Sense.

Many times they tell me, playing ancient music. And my answer is always there's no ancient music. Somebody will have the idea to say the Shakespeare is ancient, ancient theater. Nobody will think the, the  plays from [inaudible] this old theater. This is contemporary theater always. And with the music I think the same, we have old manuscripts, ancient manuscripts, ancient printings but when you play the music, when you sing the music, the music becomes your contemporary. Because the music it's only finished, it's only well not finished, it's never finished. The musicians part is beautiful. But music becomes a new life every time the singer and musician plays. And this, it's long and we are singing and playing and when we stop, music stop. And what remains, what remains after this, the memory, memory.

Ah, ah Voltaire says with "sans les sens y pas de memoire". The sense, all the things that touch us, it makes our memory. We don't, we remember only the things that touching us. A nice pasta, a nice beautiful breeze and the sun and the afternoon. A beautiful person. We remember from the, the nice times, also the very bad things. But human beings has tendency to forgot the bad things and to remember the best things. And this is the quality of the music. For this is so important to play the music with the old emotion and all the beauty because only like this we will remember this moment forever, you know.

And I think this is a quality that's possible because with music we cannot lie. As you know, many people are lying today.  And it's very easy to lie with the words but with the music no, it's not possible. Even the person who has no idea about music, will feel if a singer is singing with emotion or not. It's not necessary to start in conservatory to know about musicology. Everybody and hear every singer sing with emotion or not. If a musician is playing with sensitive, sensibility and pleasure. And this, I think, is the most important thing.

Jordi Savall

Jordi Savall speaks with Anne McLean about his special program with Hespèrion XXI, La Capella Reial de Catalunya and Le Concert des Nations. Savall also tries out a bass viol attributed to Pieter Rombouts from 1708--part of the Library's Wilkins Early Stringed Instruments Collection.