Our knowledge of music in Milan in the last quarter of the sixteenth century and the first half of the seventeenth century has been founded on the developments in string instruments, especially the violin, and on new genres of music written especially for these instruments--the earliest surviving examples of sonatas for violin and basso continuo were published in Concerti ecclesiastici in Milan in 1610.

In Baselitz's aesthetics, then, a personally tailored Africa functions as a kind of stabilizing basso continuo for the iconoclastic capriccios of Western artistic freedom.

But Hadda does not hear the basso continuo of denial and despair that runs through Singer's work, early and late.