MANIFESTO

Music is not only a source of pleasure or recreation as it has commonly been and is still perceived, but also a privileged means to seriously understand the World.

Music is Not only Art, but Thought, and Not only abstract but distinct Thought. An intense binding of what is real and pragmatic.

Music is not a form of communication between men, music does not communicate: it manifests; it does not employ subjective filters to express the object as the verbal system, Music makes the highest level of human thought palpable in a complete and unquestionable manner.

Music cannot and must not be submitted to speculations of an economic, political and social tout court nature that alters its Gnoseological Potential and belittles it to fashionable merchandise, to a consumer product.

Society must give Music and musicians the acknowledgments that, but for very few exceptions, they have been denied throughout the centuries, relegating Music to a mere matter of entertainment. The Musician, of course in the most accomplished form, is not a circus performer, but a serious Thinker, and is to be treated as such, placing this function on the same level as other professional activities commonly considered to be at the top levels of a state community.

Musical thought cannot and must not be considered inferior to verbal or scientific thought, therefore educating a musical mind at a developing age cannot be separated, through the overestimation of ghetto-schools or academies of music, from the other humanistic or scientific educational realities.

Contemporary Music is not to be understood as a solipsist elite dedicated to avant-garde experimentation that rises against presumed rearguard reshuffling; likewise, to consider “Atonality” an overrun of “tonality” is simply a mistake which is no longer of any use to any musician. The same dichotomy, Atonal/Tonal Music, is an inauspicious and totally arbitrary invention, a formula with an unfortunate beginning and a suicidal end.

Although stratification of the musical phenomenon has been taking place in recent times, musical aesthetics must not be broken down into cultured or extra-cultured genres — classical, contemporary, folk, jazz, rock and other under genres, denote sociological-historical definitions, not aesthetic definitions. The only two genres of music that must authentically interest the musical triad (composer, performer, and listener) are those relative to the production of good music that elevates the human condition, and to the avoidance of bad music, be it degraded by the human condition.

Verbal or scientific-mathematical thought can only sustain, but can never replace, musical thought. Every attempt at a critical, philosophical, sociological, or musicological survey of verbal extraction, or every attempt at a scientific-mathematical formulation in the desire to explore the essence of music is, and always will be, ephemeral and illusory.

All musicians live in the Age of Bach.