Chant
A chant (from French chanter, from Latin cantare, "to sing") is the iterative speaking or singing of words or sounds, often primarily on one or two main pitches called reciting tones.
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Quotes
[edit]- My Nanna, your chant is sweet; it is the chant of my heart.
- Ningal, in a A suscript (balbale) to Nanna (Nanna B), late 3rd millennium BCE, at The Electronic Text Corpus of Sumerian Literature.
- 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.
- Ida Magli, La sessualita maschile, Mondadori, Milano 1989. ISBN 88-04-31023-5, p. 33.
- 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.
- Ida Magli, La sessualita maschile, Mondadori, Milano 1989. ISBN 88-04-31023-5, p. 44.
- 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 [[w:Sylvano Bussotti|Bussotti, moves further and further away from the concept of 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.
- Ida Magli, La sessualita maschile, Mondadori, Milano 1989. ISBN 88-04-31023-5, p. 44.
