Codex

It has been a long time since improvised music distanced itself from the adolescent posture of its first revolutionary years which, under the pretext of breaking with the prerequisite and transcendence of a text to be “interpreted” in the instant of a performance that is by nature always second and deferred, allowed it to claim, in the instantaneity in which it was based, a direct relationship to the creative impulse, freed in some way from any reference to the past, which is necessarily alienating. Without renouncing the authentically subversive dimension of a gesture that is both political and poetic, radically deconstructing dominant cultural forms and norms, what all great improvisers have, on the contrary, constantly experimented with and highlighted in their practice is the extent to which their gestures, however spontaneous in their expression, were haunted, nourished, and populated by a multitude of stories and memories, pertaining as much to the intimate as to the collective unconscious, which were not to be denied or repressed as so many vestiges of an "old order" to be erased, but rather to be welcomed, recognized, even liberated—bringing (re)emerged in the flow of discourse all this intertwining of affects and artifacts that ground us, only to set them in motion again within the field and perspective of a revisited relationship with oneself and with the other.

Figures of Harmony: Songs of Codex Chantilly c. 1390 - Ferrara Ensemble, Crawford Young (2015) {4CD Outhere-Arcana A382}
EAC rip (secure mode) | FLAC (tracks)+CUE+LOG -> 1.22 Gb | MP3 @320 -> 663 Mb
Full Artwork @ 300 dpi (png) -> 258 Mb | 5% recovery rar
© 2015 Outhere Music / Arcana | A382
Classical / Medieval / Early Music / Vocal Music / Chamber Music / Instrumental

Presented in a stylish 4-CD box set, here is a comprehensive recording of one of the most enigmatic manuscripts in the history of European music, preserved in the museum at the Château de Chantilly, France. ‘Anything that can be sung, can be written in music notation,’ claimed an anonymous treatise on notation in the late fourteenth century. The harmonies thus ‘captured’ on parchment represent an apex in Western music, associated with the wealthiest courts in Christendom, called ‘decadent’ by some.