention than nonmusicians,” Nyce continues. “Banging on a drum or tooting a horn can also relieve stress, reduce burnout, and help with anxiety and depression. For older people specifically, research has shown potential cognitive benefits along with a possible decrease in dementia risk.”
Adults may be skipping out in part because music education is associated with childhood and coursework. And after people grow out of music education in their childhood, they tend to think that music is a special talent, Nyce writes, not something that just anybody can learn.
“Of course, people are busy; they simply may not have the luxury of sitting down to study Bach once a week, much less the money to pay for an instrument or private lessons,” Nyce writes.
Playing music in groups has additional benefits, such as allowing adults to feel more trusting of and connected to one another, and to the world in general. But while it’s easy to go to a park or gym and pull together a game of pickup basketball, “piecing together people at the same skill level to play a concerto or even just jam in a garage is another matter.”
Nyce herself recently began to play the recorder. “I plan to keep learning,” she writes, “not because it strengthens my neuropathways per se (though I certainly don’t mind that), but because making music, even when it’s silly—perhaps especially when it’s silly—is just a whole lot of fun.”
https://theatln.tc/oglkQfzJ: Photo Media / ClassicStock / Getty
"The Egyptian Blue"
Egyptian Blue is the oldest known artificial pigment. The Blue color has been throughout the history of humanity one of the most quoted, identified by it with royalty and divinity, due to the difficulty of its obtaining.
Blue pigments were used from very old, but more late than others such as red, Black, brown or ochre, easier to get in nature and used already in the art art. But the most quoted blue pigment came from minerals such as lapis, scarce and rare,
and therefore very expensive. The largest lapis deposits are located in the hindukush of Afghanistan, where they are still exploited with procedures very similar to employees more than 3.000 years ago.
The Egyptians cared about those mines large amounts of lapis to obtain the azurite, the dust that provided the blue pigment with which they adorned their artistic works. Its price was so high that even in medieval times still cuadriplicaba the gold. That's why towards 3000 BC they sought a way to make their own blue pigment. Little by little they were perfecting the technique, which consisted of grinding silica, lime, copper and an alkaline base, and heat it at 800-900 degrees Celsius. The result obtained is considered the first synthetic pigment in history.
The Egyptians used it to paint wood, papyri and canvases, coloring enamels, inlays and vessels. But especially in the funerary field in masks, statues and paintings of the graves, as they believed that the blue color protected the dead from evil in the other life. The oldest known example of the pigment dates from about 5000 years ago and was found in the painting of a tomb of the reign of ka-Sen, the last Pharaoh of the first dynasty. In the new kingdom the Egyptian Blue was used abundantly as a pigment being found in statues, paintings of tombs and sarcophagi.
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