Considerations about the Two Beginnings of the European Musical Culture. the Idea of “Europeanity” Between Antiquity and the Middle Ages
Considerations about the Two Beginnings of the European Musical Culture. the Idea of “Europeanity” Between Antiquity and the Middle Ages

Summary/Abstract: In total opposition with the image of a linear and progressive evolution of European music, which has long acquired referential status in the context of (primary, secondary and higher) musical education, the central idea of our study reveals at least two of its beginnings – the classical Greek antiquity and the early Middle Ages (barbarian and Christian). The first argument in favour of the latter is the process of dialectical interaction of the signs of the two cultures, as well as their mutual strengthening – (a) the numerical-cosmical, mystical “genome” of Pythagoras and (b) the discursive-conceptual, rational-philosophical “genome” of Plato. These two “genomes”, as distinct, “uniform” and “stationary” signs of the ancient culture (Guizot), are potentiated by another pair of “genomes”, this time belonging to the Middle Ages, namely (a) a sum of characteristics of the nomadic mentality and imaginary (barbarian – Crocker, Guizot) – dynamism, individualism, freedom and independence, and (b) the centripetal and all-encompassing energy of the Christian religion, with its central idea of tolerance. The second argument aims at redefining the image of progress, because each stylistic period after the Middle Ages – from the Renaissance up to Modernism, is nothing but an increasingly weaker and “cooled” form (Guénon and Martynov) of the primal (barbarian) evolutionary energy. This progress was in reality a progress of dissipation, stemming from the clash between the two ancient “genomes” – the Pythagorean ontologism and the Platonic hermeneutics, both re-signified in terms of a continental-Christian, imperial culture, until the Renaissance, when preference was shifted to the weaker, Platonic option, with predictable consequences for the entire subsequent evolution not only of musical culture, but of European thinking in general. Progress in musical thinking and practices stemmed from the preference for an ever stronger discretionary individualism and conceptual complexity, to compensate for the (also progressive) dissipation of the spiritual “temperature”. Musical postmodernism, viewed as a time of chaos, dissemination, fragmentation, deviation, loss and denial of all the strong cultural truths, is but a logical consequence of this spiral evolution, though not in the sense of the Hegelian spiral, but in that of the human DNA, with the two strands – ancient and barbarian, each with two constituents, advancing towards progressive dispersion.

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