Manifesto

“It is absolutely unmistakable that a musical work was created by a real person who did not create a system isolated from the real world, non-human and human. He was certainly woven into numerous relationships with the world around him, inanimate and animate, and with the world of contemporary people. This fact did not remain without influence on what the work created by him became. So, it is at least probable that it is possible to deduce from its properties with a certain probability, what its author was like and what the world surrounding the author was like.”¹ 

“(...) two different cognitive procedures have to be performed: first of all, one must get to know a given cultural product in its own qualities – in our case, the work of music, and so as not to bring anything alien to it, what in itself cannot be found – and secondly, to know independently of the results of the cognition of a given work, the real and cultural conditions of its creation. Only when these two cognitive operations are completed, and the results achieved in each of them are independent from each other, can one begin a new cognitive task: to compile the results obtained in both series of research and to consider what causal relationships, affinity and similarity etc. occur between them.”² 

A performer who specializes in playing period instruments should be an enlightened musician – an enlightened virtuoso. A man of the Renaissance. His duty is only to deal with narrowly understood musicianship, but also to be aware of all possible disciplines of art. Thus, an enlightened virtuoso is on the one hand a person interested in art and painting, architecture and poetry, and on the other hand, a high-class scholar and specialist.

¹ Roman Ingarden, Utwór muzyczny i sprawa jego tożsamości (The Work of Music and the Problem of Its Identity), PWN, Warszawa, 1966, p. 208, tłumaczenie Anna Marks
² Ibid., p. 209