Time Regained: A Warburg Atlas for Early Music - Schmelzer, Björn; Garcia, Margarida (MER paper Kunsthalle Ghent, 2018)
This publication is a kind of workbook or manual. It is not a music history, nor is it a technical, musicological book. It is rather a book about materials - musical materials and their relation to other artistic materials. It is not a book for professionals or specialists but for those who like to explore the capacities and possibilities of artistic materials. However it never talks about them in a technical way. This book is instead about love and desire for old repertoires, and especially for polyphony, attempting to retrace its shape: the initial desire that makes one want to perform this music. It consists of two parts: one mostly text, but with much to look at; the other mainly visual, but with plenty to read and consider. A very concrete dialectic is possible here: both parts act and react to one another; the plates can be taken out, acting as separate entities, or can be put into relation with one another. We hope to offer the book's user what Aby Warburg called a Denkraum (thinking space). This is not a history of Early Music, but a fabulation of it, in the same way as Early Music is a fabulation of music history. And as a fabulation it draws on various bits and pieces to slowly try and formulate something that could become like a poetics of graindelavoix, the group with whom we have explored these old repertoires for almost twenty years. But it is a poetics in the making, like the plates of our atlas, akin to a world in the making.
Keywords: performance practice