| News Guides Performances What Is Music? | ELLOPOS |
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| GEORGE VALSAMIS | |||||
Which paths did music take during the ages of the death of Music? It faced again language in the light of Christian Revelation. Since there did not exist any more an organic relationship between them, their meeting was realized as a subordination of human musicality to the Word of God. The current interpretation of freedom as independence may be rooted on this subordination. It might help us to take a glance at some historical facts. Looking for power, papacy offered earth and water to the Franks. In 800 AD, on Christmas Day, Charlemagne was crowned by Pope Leo III rector of Europe. This move had various and significant consequences; we are here interested in the encounter of Christian word with German musicality.[3] Musical notation in the 9th century ceases to be a mere supporter of memory and the ancestor of stave appears. Settings to music are leaving the dominion of traditional music and begin to preserve and transmit themselves; in other words, they begin to being dealt with as works of art. In the 10th and 11th century Gregorian Chant splits into its constituent syllables, which now begin to sound isolated, in a manner akin to German musicality. In this split we could see the musical expression of what Nietzsche later called «the death of God», and even if indeed Latin language, as an overall technological language, is mainly responsible, Germanism procured for it the strength to move toward its limits, which coincide with the limits of technology; the most important outcome of this move, either philosophical or poetical or musical, is clearly German. We return to the developments: "The task now was to join these syllables in a new manner and thus to construct a whole, to create — differently than in the first thousand years — the linguistic reality anew from the music" (cf. Thr. Georgiades, Music and Language, p. 22). In the 16th century Palestrina transforms music to an expansion of human understanding by transforming language itself into music (a capella). With Schütz music exploits its capabilities starting to interpret language, namely to explicate man and everything about him, beyond words. With Bach it already compounds a sufficient and autonomous language of sounds, also capable of leaving the words behind. Beethoven feels the deadlock to which he himself and the romantics are going to come, the name of which we already know from Plato: unmindfulness of the Muse's justice and legitimacy. From the 19th century and on the effort of elevating the musical (constructive/intentional) power of man to an absolutely valid interpreter of Godly Revelation takes anew, even though inversely, the same path the ancient hybris had taken.[4]
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page notes
3 A meticulous recording of the subsequent facts can be found by any one interested in the subject, in Thr. Georgiades' book Music and Language, in which the necessary musical examples also lie.
4 The reversal was due to the fact that Greek music developed itself by deconstructing, whilst European music developed itself by constructing; thus the two poles coincided revealing the two horizons: the one of the skeptic negation, and the one of ascetic affirmation. However, the fundamental identity of the two moves do not rescind the attributes we witness in the Latin or German language, if we bear in mind the different fates of Christianity in the East and in the West. We also must not forget the following and most important difference, that all the ancient Greek great achievements are being baptized, whilst all the great European achievements are being shattered.
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