Music: An Instrument of Dialogue Christian Medieval Music and Arab Music, or the Need for Heresy
By Luca Brunelli Felicetti
European Journal of Science and Theology, Vol.4, No.4 (2008)
Abstract: Now, medieval music would seem to make sense only as a pleasure for those, who are not able to live in modern times. This outdated music, which is also the victim – in the social imaginary – of a series of clichés that depict it as hieratic and absolute, or as an ingenuous and naive background music for minstrel plays, actually brings valuable inheritances for us. The first inheritance: the wonderful instruments, proper objects of art, worthy of a place of honour in figurative art, whose voices are as ravishing as and more than their shapes. The second inheritance: extreme beauty within extreme simplicity, a rare virtue involving the spirit and senses in a way that modern man has forgotten. The third inheritance, the most important of our times: in medieval music, different cultures and ideologies – which speak of themselves through their fragrance, when they are grasped and emphasized in the right degree by the performer – combine. Through medieval music, the European man can actually acquire important elements in order to draw a boundary line between what his today’s portrait is and what it could have been, and understand himself a little better.
By Luca Brunelli Felicetti
European Journal of Science and Theology, Vol.4, No.4 (2008)
Abstract: Now, medieval music would seem to make sense only as a pleasure for those, who are not able to live in modern times. This outdated music, which is also the victim – in the social imaginary – of a series of clichés that depict it as hieratic and absolute, or as an ingenuous and naive background music for minstrel plays, actually brings valuable inheritances for us. The first inheritance: the wonderful instruments, proper objects of art, worthy of a place of honour in figurative art, whose voices are as ravishing as and more than their shapes. The second inheritance: extreme beauty within extreme simplicity, a rare virtue involving the spirit and senses in a way that modern man has forgotten. The third inheritance, the most important of our times: in medieval music, different cultures and ideologies – which speak of themselves through their fragrance, when they are grasped and emphasized in the right degree by the performer – combine. Through medieval music, the European man can actually acquire important elements in order to draw a boundary line between what his today’s portrait is and what it could have been, and understand himself a little better.
Click here to read this article from the European Journal of Science and Technology
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