On YouTube I watched again videos from an interesting programme by TV2000, an Italy-based TV broadcaster, called “Ai confini del sacro” (At the borders of the sacred), centred on investigating apparitions, seers, and supernatural phenomena that very often were only the result of mind control, deception, and fraud. The programme sought to separate phoney experiences from real ones, i.e., the apparitions and phenomena that the Church found legitimate. What struck me in these short episodes was the tide of people who sought consolation in them; millions and millions of people in Italy alone. This suggests that the “sacred” is something really needed, but also sometimes, as suggested above, that is used in a distorted way.
Mystics have a privileged relationship with the sacred. The Greek word mystikos seems to derive from myein which means “to shut, to be silent”. But silence, the search for silence, is not in contradiction with music, which in its supreme form is precisely a search for a higher silence. Certainly, this was what Tomás Luis de Victoria (1548-1611), the third great Renaissance musician with Palestrina and Orlande de Lassus, was looking for. He left his native Spain as a teenager, sent to Rome to train for the priesthood. According to some of his most admiring pupils, he studied under Palestrina in the same city. Born near Avila, it seems that in his youth he met with the great Teresa, a Carmelite reformer. He certainly exuded this Spanish mysticism, this intense fervour that comes through in his music. He could do this in Rome, which knew how to synthesise the international liveliness from the north with the intense mysticism of the Iberian Peninsula. This synthesis was achieved in the churches of Rome, thanks to the work of extraordinary masters like the ones that will follow.
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