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The words of Elias Canetti (from the Notes of 1942, published in The Province of Man) bring us directly to the very roots of a civilisation that has developed the most human and spiritual of all arts. With its truly universal power of communication, music is the prime language of the human being, the one that has the capacity to preserve the living memory of an original emotion. If music has existed, in its primitive and basic forms, since the first steps of man (as Goethe said,“Man carries music within him”), then the most representative moments of this living history, immortalised from the first examples of Gregorian chant in the 11th Century on, have been developed during this second millennium just finished. They have done so in a great variety of styles that correspond to the sensibility and imagination of the composers, reflecting the tastes of the different historical moments in which they lived.
Thanks to the invention of a clearly defined written music (a notation which allows the intervals and rhythms imagined by the composer to be understood), this heritage has preserved itself as an understandable language. Even so, the most perfect score remains only a plan, more or less intricately coded, that will always need contemporary musicians to bring it to life, because music (live or recorded) exists only in the instant in which it takes form as a result of the sound waves produced by the human voice or instrument. Its historical significance as a work will be determined not by the development of the musical material (melody, harmony, rhythm, timbre, form, etc.), but by the need for expression of the musicians, composers or performers who use it.
Historically, taste and style have changed, but man has always possessed a strong necessity and a great capacity for emotion and spirituality. The essence of this musical expression that touches our soul and makes it vibrate is, to quote La Fontaine, “grace, more beautiful than beauty.”
Translated by Dave Mason
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