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Any attempt to classify the artistic movements that have existed throughout history should take into account the possible relationships between different currents of thought, even though they belong to distinct time frames and respond to widely differing creative procedures. Viewed from this perspective, the struggle of the pioneers of abstract painting to free colour and form from their age-old ‘yoke’ of figurative representation, is remarkably similar to that of 17th and 18th century composers and musicians to liberate instrumental sound from the confines of the word.
The expressive power attributed to non-figurative colours and forms has traditionally been associated with the dismantling of the tonal system that gave way to early 20th- century atonal and dodecaphonic music, since Kandinsky, Mondrian, Malevich, Klee and many others found in the absolutism of 19th-century music the spiritual bed-rock of their own work. Historically speaking, however, that view is mistaken. In referring to the concept of pure abstraction, formulated by Worringer in 1906 as having evolved from the geometrical ornamental art of primitive peoples to Kandinsky’s notion of art as giving expression to an inner need, it would be more accurate both in historical and anthropological terms to see links between abstraction and the whole process that goes from the revival of monody by the Camerata in Florence at the end of the 16th-century to the final establishment of the tonal system by Rameau in the 18th-century. In fact, the human mind could conceive of nothing more abstract than isolating a melody, stripping it of the meaning that was previously given by its association with a text, clothing it in harmony based on the major-minor polarity and leading it via paths of dissonance to the arena of the emotions. We are so accustomed nowadays to listening to sonatas and symphonies and allowing ourselves to be moved by them, that it is all too easy to forget that for the sound of a musical instrument to be accepted as an artistically valid product - not only by the doyens of musical science but also by the public at large - it took the combined energies of innumerable composers, musicians, instrument-makers, philosophers and audiences to persuade orthodox academic opinion that a new kind of music was possible and, as a consequence, that the autonomy of sound, like that of colour and form some three hundred years later, was a necessary giant leap forward in the direction of individual artistic subjectivity.
When Michael Pretorius in his Syntagma Musicum (1615-1619) proved that evolution had finally put an end to the absolute primacy of the word and divided the Cantilenae into cum textu and sine textu, he marked the beginning in Europe of an extravagant and ‘Baroque’ amalgam of concepts: the creative dance of symmetries, the fugue that was heir to an inevitable past, tonality as the infinite widening out from its strict modal confines, the theory of feelings that was synthesised in the contrast between adagio and allegro, the laws of rhetoric that were to turn musical discourse into an art of persuasion, the perfect imitation of the inimitable, mathematics as the only true means of dividing the octave, the progress of God from church to theatre, and, of course, the feverish duel between melody and harmony. The result would be a musicus poeticus emerging from a sea of chiaroscuro, someone who, from an objective awareness of the joys and sorrows of his whole society, could fashion the expression of his own joy and sadness. Before that could happen, however, it would be necessary to wrestle with the word for two long centuries and enter a confused world of signifiers with or without leaning and forms that are and are not content. As late as 1784, William Jones of Nayland argued that ‘ever since instrumental music became independent from vocal music, we have been in constant danger of falling prey to sound without sense’. From the moment that music breaks through the membrane of silence to its simultaneous birth and death on the ear of the listener, the musician simultaneously plays, is quiet and listens, knowing that all his notes are but half truths. How right the poet and essayist José Bergamín was when he wrote in his baroquely ironic aphorism, ‘Music always deceives us, because it can never keep a word it does not own.’
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