Marin Mersenne: Harmonie Universelle (1636) - The transverse flute and the recorder

Marin Marsenne (1555-1648) was a French born theologist, priest, philosopher, mathematician and musical theorist. He played an important role in the dissemination of the scientific and philosophical production of his time: he maintained correspondence with Descartes, Galileo, Pascal, and Torricelli (among others). His main contribution to music was a treatise titled "Harmonie Universelle" (1636), which deals with many theoretical and practical aspects of seventeenth-century music - just like a great musical encyclopedia. In this post, I will relate to the definitions of "transverse flute" and "recorder" given by the author.

Transverse flute ("Fluste d'Allemand")

The entry which deals with the transverse flute is titled "Fluste d'Allemand" (if you recall it, the transverse flute was known at that time and in the majority of European countries as "german flute" - if not, go to the post related to the flute in the Middle Ages). Mersenne gives its measures and writes about its basic technical principles: how to hold the flute and how to blow inside of it. He also provides a fingering chart for it.

But even before talking about the transverse flute, Mersenne's concern is to make it clear that the fluste d'Allemand is a completely different instrument from the "Flageollet" (written in some publications with a single "L" instead of a double one). The French version of the flageollet is very similar to the recorder: 

This is an English flageolet. Its sound is very similar to that of an Irish tin whistle. 

On the video posted above, we can hear and see a "double flageolet". Its shape resembles more closely that of an English flageolet. Its sound is somewhere between that of a recorder and an Irish tin whistle.

The precedent image can be found in Mersenne's treatise. The letters and numbers contained in it are there to help the reader to understand what Mersenne wrote: "Even if some people prefer to put this kind of flute in the same category of the Flageollet because they both have six holes to be stopped with the fingers, I chose not to do the same because the embouchure hole is not located in the A B region (as it can be observed in the flutes of the other kind), but in the I hole (...). The embouchure is achieved by placing the inferior lip by the border of that hole and pushing the air rather softly into it.". The author sustains that the embouchure needed to play the transverse flute is more difficult to learn than the embouchure needed to play the flageolet and other similar flutes.

Mersenne also talks about which materials could be used to make transverse flutes. Wood was more commonly employed, especially that of the plum and cherry trees. Ebony was also appreciated. Besides wood, glass and crystal could be used, even though more rarely. Still on the subject of the physical characteristics of the flute, Mersenne provides us with measurements for the holes' diameters, for the distance between them, and for the tube's diameter. But Ardal Powell (The Flute, 2002), sustains that some of those measurements are not accurate. The flute described by Mersenne is, supposedly, a flute in G, but the provided fingering chart seems to relate to a flute in D - and the given distance between each of the finger-holes doesn't seem to correspond with neither instrument. The same fingering chart could be used, according to its author, by those who play the fife ("Fifre"). Mersenne writes that the fifre and the transverse flute are two very similar instruments, differing only in sonority (the tone of the fifre being more piercing and lively) but not in technique.

Recorder ("Fluste d'Angleterre")

The entry which deals with the recorder is called “Fluste d’Angleterre” (“english flute"), also known as “Fluste douce” (“sweet flute”) and nine-hole flute. Its first name is due to the fact that it was first introduced in French territory by an unknown English king. Its second name was inspired by its sweet tone. The origin of its third name is rather obvious: that flute had, indeed, nine finger-holes. Today, this kind of flute is known as “flûte à bec” (“flute with a beak”) by the French.

The flute described by Mersenne could be played by right and left-handed musicians: the last finger-hole (the one located at the end of the flute’s foot joint) was doubled, making it possible for both kinds of flutists to reach it. Mersenne affirms that the recorder and the “Flageollet” had the same extension (a 15^th, approximately).

This image can be found in Mersenne’s “Harmonie”. Its shows many musical instruments, most of them recorders. The letters written on the image are meant to help the reader to have a better understanding of which instrument was Mersenne talking about. The instrument pointed by a green arrow is a recorder in its more familiar shape. The blue arrows show a less known kind of recorder. According to the author, that instrument could be 7 or 8 feet long. The blue oval shows a kind of resonating chamber which hides some of the toneholes from our view. Those toneholes are stopped by the action of a key for the small finger. That key is doubled, a feature that allows right and left-handed flutists to play the instrument. Watch the following video to see and to hear this overgrown flute.

This entry mentions a very curious technique. Mersenne points out rather naturally that the natural extension of the recorder can be expanded if the flutists sings and plays at the same time, “for the wind which leaves the mouth while one sings is capable of sounding the flute, making it possible for a single man to play a Duo”. It is interesting to notice that such technique was not mentioned in the entry which deals with the transverse flute. The author mentions solely the possibility to build transverse flutes with two tubes, an invention that would allow a flutist to play a duet without the help of another musician. Maybe Mersenne hadn't met a flutist capable of applying the sing-while-playing technique to the transverse flute with equal success as it was applied to the recorder. It can be inferred that Mersenne thought that such technique could disturb the kind of embouchure needed to play the transverse flute and, therefore, it couldn't be used. Nevertheless, it is worthy of notice that in 1636 a technique that still sounds rather strange to some 21th century listeners was not a stranger to Mersenne and his contemporaries.

Principais fontes:

MERSENNE, Marin. Harmonie Universelle. Paris: 1636. Fac-símile presente em: SAINT-ARROMAN, Jean. Méthodes & Traités: Flûte à Bec - Europe 1500-1800. Vol.I. p.165-168. 3ªEd. Bressuire: Anne Fuzeau Productions, 2001.

MERSENNE, Marin. Harmonie Universelle. Paris: 1636. Fac-símile presente em: SAINT-ARROMAN, Jean. Méthodes & Traités: Flûte Traversière - France 1600-1800. Vol.I. p.7-10. 3ªEd. Bressuire: Anne Fuzeau Productions, 2001.

POWELL, Ardal. The Flute. New Heaven and London: Yale University Press, 2002.

The history of the transverse flute: The Baroque Era (part one)

In Music History, the Baroque Era lies between the years 1600 and 1750. Throughout the Renaissance, the transverse flute was used in two important contexts: in military music and in consort music (check the post on the renaissance flute to review this subject). By the end of the 16th century, things started to change in music making. Consorts that consisted of instruments of the same kind lost some of their popularity to consorts of mixed instruments: violas, fiddles, recorders, flutes, cornetts, as well as the harpsichord, the lute and the theorbo.

The preference for this new kind of music will be, in Italy, the origin of a new musical form: the sonata for soloist. The sonata consisted of a musical composition in which one instrument was treated like the soloist, receiving most of the attention of the composer and the audience. The soloist could be accompanied by one or two instruments - a low-register instrument like the viola da gamba or the basson, playing the bass notes, and a harmony instrument such as the harpsichord or the theorbo. This new musical form brought new musical exigences to the instrumentalists. To fulfill those new demands, they had not only to rethink their instrumental techniques, but they also had to find other ways to make their instruments.

Paulo da Mata (playing the traverso) and Guilherme de Camargo (playing the theorbo) playing a piece by Michel Blavet, a French composer of the 18th century. This video is a good example of the new role of the flute during the Baroque Era, even though it is a late example if we consider that this kind of music started to be played in Italy by the end of the 16th century.

The court of Louis XIV, the Sun King, was very favorable to the development of this new kind of music and other more elaborated instrumental forms. While the music employed in solemnities and official royal events was rigidly taken care of by Jean-Baptiste Lully, the music played in private parties had a more inventive character. Talented instrumentalists were invited to such occasions and the preferred instruments were, at that time, the theorbo, the harpsichord, the viola da gamba and the flute. This kind of music provoked another great change: instrumentalists that used to play two or more instruments professionally started to specialize in one instrument, aiming to achieve a high degree of virtuosity on the chosen instrument. 

The transverse flute of the Baroque Era (known simply as traverso) acquired a more or less definite form around the year 1670. Some differences are noticeable when comparing a traverso and a renaissance flute: the traverso was divided in more pieces (the renaissance flute was divided in two pieces or wasn't divided at all, while the baroque flute could be divided intro three or even four pieces); the bore changes from cylindrical to conical; a new tone hole is added and it remains closed by a key that, when pressed by the little finger of the right hand, opens the hole.

A traverso made by Hotteterre, divided in three pieces: first the head, then the body, and then the foot.

The Hotteterre family became famous as an important family of wind instrument makers. The most famous among the Hotteterres is Jacques-Martin Hotteterre (1674-1763), nicknamed "le Romain". His fame - both while alive and posthumous - is due to his treatise "Principes de la Flute Traversiere" (1707). His treatise has directions on how to play the traverso, the recorder and the oboe. However, the thought that he was the one who 'invented' the baroque flute is not accurate. Some researchers point out that the key on the foot of the flute might have been invented around the year 1670, four years before Jacques-Martin was born.

A flute maker from Japan talks (in Japanese) about his replica of a Hotteterre traverso found in Graz. Even being unable to understand Japanese, that's a very interesting video: the craftsman shows to the camera all the pieces of the traverso in different angles.

The Hotteterre flute found in Graz may have been made by Jacques-Martin or his father Martin. That flute is considered the best example of the early French baroque flute. This was probably the instrument that Lully had in mind when he wrote what researchers consider to be the first apparition of the transverse flute in an orchestra: his opera-ballet "Le Triomphe de l'Amour", from 1681. Instruments thought to be made by the Hotteterres were also found in Berlin and Saint Petersburg, but it was found out recently that they are replicas made in the 19th century. Those last two are pitched in A=400hz, while the flute found in Graz is in A=392hz. All the three flutes have a rich and smooth tone.

 The sound of a Hotteterre flute. This piece was written by Michel de Labarre (1675-1745).

A few paragraphs ago, I wrote that the baroque flute could be divided in three or four pieces, contrasting to the one-pieced (or, sometimes, two-pieced) renaissance flute. This division is due not only to the ease to carry a disassembled instrument, but also to tuning issues. The pitch adopted in a determined city could be different from the pitch adopted in other cities. One way to make tuning easier was to make flutes in four parts and to provide the flutists with upper-bodies of different lengths: the bigger the upper-body is, the lower is the tuning. Those extra upper-bodies were known as "corps de rechange" (something like "exchangeable bodies"). 

A four-piece flute by Carl August Grenser (1720-1807), with six "corps de rechange". The foot of that flute also has a tuning mechanism: when pulled out, it makes the foot longer and, therefore, lowers the tuning.

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Now that this little historical contextualization was made, it is time to start writing about the flute publications that I have in my personal library. We have stopped at the time when the one-keyed flute was invented - then, the following posts will deal with the methods and treatises written until that point in history. When I'm done with this, I'll continue our little historical contextualization (The Baroque Era - Part II).  Some of the publications that I plan to discuss  at the moment are the treatises written by Hotteterre, Quantz and Tromlitz, among many other methods and writings.

Related posts:
The history of the transverse flute - The Middle Ages

The history of the transverse flute - The Renaissance
Main sources:

POWELL, Ardal. The Flute. New Heaven and London: Yale University Press, 2002.

SOLUM, John. The early flute. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992.

The history of the transverse flute - The Renaissance

The visitor probably remembers the fact that there are no extant transverse flutes from the Middle Ages, a fact that leaves us unable to know how they sounded and how they were played. Besides that, just few examples of music written at that time for the flute were found - which leaves us in the dark when we try to figure out the characteristics of the flute repertoire back then. The Renaissance doesn't present such problems with the same depth: Renaissance flutes and Renaissance flute repertoire were both found and are being analysed by musicologists. Those sources, however, are not the only useful ones, for images and texts referring to the flute (the main kind of source we rely on when it comes to the Middle Ages) were also found.
 

Most historians agree that the Renaissance lies between the fifteenth and the seventeenth centuries. Anne Smith (the author of the chapter dedicated to the Renaissance flute which belongs to John Solum's book "The Early Flute"), however, defines the Renaissance flute as the flute played in Europe between 1500 and 1670, being the last date an estimated year for the appearance of the baroque traverso. Smith describes the Renaissance flute as having a more or less cylindrical bore, six finger-holes and one embouchure hole. 

The Renaissance flute.

Only rarely is the flute found in fifteenth-century paintings. The instrument is found more frequently in paintings of the next century. Those paintings suggest that the flute was played in two very different contexts, the military context being one of those two. Sources point out that the transverse flute became a traditionally military instrument around the sixteenth century. In 1467, Swiss troops achieved success in the battlefield by employing an extremely disciplined formation that was not only strong in defense but also movable when attacking. Testimonies related that those troops marched in perfect synchronicity, just like a deadly corps de ballet, accompanied by a fife (a transverse flute very similar to that one described by Annie Smith) and some drums. News about that original battle strategy spread all over Europe by the end of the fifteenth century.

This image belongs to a German manual of military science and law published in 1555. In it, we see a fife player (his back turned on us) and a drummer. Hanging on the fife player's back, his case, inside of which four instruments could fit: a long fife, two middle-sized fifes and another shorter in size.

Illustrations of battle situations dating from the sixteenth century do not represent the fife very uniformly: its size was highly variable (from 2 to 3 feet) and the number of finger-holes could vary from seven to eight. Thoinot Arbeau (1519-1595) wrote in his dance manual titled "Orchesographie" (1589) about a fife which characteristics are closer to those of the fife of our days: a little transverse flute with six finger-holes and a very narrow bore, which contributed to the brilliant timbre of the instrument. Arbeau also points out that the music played by military fife players was improvised.

A richly illustrated edition of the first known treatise on instrumentation was printed in Basel in 1511. Its title is "Musica getutscht" and it was written by Sebastian Virdung (c.1465-1511), a priest. Virdung was the first musical theorist of the seventeenth century to mention flutes of any kind. He uses the word "Flöten" to refer to recorders, and the word "Zwerchpfeiff" to refer to the military fife (he doesn't mention any kind of transverse flue played outside the military context). On the other hand, Martin Agricola (c.1486-1556) published in Wittenberg in 1529 (and also in 1545, in a revised edition), his "Musica instrumentalis deudch". Agricola writes about a few kinds of transverse flutes - the "Schweitzerpfeiffen" (Swiss fifes) and the "Querfeiffen" or "Querpfeiffen" (transverse flutes or transverse fifes) -, but he describes another kind of context for the use of those flutes, one very different from the military context.

 

The image above belongs to Virdung's "Musica getutscht". The fourth instrument from the top to the bottom was mentioned in the previous paragraph: it's the "Zwerchpfeiff". Right below it, four instruments from the family of the recorders (or "Flöten", according to Virdung). The two instruments on the top are not flutes, but shawms ("Schalmey"), the predecessors of the oboe.

I have mentioned the existence of two different contexts for flute-playing just a few paragraphs back. I've written about the military context. The other one is the one described by Agricola's writings: the court and the private residences - the chamber music (or, to be more specific, consort music). Consort music was written for a formation of instruments that belonged to the same family. If we take a flute for example, a consort of flutes would be formed by flutes of the same kind, but of different sizes (in order to explore low and high pitches), and each one with its individual melodic line. 

Agricola had in mind a flute consort in which three instruments of different sizes figured: one bass flute, another one of intermediate size which could play the tenor or the alto part, and a smaller flute to play high pitches. Philibert Jambe de Fer (c.1515-1566) describes in his "L'Epitome musical" (published in Lyons in 1556) a four-flute consort in which instruments of two different sizes were combined: one bass flute and three smaller flutes of the same size - versatile instruments capable to play in different registers. The first collection of music written for this kind of four-flute consort was published in 1519. That fact shows that Jambe de Fer was  writing about a practice that was already common when it comes to music for flute consorts of that time. 

English Renaissance music played by a Renaissance flute consort. That consort (the Flötten Consort Stuttgart) is similar to the one described by Agricola. It has three instruments: one bass flute and two flutes of similar size (opposing to Agricola's description of a flute consort of three flutes of different sizes).

It seems that the transverse flute has reached great popularity - as well as a certain level of predominance - at the middle of the seventeenth century. Such hypothesis is sustained by the numbers found in inventories of the musical instruments that belonged to certain courts of that time. One inventory written in 1589 referred to the musical instruments possessed by the court of Baden-Württemberg (located in Stuttgart): 220 transverse flutes, 48 recorders, 113 cornetts and 39 viols. The transverse flute also became popular outside of the court. Members of the bourgeoisie and amateur musicians among the nobles of both sexes were playing it in Italy, France and Holland.

Despite the large number of transverse flutes found in court inventories all over Europe, playing music in flute consorts seemed to be considered some kind of French expertise in the sixteenth century. Frenchmen called for themselves the status of the best flautists in Europe - they also didn't really like the term "German flute". That wasn't mere vanity: French flautists held very important musical positions outside France, a fact that attests the high quality of their performance.

The flute wasn't limited to military music and flute-consort music. It also appears in groups of diverse instruments. Such groupings weren't uncommon in the context of religious and private music. In 1563, in the Bavarian court located in Munich, Orlando di Lasso (1532-1594) started to use string instruments in religious music and, after that, started to use all kinds of instruments and voices. 

This painting (painted in 1520, approximately) shows three women practicing chamber music, in a private context, in a group of diverse instruments: the lute, the flute and the voice. 

Filadelfio Puglisi, a researcher who has studied the Renaissance flute in depth, had access to a Renaissance flute collection found in Verona, Italy. After comparing those flutes he found out some common characteristics between them:

1.In most cases, the embouchure hole was oval and smaller than the embouchure hole of baroque flutes;
2.To make fingering easier, the six finger-holes were placed in two groups of three;
3.All the holes were aligned, a feature that allowed the flute to be held either to the right or to the left;
4.The bore was semi-cylindrical;
5.The walls of the instruments were relatively thin, a feature that contributed to their lightness;
6.The pitch of the Verona flutes varied a lot, but two great pitch groups were found out: one in A=435hz (the "Kammerton", employed in private and festive music) and the other one in A=410hz (the "Chorton", employed in religious music). The Chorton was a whole tone lower than the Kammerton and the group of flutes in A=410hz was bigger than the other group in A=435hz.

Some of the Renaissance flutes found in Verona.

Instrumentalists tried to cultivate a singing style while playing - in other words, they wanted to make their instruments produce sounds which qualities resembled those of the human voice. Agricola encouraged the use of vibrato and many sources point out that instrumentalists considered that vibrato (produced by the air column or the fingers) was an essential element of the sound and its expressiveness. Renaissance flautists also gave great importance to the articulation of the sounds. As in speech, a clear articulation was considered indispensable for a good performance. Jambe de Fer encourages his readers to articulate every single note - even the fastest ones - saying that "he who doesn't articulate every syllable while giving a speech sounds like he is drunk and, therefore, such attitude would produce a poor effect in music as well". Another important aspect of Renaissance music-making was "diminution" - or improvised ornamentation of a melodic line. The instrumentalist had to be capable of improvising on the given melody, making his musical discourse even more rich.  

Thanks to the fact that there are extant Renaissance flutes and Renaissance flute-music, we can paint a clearer portrait of the flute of that time - a much clearer portrait than the one of the Middle Ages. However, it would be unwise to think that the knowledge we have is solid enough to make exact assumptions about the subject. The extant instruments are very fragile and, due to this fragility, just a few researchers have access to it. That means that we don't have many different points of view on the subject and that only a small number of individuals were able to make reliable replicas of those instruments and, therefore, to learn how to play them accordingly to the stylistic conceptions of the Renaissance. Besides that, it is not that simple to come up with the accurate dates of the making of the extant instruments - some of them were reevaluated as seventeenth-century replicas. What we know about the Renaissance flute is based on the vision of a small number of specialists, people in which we chose to trust. 

Main sources:

POWELL, Ardal. The Flute. New Heaven and London: Yale University Press, 2002.

SOLUM, John. The Early Flute. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992. 

The history of the transverse flute - The Middle Ages

Before I start writing about the flute methods I own, a historical contextualization is necessary. The next three posts will be dedicated to the uses and the development of the transverse flute in the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, and the first century of the Baroque era - the moment in history in which the one-keyed flute begins to be largely employed. These posts will serve as basis to a better understanding of the sources I'm going to write about in the future. 

The transverse flute in the Middle Ages

            

Custom dictates that the history of our modern flute starts in 1700 with the advent of the baroque flute and with the printing of the first pieces of music written for that instrument. Taking that point of view, the precedent centuries seem impenetrable and remote, especially those of the Middle Ages (5th to 15th centuries).
          

All the knowledge we possess concerning the medieval flute comes from a handful of images and some textual fragments from the Middle Ages. No extant medieval flute was found so far, so we are unable to know how they sounded like or how they were played. Added to that, just a fraction of the medieval music was written down - and what was written lacks information related to which instruments should be employed or how to play the music. 

If we take fiddles and harps as models of comparison - instruments that appear very frequently in paintings and writings - the flute was clearly a rare instrument during the Middle Ages. But the extant flute iconography can't be interpreted literally: it was common for the artist to take a decision on how he should represent the flute based primarily on issues of the harmony and the composition of the painting itself, leaving the realism aside.

A miniature shown in a collection of songs published around 1340. The flautist holds her flute to the right, but only to harmonize better with the fiddle, making both instruments point to the image's central point. Most of the representations of flautists from the Middle Ages show the instrumentalists holding their instruments to the left and not to the right - like we can see above and like we do nowadays.

The interpretation of the written sources generates other kinds of problems. The word used to refer to the transverse flute applied, frequently, to recorders and whistle-like instruments. Besides that, looking for references of professional flute players in literature is a waste of time: at that time, musicians were not specialized in only one instrument, like most of us are today.

Many ancient images (many of them even more ancient than those of the Middle Ages) depicted flautists in mythological contexts. Greece, India, and Egypt have legends that associate the creation of the flute to deities: the Greeks with Pan, the Hindus with Krishna, and the Egyptians with Osiris. Among those legends, only the Greek legend of Pan belongs to the western mythological repertoire. However, Pan's flute was not a transverse one. Among those three cultures, Hindu culture was the only one to attribute the creation of a transverse flute to a god. 

Pan, a half human-like, half goat-like Greek deity, holding his creation: the Pan flute. 

Krishna, Hindu god, teaching Radha, a mortal, to play the flute.

The transverse Hindu flute might have traveled to Byzantium around the 10th century and then it was spread into Europe. References to the transverse flute (both in visual arts and literature) start to pop out only in the 12th century. Until the 14th centurty, however, the use of the flute was limited to the borders of the Holy Roman Empire - which territory corresponds roughly to today's Germany. Due to that territorial limitation, the transverse flue became known as the "German flute" when it reached other countries between the 13th and the 14th centuries. The flute seemed to be already in use in France (where it was known as "flûte d'Allemagne") by the end of the 13th century. Paintings show that the instrument was present in French and German military music around the 14th century. In Spain, the flute was already known in the mid-fourteenth century, but the instrument would only be introduced to Italians in the following century. 

The borders of the Holy Roman Empire throughout the centuries.

The extant sources related to the transverse flute in the Middle Ages reveal that neither a consensus on how to build the flute or how to play it existed. The instrumentalists had to have a highly developed musical perception in order to be able to adapt the music they needed to play to the instrument they had in their hands at the moment. They should be able to, within a few minutes, identify where the tones and semitones of the flute were, identify the instrument's range, and play it accordingly. No fixed pitch existed for the flutes at that time - the pitch was different in each province, conditions under which every musical instrument was submitted to. Apparently, the only consensus was that the transverse flute should be held in a transverse fashion.

Main reference:

POWELL, Ardal. The Flute. New Heaven and London: Yale University Press, 2002.

Dear visitor...

Welcome to Faro Flautista!

This blog has as its central topic the transverse flute - the instrument I chose to be my companion in my career as a professional musician. My objective is to write posts about the flute material which belong to my personal archive. I'll write about flute-related books, treatises, methods, and articles that I judge to be important, interesting and/or curious, aiming to put the reader in contact with them and their contents.

A big portion of the material that I have belongs to the collections of facsimiles published by Fuzeau. Those facsimiles where published in France between the years of 1500 and 1860 and consist of almost a hundred diverse publications including transverse flute and recorder methods, entries in music dictionaries and general encyclopaedias, paragraphs destined to the flute in instrumentation treatises, and some articles. It is a very rich material, which is filled with curiosities and is very useful to help tracing a history of the flute and its techniques. Some other books from the 18th century which are not included in the Fuzeau collections are also part of my personal archive, as well as many flute publications of the 20th and 21th centuries.

 

Above, on the left, the collection "Flûte à Bec", which contains recorder material published in France between the years 1500 and 1800. To the right, the collection "Flûte Traversière", with transverse flute material published in the same country between the years 1800 and 1860. There are also two extra volumes to that collection with material published between the years 1600 and 1800.

This blog has some preliminary posts dealing with the basics of the flute. They were written intending to give the complete beginner a basis to understand what is going on in this blog (ver "O básico sobre a flauta"*, in the "Content" session, on the right). The next posts, however, will get more deep in the subject. They will contain many musical theory terms, as well as flute-technique terminology. Since I don't plan to give explanations about them in the posts, I have written a small glossary*. That way, I'll be able to reach both the beginner and the initiated: giving explanations to the first; writing a more straightforward text to the former

Hoping to reach a wider audience, I plan to write posts both in English and Portuguese. To have access to all the posts written in English, look for "Posts in English", just below this blog's banner. To read them in Portuguese, click on "Postagens em português", at the same location.

That being said, I welcome you once more and invite you to leave me your comments and suggestions. 

Hope you enjoy it!

*Only available in Portuguese.