In the Essence of Styles

IN THE PROLOGUE TO KAFKA'S AMERIKA, VOGELMAN, AFTER HIS APPROPRIATE recollection of Dostoyevsky, cites J. S. Bach. The strangeness of this quote moves us. Eisenstein also moves us when he talks about the whiteness of Moby Dick. Taking these relationships as our point of departure, we name two essences: exactitude and infinity, which define for us the vulnerability of man in this world. Upon this foundation, upon the exact notion of the infinity of his genesis, we will base the trajectory of music in its operational forms.

Often the questions about the beautiful in aesthetics—this German creation with its protestant disquisitions on the absolute—numb us to the extent that we contemplate forms, the exactitude of Creation as a catholic mystery. Thus, medieval times establish the final situation of music in European art. Man is confronted with his absolute subordination to the cathedral, or rather, to the narration in stone of his mystery, to the narration that he attends absorbed and illuminated. Music affords him, besides, participation in what is most secret, or in what is most filled with grace, as if the spirit of God inhabited the Gregorian chant. The modes are already not affective or heroic but participatory, since it is not about illustration but illumination. And man, who in the ancient tragedy showed himself to be plain and passive in the face of death, now finds himself, precisely, face to face with death, with the moment when he can act to have access to his salvation. And it is starting from this moment when music will initiate its upward process in the Christian European world. This act seems fortunate enough that I can speculate upon it by comparing paintings and points of view. I find in medieval times two similar creations or revelations: the proof of God on Earth and, in the mendicant orders, participation as creatures of the animals. San Antonio speaking with the fish is the proof of the absolute unification of the universe with its Creator, and thus we will soon see the animals turning up in poetic art and monsters showing their smiles and their horror on Gothic cathedrals, and later hovering over the Saint in the old countryside of Grünewald.

Music reaches its most concrete definition in its birth alongside medieval faith with the grandeur of the multitude of instruments that accompany David in his entrance in Jerusalem or the softness of those voices that proclaimed "hosanna" in the other entrance, when the donkey, the son of the ass, reached its place as a blessed animal, stepping across the tunics and boughs of those strange and jubilant people who contemplated the gentle look that the beast of burden brought so close to home for men.

The same multitude that sings, the jubilant and heartrending voices in the worship service, and what is mystical about the instruments in the town, they all represent the approximation of medieval music to the Old Testament. The art of monody shows us the infinite in its most exact inclination at the same time that it responds to the same idea of the unity of the Gothic. In the Gregorian this was produced by a horizontality which is sometimes broken, like in the Ambrosian beginning, by the fragmentation of the sound across two or three notes for one syllable. Later, in the Gregorian reform, these notes are extended even further, perhaps under the influence of Byzantine sumptuousness, which itself went on to dazzle northern imaginations in order to achieve the yoking of styles in the Gothic. The unity which is Gothic manifests the ubiquity of faith, the belief in sanctity hoped-for like the sign of the times, like a mystic announcement from the reproduction of the acts of the passion which in the end are shown...