Jacques Viret (born 19 October 1943) is a contemporary French

musicologist Musicology (from Greek μουσική ''mousikē'' 'music' and -λογια ''-logia'', 'domain of study') is the scholarly analysis and research-based study of music. Musicology departments traditionally belong to the humanities, although some m ...

of Swiss origin.

Life

Born in Lausanne, Viret is a pianist and

organist An organist is a musician who plays any type of organ. An organist may play solo organ works, play with an ensemble or orchestra, or accompany one or more singers or instrumental soloists. In addition, an organist may accompany congregational h ...

, graduated in classic literature from the

University of Lausanne The University of Lausanne (UNIL; french: links=no, Université de Lausanne) in Lausanne, Switzerland was founded in 1537 as a school of Protestant theology, before being made a university in 1890. The university is the second oldest in Switzer ...

, habilitated for the teaching of music theory (Société suisse de pédagogie musicale), Jacques Viret perfected his studies in musicology at the

Paris-Sorbonne University Paris-Sorbonne University (also known as Paris IV; french: Université Paris-Sorbonne, Paris IV) was a public research university in Paris, France, active from 1971 to 2017. It was the main inheritor of the Faculty of Humanities of the Universit ...

, with

Jacques Chailley Jacques Chailley (24 March 1910 – 21 January 1999) was a French musicologist and composer. Alain Lompech, "Jacques Chailley, musicologue-praticien et infatigable chercheur", ''Consociatio internationalis musicæ sacræ, Musicæ sacræ ministeriu ...

who conducted his Ph.D. thesis on

gregorian chant Gregorian chant is the central tradition of Western plainsong, plainchant, a form of monophony, monophonic, unaccompanied sacred song in Latin (and occasionally Greek (language), Greek) of the Roman Catholic Church. Gregorian chant developed ma ...

(1981). Since 1972, Jacques Viret has been teaching musicology at the

university of Strasbourg The University of Strasbourg (french: Université de Strasbourg, Unistra) is a public research university located in Strasbourg, Alsace, France, with over 52,000 students and 3,300 researchers. The French university traces its history to the ea ...

, as an assistant and then lecturer and professor, emeritus since 2009.

Gregorian chant and medieval music

The research and reflection of Jacques Viret refer essentially to the notion of tradition as defined by

René Guénon René Jean-Marie-Joseph Guénon (15 November 1886 – 7 January 1951), also known as ''Abdalwâhid Yahiâ'' (; ''ʿAbd al-Wāḥid Yaḥiā'') was a French intellectual who remains an influential figure in the domain of metaphysics, having writte ...

in the line of the

perennialism The perennial philosophy ( la, philosophia perennis), also referred to as perennialism and perennial wisdom, is a perspective in philosophy and spirituality that views all of the world's religious traditions as sharing a single, metaphysical trut ...

(or

Gnosis Gnosis is the common Greek noun for knowledge ( γνῶσις, ''gnōsis'', f.). The term was used among various Hellenistic religions and philosophies in the Greco-Roman world. It is best known for its implication within Gnosticism, where it ...

): Not as the preservation of a fixed legacy, more or less ancient, but as the manifestation, diversified according to cultures, epochs and disciplines, of a "sacred, universal and timeless truth", a fruitful source of inspiration and creativity, in perpetual becoming and renewal. For music,

Pythagoras Pythagoras of Samos ( grc, Πυθαγόρας ὁ Σάμιος, Pythagóras ho Sámios, Pythagoras the Samian, or simply ; in Ionian Greek; ) was an ancient Ionian Greek philosopher and the eponymous founder of Pythagoreanism. His politi ...

remains, in this respect, a permanent reference. The series of

harmonics A harmonic is a wave with a frequency that is a positive integer multiple of the '' fundamental frequency'', the frequency of the original periodic signal, such as a sinusoidal wave. The original signal is also called the ''1st harmonic'', ...

thus appears, as an audible expression of numbers and proportions, as an image of the cosmic order. The universal creative principle is symbolized by the

fundamental frequency The fundamental frequency, often referred to simply as the ''fundamental'', is defined as the lowest frequency of a periodic waveform. In music, the fundamental is the musical pitch of a note that is perceived as the lowest partial present. I ...

in the har:monic order, by the tonic of the

modes Mode ( la, modus meaning "manner, tune, measure, due measure, rhythm, melody") may refer to: Arts and entertainment * '' MO''D''E (magazine)'', a defunct U.S. women's fashion magazine * ''Mode'' magazine, a fictional fashion magazine which is ...

in the melodic order (all traditional music is of modal essence). In particular, the tonic ''sol'', "sun" in Latin, the central element of the

theological Theology is the systematic study of the nature of the divine and, more broadly, of religious belief. It is taught as an academic discipline, typically in universities and seminaries. It occupies itself with the unique content of analyzing the s ...

and

esoteric Western esotericism, also known as esotericism, esoterism, and sometimes the Western mystery tradition, is a term scholars use to categorise a wide range of loosely related ideas and movements that developed within Western society. These ideas ...

cryptogram A cryptogram is a type of puzzle that consists of a short piece of encrypted text. Generally the cipher used to encrypt the text is simple enough that the cryptogram can be solved by hand. Substitution ciphers where each letter is replaced by ...

that Jacques Viret discovered in 1978 in the notes of the

range Range may refer to: Geography * Range (geographic), a chain of hills or mountains; a somewhat linear, complex mountainous or hilly area (cordillera, sierra) ** Mountain range, a group of mountains bordered by lowlands * Range, a term used to i ...

(''ut'', ''ré'', ''mi'', taken from the

hymn A hymn is a type of song, and partially synonymous with devotional song, specifically written for the purpose of adoration or prayer, and typically addressed to a deity or deities, or to a prominent figure or personification. The word ''hy ...

to Saint

John the Baptist John the Baptist or , , or , ;Wetterau, Bruce. ''World history''. New York: Henry Holt and Company. 1994. syc, ܝܘܿܚܲܢܵܢ ܡܲܥܡܕ݂ܵܢܵܐ, Yoḥanān Maʿmḏānā; he, יוחנן המטביל, Yohanān HaMatbil; la, Ioannes Bapti ...

''Ut queant laxis'') and of which Jacques Chailley completed the explanation. The official

liturgical Liturgy is the customary public ritual of worship performed by a religious group. ''Liturgy'' can also be used to refer specifically to public worship by Christians. As a religious phenomenon, liturgy represents a communal response to and partic ...

chant of the Roman Catholic Church, the Gregorian chant is especially the expression par excellence of tradition for the music of the West. Jacques Viret studies it in this light. He highlights, upstream, the rooting of this corpus in the other musical traditions of the world, especially oriental (and, probably, the ancient celtic music; Downstream, its importance as a breeding ground for European music, both scholarly and - in part -

folkloric Folklore is shared by a particular group of people; it encompasses the traditions common to that culture, subculture or group. This includes oral traditions such as tales, legends, proverbs and jokes. They include material culture, ranging fro ...

. This truly traditional approach illuminates Latin liturgical chant in its true light and allows the rediscovering, as far as possible, of its authentic interpretation (cf

rhythm Rhythm (from Greek , ''rhythmos'', "any regular recurring motion, symmetry") generally means a " movement marked by the regulated succession of strong and weak elements, or of opposite or different conditions". This general meaning of regular re ...

) before the year 1000, which is very different from the style instituted in the Nineteenth by the Benedictines of the Abbaye Saint-Pierre de Solesmes. Nevertheless, it benefits from the careful study of

neumes A neume (; sometimes spelled neum) is the basic element of Western and Eastern systems of musical notation prior to the invention of five-line staff notation. The earliest neumes were inflective marks that indicated the general shape but not nec ...

by Dom and his pupils ("Gregorian semiotics", musical

palaeography Palaeography ( UK) or paleography ( US; ultimately from grc-gre, , ''palaiós'', "old", and , ''gráphein'', "to write") is the study of historic writing systems and the deciphering and dating of historical manuscripts, including the analysi ...

). It is a comparativism tributary to ethnomusicology, insofar as it relates to each other the writings of the Middle Ages (noted manuscripts, treaties) and the traditions currently alive. This approach is also illustrated by the work of Hungarian musicologist Benjámin Rajeczky, as well as by the interpretations of

Marcel Pérès Marcel Pérès (born 15 July 1956, Oran, Algeria) is a French musicologist, composer, choral director and singer, and the founder of the early music group Ensemble Organum. He is an authority on Gregorian and pre-Gregorian chant. Pérès w ...

. According to the same spirit, the series ''Diaphonia'', created by Jacques Viret in 2000 with the "À Cœur Joie" publishing house in Lyon, provides amateur choristers with a repertoire of medieval songs transcribed in modern musical notation so as to restore all the finenesses of the original notations and add data which are not included therein and come from other sources.

An integral science of music

The work of Jacques Viret is based on a rigorous investigation from sources, as required by scientific musicology. However, they broaden the

historicist Historicism is an approach to explaining the existence of phenomena, especially social and cultural practices (including ideas and beliefs), by studying their history, that is, by studying the process by which they came about. The term is widely u ...

positivism and

music analysis Musical analysis is the study of musical structure in either compositions or performances. According to music theorist Ian Bent, music analysis "is the means of answering directly the question 'How does it work?'". The method employed to answe ...

, where it is generally confined to two correlated movements: On the one hand, the musical philology of Jacques Chailley, which elucidates the general laws of musical languages and their perception; On the other hand, the , which reconciles

modernity Modernity, a topic in the humanities and social sciences, is both a historical period (the modern era) and the ensemble of particular socio-cultural norms, attitudes and practices that arose in the wake of the Renaissancein the "Age of Reas ...

and tradition, science and spirituality. Jacques Viret is today one of the very rare musicologists claiming the New Paradigm; In this capacity, he joined the team by . His perspective, therefore, is defined as totalizing and

holistic Holism () is the idea that various systems (e.g. physical, biological, social) should be viewed as wholes, not merely as a collection of parts. The term "holism" was coined by Jan Smuts in his 1926 book '' Holism and Evolution''."holism, n." OED On ...

: the musical fact is considered not only from the objective and partial angle of ordinary musicology, but from that of the receptive or active subject (his consciousness), beyond the cleavage between the various types of music. Explanation and commentary then restore its legitimate primacy to sound in the face of writing, and closely link the musical meaning to the human being in its threefold constitution of body, soul, spirit. They restore, in a new form, the "musical science" of Pythagorean obedience cultivated in Ancient times and in the Middle Ages: highly rational on one side, in its mathematical slope; Irrationality of the other, in its sensitive, intuitive, even magical (

ethos Ethos ( or ) is a Greek word meaning "character" that is used to describe the guiding beliefs or ideals that characterize a community, nation, or ideology; and the balance between caution, and passion. The Greeks also used this word to refer to ...

theory, derived from the primitive

incantation An incantation, a spell, a charm, an enchantment or a bewitchery, is a magical formula intended to trigger a magical effect on a person or objects. The formula can be spoken, sung or chanted. An incantation can also be performed during ceremo ...

). In the eyes of the thinkers of German

Romantism Romanticism (also known as the Romantic movement or Romantic era) was an artistic, literary, musical, and intellectual movement that originated in Europe towards the end of the 18th century, and in most areas was at its peak in the approximate ...

also - among others

Schopenhauer Arthur Schopenhauer ( , ; 22 February 1788 – 21 September 1860) was a German philosopher. He is best known for his 1818 work '' The World as Will and Representation'' (expanded in 1844), which characterizes the phenomenal world as the pr ...

, admired by Richard Wagner –, music is much better than an art of pleasure: language of the soul, interiority, revelation of the unspeakable, it opens an access to the "Soul of the world" (

empathy Empathy is the capacity to understand or feel what another person is experiencing from within their frame of reference, that is, the capacity to place oneself in another's position. Definitions of empathy encompass a broad range of social, co ...

, ''Einfühlung'' according to Herder, ''correspondances'' according to Baudelaire). The

anthropological Anthropology is the scientific study of humanity, concerned with human behavior, human biology, cultures, societies, and linguistics, in both the present and past, including past human species. Social anthropology studies patterns of behav ...

humanist musicology, which is promoted by Jacques Viret, integrates the contributions of

Carl Gustav Jung Carl Gustav Jung ( ; ; 26 July 1875 – 6 June 1961) was a Swiss psychiatrist and psychoanalyst who founded analytical psychology. Jung's work has been influential in the fields of psychiatry, anthropology, archaeology, literature, philo ...

's psychology,

Gestalt psychology Gestalt-psychology, gestaltism, or configurationism is a school of psychology that emerged in the early twentieth century in Austria and Germany as a theory of perception that was a rejection of basic principles of Wilhelm Wundt's and Edward ...

analytical psychology Analytical psychology ( de , Analytische Psychologie, sometimes translated as analytic psychology and referred to as Jungian analysis) is a term coined by Carl Jung, a Swiss psychiatrist, to describe research into his new "empirical science ...

transpersonal psychology Transpersonal psychology, or spiritual psychology, is a sub-field or school of psychology that integrates the spiritual and transcendent aspects of the human experience with the framework of modern psychology. The '' transpersonal'' is defined ...

, neuropsychology). It ramifies towards

aesthetics Aesthetics, or esthetics, is a branch of philosophy that deals with the nature of beauty and taste, as well as the philosophy of art (its own area of philosophy that comes out of aesthetics). It examines aesthetic values, often expressed t ...

, acoustics,

hermeneutics Hermeneutics () is the theory and methodology of interpretation, especially the interpretation of biblical texts, wisdom literature, and philosophical texts. Hermeneutics is more than interpretative principles or methods used when immediate ...

symbolism Symbolism or symbolist may refer to: Arts * Symbolism (arts), a 19th-century movement rejecting Realism ** Symbolist movement in Romania, symbolist literature and visual arts in Romania during the late 19th and early 20th centuries ** Russian sym ...

metaphysics Metaphysics is the branch of philosophy that studies the fundamental nature of reality, the first principles of being, identity and change, space and time, causality, necessity, and possibility. It includes questions about the nature of conscio ...

sociology Sociology is a social science that focuses on society, human social behavior, patterns of social relationships, social interaction, and aspects of culture associated with everyday life. It uses various methods of empirical investigation an ...

music therapy Music therapy, an allied health profession, "is the clinical and evidence-based use of music interventions to accomplish individualized goals within a therapeutic relationship by a credentialed professional who has completed an approved music t ...

pedagogy Pedagogy (), most commonly understood as the approach to teaching, is the theory and practice of learning, and how this process influences, and is influenced by, the social, political and psychological development of learners. Pedagogy, taken ...

, psycho - pedagogy, and rhetoric, and includes research on the interpretation (''Aufführungspraxis'') allowing to execute the old repertoires according to their authenticity. It revalues the

orality Orality is thought and verbal expression in societies where the technologies of literacy (especially writing and print) are unfamiliar to most of the population. The study of orality is closely allied to the study of oral tradition. The term "oral ...

as a living vehicle of traditional practices and knowledge, bearing precious values: vital, human, spiritual (cf.

Marcel Jousse Marcel Jousse (28 July 1886 – 14 August 1961) was a French Jesuit and anthropologist. References 1886 births 1961 deaths Knights of the Legion of Honour French anthropologists 19th-century French Jesuits 20th-century French Jesuits ...

). This broad, open, spiritualist conception of musical science confers their originality to the works that Jacques Viret has published since 2004 at , about gregorian chant, Medieval music, Richard Wagner, musicothérapy, Baroque music, and

opera Opera is a form of theatre in which music is a fundamental component and dramatic roles are taken by singers. Such a "work" (the literal translation of the Italian word "opera") is typically a collaboration between a composer and a libr ...

. Among the transverse problems that they expose, one will particularly mention that of singing in relation (vocal, rhythmic, emotional) with the speech, as the most direct expression of the feeling or musical instinct, and this, from the early childhood (spontaneous childish chantings where emerge elementary musical materials, melodic and rhythmic

archetype The concept of an archetype (; ) appears in areas relating to behavior, historical psychology, and literary analysis. An archetype can be any of the following: # a statement, pattern of behavior, prototype, "first" form, or a main model that ...

s).

Bibliography

*1981: ''Aloÿs Fornerod, ou le musicien et le pays'', Lausanne, Cahiers de la Renaissance Vaudoise *1986: ''Le Chant grégorien, musique de la parole sacrée'', Lausanne, *1987: ''La Modalité grégorienne, un langage pour quel message ?'', Lyon, , augmented reissue in 1996. *1988: ''Le Symbolisme de la gamme – L'hymne UT QUEANT LAXIS et ses quatre cryptogrammes'' (in collaboration with Jacques Chailley), Paris, in ''

La Revue Musicale ''La Revue musicale'' was a music magazine founded by Henry Prunières in 1920. ''La Revue musicale'' of Prunières was undoubtedly the first music publishing magazine giving as much attention to the quality of editing, iconography, and illustrat ...

'' *1990–1992. ''La musique d'orgue du XVIe et son interprétation'', five articles, ''L'Orgue francophone'' *1992: ''Regards sur la musique vocale de la Renaissance italienne'', Lyon, À Cœur Joie *1993–1994: ''Aux sources de l’expression musicale : la créativité mélodique enfantine'', three articles, ''L’Éducation musicale'' *2000: ''Les Premières Polyphonies, 800–1100'', Lyon, À Cœur Joie, (''Diaphonia'' 1) *2001: ''Le Chant grégorien et la tradition grégorienne'', Lausanne, L'Âge d'Homme *2001: ''Approches herméneutiques de la musique'' (dir. J. Viret), *2001: ''L’École de Notre-Dame et ses conduits polyphoniques'', Lyon, à Cœur Joie, (''Diaphonia'' 2). *2004: ''B.A.-BA du chant grégorien'', éditions Pardès *2005: ''B.A.-BA de la musique médiévale'', éditions Pardès *2005: ''Le « Libre Vermell » de Montserrat'', Lyon, À Cœur Joie, (''Diaphonia'' 3). *2005: ''Métamorphoses de l’harmonie : la musique occidentale et la Tradition'', in ''Les Pouvoirs de la musique, à l’écoute du sacré'', dossier de la revue ''Connaissance des Religions'', Paris, *2006: ''Qui suis-je ? Wagner'', éditions Pardès, 2006. *2006: ''De la Musique et des Vaudois, itinéraire photographique 1905-2005'', Lausanne, Bibliothèque Cantonale et Universitaire *2007: ''B.A.-BA de la musicothérapie'', éditions Pardès *2008: ''B.A.-BA de la musique baroque'', éditions Pardès *2009: ''B.A.-BA de l'opéra'', éditions Pardès *2012: ''Le chant grégorien'',''Le chant grégorien''
/ref>, 206 p. (CD audio inserted: 75 min). *2012: ''Philologie musicale et modes grégoriens : de la théorie à l’instinct'' in ''Musurgia'', vol. XIX/1-3 (hommage to Jacques Chailley), () *2017: ''Les deux chemins, Dialogue sur la musique'', (in collaboration with Aurelio Porfiri), Hong Kong, Chorabooks

Life

Gregorian chant and medieval music

An integral science of music

Bibliography

References

External links