Jordi Savall Interview

Yesterday I listened to a 2008 pre-concert interview with Jordi Savall on an "Overgrown Path" podcast. You can get the link to the (free) interview here. I have transcribed a few of Savall's statements.

Music is the art of the dialog, and I think it’s the best training, the best school for everybody to learn to establish a dialog with other people with other cultures, because when you are doing music you do music with people with [whom] you have a sympathy. Normally then you have to respect them. You have to tune in the same tuning, you have to listen to them to make music. And this is the best school for all the situations in the life.

[For] many hundred years there was thinking the music was in evolution, even Stendhal in the 19th century, says while now Haydn and Mozart are really great composers, and they have advantaged all the other ancient composers. This is a mistake. I say it was the quality of the music that brings the emotion. And you can be so much touched by a simple voice combined by a lute or another instrument so much emotional as you can have with a big vocal ensemble from a hundred singers, and a big orchestra from a hundred musicians. The quality of the emotion, the quality of the art, has nothing to do with the strongness of the sound, with the bigness of the orchestra, and with the complexity of the music.