Dol: a measurement of pain or sadness

The history of the development of the dol as a unit for measuring pain is rather horrible. It came as a result of inflicting pain by way of heat onto the hands of women while they were giving birth, and asking them to rate the pain of the contraction against the pain they felt in their hands. You can read about it here. The kind of abuse that was inflicted on people in the name of science during the 1940s is in itself cause for a huge amount of sadness.

The name comes from the Latin dolor meaning pain, grief, or sorrow. The Italian word dolore is used often in late Italian Renaissance music, particularly in the music of Carlo Gesualdo and Claudio Monteverdi. I encountered it first in Bach's Cantata 209, Non sa che sia dolore. I chose (because I could) to think of the "grief" associations with the Dol scale for this piece in "Weights and Measures," and thought it would be useful (I had a day visited by doldrums yesterday) to play this piece on viola in order to work out some of my feelings. Then I tried it on the violin, and found a whole different spectrum of feelings to work through. I recorded both of them, with the idea of posting one or the other on line to share.

Then, while messing around in iMovie, I thought of playing both videos simultaneously. I lined them up to end at the same time (the tempos were a little different), and was really thrilled with the results. Sometimes the voices answer one another, and, surpisingly, sometimes they play exactly together, purely by chance!