Chant

"Bring forward a chant, a melody of the heart!"

"My Nanna, your chant is sweet; it is the chant of my heart."

"Gregorian chant, but with it all the rhythm of medieval music, reflects a cyclical (and therefore liturgical) conception of time, which undulates and oscillates without rigid formal parameters of duration because it always returns to itself. Implicit in its thematic structure is the certainty of the answer to any question. Every ritual, in fact, like every prayer, never asks real questions, never reaches doubt, because the interlocutor to whom it is addressed is God. Gregorian chant, therefore, can afford to “range” over indefinite durations because it is supported by the “certainty” of the divine response. Time is given."

"Bach's genius lies in having found a logical system necessary to support the unnecessarily repetitive structure of cyclical time, which is no longer “given” as obvious and correct. Repetition becomes a continuous succession of questions and answers, a tremendous effort of human intelligence to fill the form of absolute time with self-sufficient content, that is, content implied in its own system, without subordinating reason to the certainty of a time already “given”. Bach's counterpoint does not need God to exist."

"With the Enlightenment, man now asks questions that have no certain answer: research becomes the very condition of being human. This is the modern form of scientific logic: the time of science, therefore, coincides with what we might call the “interrogative structure” of music; with a musical time that, from Debussy to Schönberg to Berg to Bussotti, moves further and further away from the concept of [[w:duration|duration, of beginning and end, and seeks “continuity” in “space”, moving from the fading of sound to the fading of tonality. In fact, in the same year that Einstein published his “Memoir on Relativity” – 1905 – Schönberg's symphonic poem Pelleas und Melisande was performed for the first time and greeted with boos, marking a milestone in the search for “spatial” music."