2009 / Ethica

various locations at home and abroad

The Ghent four-voiced Credo from MS 14 as the basis for a programme with singers and wind instruments, that overall constitutes an investigation of our beliefs.

Ethica is a production which celebrates the meeting between Gregorian chant and polyphony, between the source material and the performer, between the singer and his body, between song and movement, between the fifteenth century and the twenty-first century… A performance of Gregorian chant by twenty-first century singers undoubtedly says more about the singers and our own time than about the fifteenth century. Moreover the modern singer is no longer professionally linked to the church and is thus frequently secularised, so that Gregorian chant can be treated by him principally as something spiritual, rather than religious or liturgical. The modern singer has a different approach, sings from a different ethic (and aesthetic). For him, biblical texts are not just (or are no longer?) ‘sacred’ texts. The meeting referred to is also a meeting between Gregorian chant and polyphony – a marriage that in the fifteenth century was celebrated daily.