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.’

Time stands still in Jan Lievens’s violin

The first deception comes as we contemplate Jan Lievens’s violin, because not only is it impossible to know exactly what it sounded like, but also what was felt by the violinist who played it. The origin of Lievens’s canvas surely lies in these words from Ecclesiastes, ‘In the day of prosperity be joyful, and in the day of adversity consider; God has made the one as well as the other, so that man may not find out anything that will be after him’. Or that was before him, we might add. The skull, the hourglass, the snuffed out candle are all Baroque allegories of the passing of time, the brevity of life and the imminence of death. Vanity of vanities, all is vanity. Yet, for a musician, this violin is a metaphor of our ignorance of past sound. The musician who played it no doubt had a better opinion of his instrument than Vincenzo Galilei who, in his Dialogo della musica antica et de la moderna (1581), described it as ‘a piece of hollow wood over which are stretched [...] strings of the gut of a dumb beast’, alluding to the impossibility of a musical instrument ever being elevated to the status of the human voice. In early music, the future is of little consequence. It is the past that captivates and stirs us. Musicians are caught between two time periods and, like Pascal, we are alarmed and thrilled by the silence of those infinite spaces. The reason why we play is to capture in the present that dimension of time.

But, it might be asked, can we not capture that sense of the present in the music of contemporary composers? For some decades now, the early music enthusiast, whether performer or music lover, has witnessed the gradual elevation of early music and its performance to the status of cult objects, resulting in a crisis of the previously ‘relaxed’ relationship that existed with the musical past. It might legitimately be argued that early music, in its struggle to be reincarnated through the schools of performance based on 20th- century ‘historical criteria’, has come to fill the socio-musical role sadly lost to contemporary ‘classical’ music, favouring the evolution of artistic parameters based more on a search for the invariability of language than on a recognition of the jarring new sounds.

For both the wider audience and students, and professional musicians alike, it is less traumatic to preserve the musical tradition intact by means of a musicological approach whose tenets adhere to the past than by advocating a break with many of the aesthetic and musical precepts which for centuries have moulded the listening habits of western ears. It is easier to follow the discourse of Harnoncourt and Leonhardt than that of Stockhausen and Boulez, for whereas the latter force new paradigms into existence, the former chisel away at time-honoured paradigms; for all the newness of their philological reinterpretation, they ultimately reaffirm and define the precepts of those paradigms on their own terms, resulting in an ‘acoustic sense of peace’ between music and the present. In other words, they remind us that, in spite of the occasional licence and liberties taken in interpretation, everything is in its rightful place - comfortably couched in the history of music.

However, our current sense of enjoying an early music paradise would have been impossible without the advent of the recorded disc, which is the true affidavit of recent performing history. Bringing together as it does both the transmitter and the receiver, it may eventually break the age-old spell of music as an inapprehensible object. Thus, music today is much closer than the other arts to being an enduring art form.

In his Codex Urbinas Leonardo da Vinci wrote, ‘painting has the advantage and reigns supreme over music because, unlike unfortunate music, it does not fade after it is created, but rather continues to exist, depicting as though living what in fact is merely surface representation’. The recording, which can be reproduced ad infinitum, has succeeded in creating something akin to that ‘enduring surface representation’, a format that enables the various strata of simultaneity that are peculiar to music to be unravelled whenever and as often as required, without having to resort to complicated specialist techniques to decipher the scores; we are therefore in a position to challenge Leonardo when he attributes to ‘the harmonious proportion of painting’ virtues that nowadays are easily achieved in a recording, bringing to life that harmonious proportion ‘which is composed of simultaneous parts, the sweetness of which, whether combined or in isolation, is apprehended in a single moment’.

Does this mean that the discourse of the violin is frozen in time on the recorded disc in much the same way that the sand in the hourglass is held motionless on the canvas of Lievens’s painting? No, because the only thing that is frozen is our thought processes of the moment. If early music continues to be a delight, it is because nobody can tell how its story ends, and in an age such as the present, when art must bear on its shoulders the weight of so many known endings, that is a priceless gift. But if the charm lies in not knowing how the story ends, in feeling our way blindfold, as it were, around original instruments and scores, why should there be so much insistence on finding out how music really sounded in the past?

On aesthetic perception: the ancients and the moderns

The more information we have about the circumstances in which a given work was created, the more speculative elements we will have to assist us in our imaginative interpretations, thereby promoting what we understand as ‘creativity’, which is basically what we are indulging in when we relive works of the past. The study of organology, the science of notation, iconography, instrument building, bibliography, performance practice, stylistics, philosophy, aesthetics, sociology and psychology, all branches of learning related to musicology but which are applicable to the actual playing of instruments, enable us to approach the score and its interpretation in a much more exciting way. Yet, strange though it may seem, the stimulus comes from the realisation that the more ingredients we have at our disposal to ‘cook a musical dish’, the greater is the risk that we will make a false move, and it is in that margin of error, and there alone, that the key to the creativity of the modern-day performer lies.

When the Romantics rediscovered musical legacies of the past, as in the case of Mendelssohn’s rediscovery of Bach’s St Matthew Passion, they related to the past in a completely natural way. Just as they did not feel it was necessary to dress up in period costume to read Petrarch’s sonnets, they were not worried about whether their approach to the composers of other periods was faithful to the music’s origins. How could they have ensured that it was? As early as 1775, Father Engramel stated that ‘the likes of Lully, Corelli and even Rameau would be incensed if they could hear how their music is played today’. They had their own idea of composition, and all music from other ages necessarily had to be poured into the moulds of their interpretation. Composing, playing and listening were different facets of the same musical whole. Nowadays, however, the situation is different, because the gap between composers and performing musicians makes it more difficult to talk in terms of coherence and debate in an age when aesthetic perception has lost its true bearings.

Although the debate between the ancients and the moderns (we refer to the 20th century, not to similar controversies of earlier ages) seems to have resulted in a more or less negotiated victory of the former over the latter, if we are scrupulous in our analysis of the situation and do not allow ourselves to be carried away by ideological fervour, we shall come to the conclusion that the problem is simply that the interpretation processes and ways of using the means of expression have inevitably dated to the point of creating tics in the performer and, as the sociologist Antoine Hennion says, as soon as a tic is identified it becomes tiresome. It is worth recalling that Leonard Meyer, in his systematic determination to elucidate the intricacies of musical emotion, quoted C. S. Myers, who in 1927 proposed the following: ‘In music and speech, pure sound, true pitch, exact tuning, perfect harmony, strict rhythm, regular beat and precise tempo play a relatively small part. They serve mainly as points of reference for art and temperament. The limitless resources of both vocal and instrumental expression stem from an artistic deviation from the pure, the true, the exact, the perfect, the strict, the regular and the precise. This deviation from the exact is the medium through which beauty is created and emotion is conveyed’. The remarkable thing about these words is that they could apply just as well to the post-Romantic concept of musical expression as to that of the historical movement, its supposed rival, since deviation from the exact may be carried out on the basis of opposing crescendo-diminuendo, rubato-a tempo, ritardando-accelerando, slow vibrato-rapid vibrato, etc., all of which affect long architectural structures of discourse; deviation may also stem from égale-inégale, long syllable-short syllable, more stress-less stress, messa di voce-plain sound, etc., which shape the pronunciation of the shorter elements in the construction of the phrase.

Although it is the case that, just as all the expressive resources came to be more standardised in post-Romantic instruments, so that the margin for re-creation grew increasingly narrow, and that the advent of historicism brought novelty of pitch, gut strings, micro-articulations and a rest from vibrato to the grateful ears of the listening public, one wonders how long audiences will take to identify the ‘tics’ of the Baroque and how musicians will contrive to renew their methods of interpretation, thus regenerating their dissuasive capacity when that time inevitably comes. Are there new ways of approaching that interplay between tension and distension with which the tonal system has forged its most characteristic resource, that is to say, the element of interest, pleasure or emotion, achieved precisely by means of defeating the expectations set up by the system itself?

Between Claesz’s violin and its reflection

Nowadays, when we can go to the supermarket or the dentist’s and come back home again without ceasing to hear music for a single moment, one might be tempted to think that music has become a kind of harmonie universelle, a sublime, Rousseau-like attempt at a brotherhood based on music. But that Esperantist ideal, according to which sound is the antithesis of Babel and music is the universal language, is of course a fallacy: well-meaning when uttered by the listener, but pretentious if propounded by the musician. The truly universal is silence.

Our final doubts are seasoned in the silence of Peter Claesz’s painting. The bow of a violin resting on the strings: that is a true still life. If those strings could sound, would they really fulfil the expectations of Johann Joachim Quantz, who in 1752 wrote that ‘the purpose of orators and musicians is basically the same: to subdue hearts, excite or calm the passions and to induce emotions in the listener’? The answer is very probably yes, since as Blainville had already suggested, ‘music is to the ear what painting is to the eye. It must capture the listener’s interest, it must attract his attention’. If it is a question of attracting the listener’s attention, it could be done on a grand scale, as indeed Georg Muffat required of the musicians performing his music in 1701: ‘When you come to a piano, you should all play so softly and delicately that you can hardly be heard; when you come to a forte in the score, you should play so forcefully from the very first note thus marked, that the audience will be overwhelmed by the strength of feeling... For it is by means of the strict observance of this opposition or rivalry between slow and fast, gentle and strong, the boldness of the full chorus and the delicacy of the trio, that the ear is rapt with wonder, just as the eye is delighted by the opposition of light and shadow.’ It is almost as if the Baroque master were describing a symphony by Beethoven. It should therefore come as no surprise that Paul Klee, who besides being a painter was an excellent violinist and a passionate admirer of Buxtehude’s trios as well as the concertos of Rameau and Couperin, admitted in Chapter IV of his book On Modern Art that ‘What was accomplished in music before the end of the18th century has only just begun in the field of the plastic arts’, or that Kandinsky expressed a similar idea in Über das Geistige in der Kunst (Concerning the Spiritual in Art), when he wrote the following: ‘Our most valuable lessons come from music. With few exceptions and deviations, music has for centuries been the art form that has used its means to express not the phenomena of the natural world, but rather the inner life of the artist, creating its own world out of musical notes’. If all this is true, if the fundamental conditions of Romanticism were beginning to manifest themselves almost fifty years before the death of Johann Sebastian Bach, if painters longed to be musicians and musicians longed to be painters and poets, if music was abstract avant la lettre and Kandinsky came late to abstract art, would somebody please put a bit of order into the history of art?

The insistent attempt on the part of so many thinkers throughout history and in our own day to attach expressive value to all kinds of human manifestations is an exercise that patently has more to do with creation and the study of aesthetics than with the performance of music of the past. We should not confuse the roles of an instrumentalist, a singer or conductor - all creative artists - with those of a Ph.D. in the History of Aesthetics and an analyst of creative works, but instead emphasise that each composer, each performer and each listener are co-participants in the challenge to discover or invent ways out of the labyrinth of mirrors that we have made of artistic expression. In early music, as in any other genre, there is a long and sensual chain made up of expressive links; to the extent that instrumentalists and audiences of the new century that has just begun are able to discern the colour of each rusty, missing link, we shall be in a position to open up a challenging new space for artistic re-creation. It is true, to quote Leonardo yet again, that ‘music is the configuration of the invisible’. It is also true that there is still no carbon dating test that can be applied to the sound waves of the past, and that when Harold Bloom dismisses the historical novel as a sub-genre because of its lack of definition, halfway between history and fiction, and therefore unworthy of being included in the canon, he could just as well be talking about the elusive task of giving expression to musical works of the past through historically-informed performances. In the final analysis, we shall simply have to accept that it is precisely that space between history and fiction that is the source of the enchantment, the emotion and the mystery in our interpretation of a group of violins that seem to share an ancient secret, for each of them has a past that harbours in its wooden soul a spirit more precious than the philosopher’s stone. As in Claesz’s painting, there is always some window shedding new reflected light on our violins. Perhaps, in their silence, they are aware that their present is little more than an imperfect reflection in a gleaming sphere.