Докса (Jun 2018)
SACRAL AND MUSICAL: FROM MYSTERY TO OPERA
Abstract
Nonlinear diffuse relations of sacred and musical components in the history of European artistic culture are discovered. Attention is focused on the interrelation between theoretical philosophical discourse and artistic practices in different socio-cultural epochs: antiquity, the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. The birth of musical theater in antiquity was directly connected with the realization of cult practices. The consequence of these was the ambivalence of ancient reflections on the nature of the relationship between the sacred and the theatrical in culture. On the one hand, the ultimate basis from which the discourse of the meaning and role of the Musical Arts are begun and maintained as the return to the sacral. On the other hand, references to the sacred in the situation of the unfolding of discourse are turned into some background for reflection on the political (in its ancient sense) such as paideia or civic education, the achievement of a virtuous state, justice. In the medieval Christian culture, with its paradigm of theocentrism, the sacred foundation of musical art appears to be obvious, however, the interrelation between the sacred and the musical is filled with internal collisions and the complex contradictory nature of the relationship. The authors distinguish three semantic changes in the relationship between the sacred and the musical in the Middle Ages – music as a participant in the internal conflict between the secular and the sacred (St. Augustine, St. Pope Gregory the Great), the restoration of the ancient understanding of the correspondence between cosmic harmony and the harmony of human body and soul (Guido d’Arezzo) and the reaction to music as a path that leading to personal meeting with the sacred (Hildegard von Bingen, Perotin the Great). Anthropocentrism of the Renaissance replaced the emphasis on music and the sacred. If in the ancient and medieval discourse there was drawn an immediate connection between the musical and the divine, then in new humanistic culture the relations between them are determined by the presence of new principle component – a human being is not only intelligent but above all sensible and able to appreciate harmony and beauty and enjoy them. The interpenetration of the sacred and musical is interpreted as the basic foundation of the origin of the opera.
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