Introduction by Jordi Savall
It is certainly unusual, or unexpected, that a musician specialised in the historical, pre-1800 repertoire should write about the creative work of a young composer of our own time. I discovered the music of Bernat Vivancos, firstly, thanks to the magnificent double CD “Blanc” with choral works performed by the Latvian Radio Choir, (given to me last year by my friend Lluís Vilamajó); and a few months ago, on 6th March to be exact, I was lucky enough to meet Vivancos personally and to hear some of his remarkable pieces on the occasion of the memorable concert in the Basilica of Santa Maria del Pi in Barcelona; a concert in homage to my friend, the much admired composer Arvo Pärt (who this year celebrated his eightieth birthday).
A new musical Rennaissance
Since earliest times, music has formed part of human life as a fundamental language; music is, in fact, the first language to which we are sensitive. We know that children, long before they understand the meaning of words, know what we want to say when we speak to them thanks to the inflection of our voice. We now know that, from the sixteenth week, a fetus reacts to musical stimulus with specific movements of face and tongue.
But in all these hundreds of thousands of years in which music has accompanied humanity, testimony remains of only a very small part of its history, since the invention of musical notation, with the definition of pitch and specific rhythms, only happened some one thousand three hundred years ago. Since then, composers have made the effort to leave manuscripts or scores with more or less concrete indications, from which it is possible to interpret what they imagined. But all these manuscripts and scores only achieve a real and living dimension at the moment that they are given specific form by voices or instruments.
This is the magical moment that enables us to perceive their full beauty and emotion, thanks to the performer’s talent. Thus, every musical performance is always a modern contemporary event, given that live music only exists at the very instant in which sound waves produced by the human voice or instruments give it audible form; it is this same limitation which, simultaneously, makes music the most human and the most spiritual of all the arts.
Music is, also, one of the most universal means of expression and communication, and the measure of its importance and of its significance is not determined according to the criteria of the evolution of language – in the sense of history and progress – but in terms of the degree of its expressive intensity, of its inner richness and humanity. Until the beginning of the nineteenth century it was thought that progress existed in the art of musical composition, and everyone believed that each new musical genius introduced improvements that turned the compositions of the established masters into irrelevant, archaic works. Therefore each new layer of modernity obscured the marvels of the old masters, causing them to be forgotten.
But all this changed in 1829, when a young conductor and composer of twenty years of age, called Felix Mendelssohn, performed, for the first time since the composer’s death, J. S. Bach’s St. Matthew Passion. The recognition that this work was a masterpiece in spite of its being more than a hundred years old, destroyed such prejudice and initiated the recovery of historical works, a task that still continues today, more energetically than ever.
Some years later, at the end of the nineteenth century, – at the same time that Ludwik Lejzer Zamenhof created and presented “esperanto” (1887), a new language intended to be universal and freed from national tongues-, in the world of musical creativity remarkable changes were also occurring, such as the abandonment of tonality (as well as the rejection of national styles) by Arnold Schoenberg and Anton Webern, or, in 1913, the impact of The Rite of Spring (Le Sacre du printemps) by Igor Stravinsky.
In the various schools that subsequently arose, and the more or less avant-garde tendencies which imposed themselves throughout the twentieth century (and the beginning of the twenty-first century), it can be claimed that one of the principle characteristics of the “cultured” music of our time has been the search for constant technical and formal innovation, often with the deliberate intention of extreme rupture. It seemed, therefore, that modernity could only be reached with the notion of a break with, and total rejection of, traditional influences and past languages, bearers of beauty and harmony.
Fortunately, thanks to the complex, historical process of discoveries and creation, of recovery and, finally, also, of recognition of the atemporal value of every work of art, we see that, today, a better knowledge of our thousand-year- old musical heritage can act as an element of inspiration and revitalisation in the creative practice of contemporary music; new composers of our own day are being widely incorporated into this veritable, new musical Renaissance that we are experiencing in the twenty-first century.
The innovative richness of the works by Bernat Vivancos are, I believe, the clearest and most striking proof of the vitality of this new musical Renaissance.
His extraordinary talent and his profound spirituality are placed at the service of a process that is the invention of a new language which, in spite of its complexity and modernity, is capable of transmitting to us pure beauty and emotion. Perhaps this is the great mystery of creativity in any true work of art, in one capable of achieving a perfect balance between technique and emotion, between beauty and spirituality, creating a web of new sounds which, becoming our own, will never cease to move us.
Jordi Savall
