Savall and Cross-Temporal Auditory Patterning

I have been listening to Jordi Savall while cooped up and getting yelled at periodically in Quebec for the last several weeks. I find myself drawn to the sound and timbre of his musical taste — the selection of the pieces of music by him — as I was upon first coming across the pianist, Glenn Gould.

Gould remarked to Bruno Monsaigneon at one point that the artist who he considered most like him in another time — in the terms of a temperament (“I would do that at that time” sort of thing). He knows how to select music and then play it to its nature in their ‘voice,’ or in how they would frame it.

A beautiful painting can be gorgeous in many manners, and the manner in which the painting is framed can be redefined in a structured way. Savall has the gift Gould had: a sensibility about auditory architecture and art.

Perhaps, it is the nature of being stuck in a repressive environment by consent for an experiment of sorts, and then having the cognitive-emotional release of listening to someone like him play.

Yet, I also find a similar pleasure in listening to Savall speak on music as I do to Gould, in spite of the apparency of accent and language barrier. He speaks beautifully in the poesy of how music feels and why this patternizing of sound makes reactive, instinctive, emoting with the sounds across eras profound.

It is a mystery, for now, but it is in people like Savall who have this talent, as with Gould, and provide a glimpse into something deeply true about the human organism: musical patterns may be more universal than linguistic ones.