THE CELTIC VIOL
Airs and dances

Reference: AVSA9865

• Jordi Savall
• Andrew Laurence-King

Music expresses and prolongs what words cannot say, and time acts as a filter, distilling these orally transmitted melodies and paring them down to the truly essential. And that is how all these pieces, in the majority of cases by anonymous authors, thanks to their vitality, beauty, emotion and charm, have become an indispensable part of the celebration of the most significant moments in the different stages of our daily life. Songs to dispel sadness or celebrate good news, dances to express moments of happiness and joy, laments to overcome the loss of a loved one or the memory of an unhappy event… All these wonderful yet fragile works represent the sensitive and most intimately personal contribution of often marginalized or persecuted cultures to the history of musical creation. They remain and will continue to remain in our hearts as the true voices and the essential spirit of a civilisation which has succeeded in staying alive, thanks to music – the memory and soul of its historical identity.

The man that hath no music in himself,
Nor is not moved with concord of sweet sounds,
Is fit for treasons, stratagems, and spoils;
The motions of his spirit are dull as the night,
And the affections dark as Erebus
Let no such man be trusted. Mark the music.

William Shakespeare The Merchant of Venice, Act V, Scene 1

If the face is the mirror of the soul, a people’s music is the reflection of the spirit of its identity, individual in origin but taking shape over time as the collective image of a cultural space which is unique and specific to that people. All music passed on and preserved by the oral tradition is the result of a felicitous survival following a long process of selection and synthesis. Unlike some Oriental cultures which have evolved chiefly within an oral tradition, in the West only those types of music commonly known as traditional, popular or folk music have been preserved thanks to unwritten means of transmission.

The invention of musical notation, a phenomenon very often linked to literary social circles, has allowed some cultures, such as those of China, Korea, Japan and Western Europe, to develop from ancient times many systems of notation which have been used in quite different situations. In other cultures, however, such as those of the Middle East (except Turkey) and South and South-West Asia, it is only in the last hundred years or so that such systems have evolved to any significant extent. In the “serious” music of Western Europe, musical communication based on the unwritten form survived until the end of the 17th century, but only in musical practices associated with improvisation and accompaniment on the bass continuo, and until somewhat later in music-making circles linked to the spiritual and temporal powers of the Church and the Court. It survived beyond the 17th century in England and especially during the 19th century in Germany, mainly in bourgeois circles. The phenomenon of written music has allowed a formidable development of musical forms and instruments, but at the same time it has contributed to the neglect and relegation to a second-class category of all those forms of living music which have traditionally accompanied the daily lives of the vast majority: in other words, popular music.

+ information in the CD booklet

JORDI SAVALL

Bellaterra, 20th February, 2009
Translated by Jacqueline Minett