This weekend, with the reopening of Notre Dame Cathedral, we have an invitation to travel to the Europe of the Gothic stonemasons. José Enrique Ruiz-Domènec already told ABC, when he wanted to explain the meaning of that temple, that the 12th century society that built it was subject to a creative earthquake. It was “an open, critical, promising Europe that bursts in then,” he said. We are still amazed by the elevation of the temples so many meters above the ground, how they lightened the walls, which allowed the opening of enormous windows through which the light painted the stained glass temple. And in music, Notre Dame is, quite simply, the place where the light of polyphony is born, with Perotinus and Leoninus (Perotin and Lèonin in the vernacular), who learned to fill the church with stained glass windows that rose with its own architecture of some voices over others. All of this will be evoked these days in a politically convulsed and somewhat distressed Paris. Nothing better to travel to the 12th century than the book ‘Dawn or the Unveiled Face of the Troubadours’, in which Clara Janés has brought together almost thirty female voices from medieval poetry, little or nothing known. It is a wonderful book. Almost no one remembers more than the Countess of Day. The volume of Ediciones del Oriente y el Mediterráneo is the journey through an irreplaceable sensitivity to understand that Europe. Love songs in Provençal, that evocative language (‘langue d’oc’) of the south of France, which would be defeated by the northern part and its ‘lange d’uil’ from which French comes.
#Jesús #García #Calero #journey #trobairitz
