through unfamiliar music

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keannu

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1. Does this "through" mean "from the begining to the end" or "with"?
2. Do the two as mean "in the way" or "because"?
3. What is the subject of "leading"? Is it "composers"? Then, doesn't it have to be "leading themselves"? Is it an exceptional case of reflexive pronoun?

ex)Fourteenth-century approaches to music had a deep and continuing impact on music and musical life in later centuries. Perhaps most significant was the invention of a precise and unambiguous notation that could record a wide variety of rhythms and allowed music to be distributed in writing...We now take this for granted when we play from notation and sight-read through unfamiliar music, but it was a remarkable innovation in the fourteenth century. Among its effects was that composers could fix their music exactly as they wished it to be performed, as(in the way?) poets had long been able to set down thier poems, leading them to take pride in authorship as(in the way?) few composers had done before the fourteenth century...
 

Tdol

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From the beginning to the end (it could be a section, etc- it's the part you play from beginning to end)
 

emsr2d2

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1. Does this "through" mean "from the begining to the end" or "with"?
2. Do the two as mean "in the way" or "because"?
3. What is the subject of "leading"? Is it "composers"? Then, doesn't it have to be "leading themselves"? Is it an exceptional case of reflexive pronoun?

ex)Fourteenth-century approaches to music had a deep and continuing impact on music and musical life in later centuries. Perhaps most significant was the invention of a precise and unambiguous notation that could record a wide variety of rhythms and allowed music to be distributed in writing...We now take this for granted when we play from notation and sight-read through unfamiliar music, but it was a remarkable innovation in the fourteenth century. Among its effects was that composers could fix their music exactly as they wished it to be performed, as(in the way?) poets had long been able to set down thier poems, leading them to take pride in authorship as(in the way?)few composers had done before the fourteenth century...

The thing "leading them to take pride" is the ability to "fix their music exactly as they wished it be performed". Poets had been able to do that for many years and now, with the invention of musical notation, composers could do the same thing, which led them to take pride in authorship. The writer used "leading" instead of "which led".
 

keannu

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Thanks a lot! Do you think the last "as" also refers to "in the way" or "because"?
 

BobK

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:up: [This was for Ems] (But I'm not sure why the writer chose 'leading'. It let them take pride in their work. Maybe by letting them, in principle, take pride in their works it led them (in practice) to take pride in authorship; if that's what it meant, it's very lazily put.)

keannu: the second 'as' does mean 'in the [same] way [as]'.

b
 

keannu

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It seems quite a rare case that participial phrase such as ",leading" can be interpreted as "which led" as I haven't encoutered this kind of structure. Participial phrase in the middle of a sentence usually has the subject of the sentence as its subject.
But as 5jj emphasized, there's no limited slots(not sluts) of interpretation or rules. I realized rules or grammar didn't come into being in the beginning, resulting in a language, but people just made rules or grammar out of an ocean-like language for convenience. There's tons of ruleless rules, I guess.

ex)Among its effects was that composers could fix their music exactly as they wished it to be performed, as(in the way?) poets had long been able to set down thier poems, leading(which led) them to take pride in authorship as(in the way?)few composers had done before the fourteenth century...
 

Barb_D

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It seems quite a rare case that participial phrase such as ",leading" can be interpreted as "which led" as I haven't encoutered this kind of structure.

It's very common.

Nation A did something for Nation B, opening the way for better relations between the two countries. [which opened]
etc

As for your question about "as" -- you are an advanced enough student to know that "because" would have made NO SENSE at all. You have done that before - asked about two meanings when only one could possibly be correct. I wonder why you do that. You must know the answer.
 
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