Polyphony

What Dominique Pagani says

Dominique Pagani defines polyphony as the interweaving of several autonomous voices, each beautiful in itself, from which a higher beauty arises. He sees it as the opposite of accompanied melody1. He places it historically as a liberation from monody, a single voice even when many chests sing it. At the Notre-Dame school and at Saint-Denis, the voices begin to diverge like the ogives of Gothic cathedrals, which he calls a novum organum23. He traces monody back to Eastern psalmody, handed down through the Byzantine style, and notes that Corsican polyphonies preserve its most archaic features4. In Bach, polyphony compensates for a constant metre and requires following several voices at once5. He does not treat it as a Western privilege: in his view, the polyphonies of the Solomon Islands and of the Pygmies are as complex to analyse as a Bach fugue or The Art of Fugue67.

1. 1DE BACH AUX PYGMÉES • Pagani Parle Musique22 Jun 2022 · 7:30
2. 2Schumann2 May 2019 · 4:10
3. 3De la voix perdue à la voie de la modernité • De la musique modale à la musique tonale • D Pagani23 May 2021 · 13:20
4. 4Schumann2 May 2019 · 14:35
5. 5La Musique de l'Histoire26 Apr 2015 · 32:38
6. 6La Musique de l'Histoire26 Apr 2015 · 1:10:22
7. 7DE BACH AUX PYGMÉES • Pagani Parle Musique22 Jun 2022 · 9:56

Summary produced automatically from 8 of the passages below, to be reviewed; the numbers link to the moment in the session.