Jacques Viret

The anthropological humanist musicology, which is promoted by Jacques Viret, integrates the contributions of Carl Gustav Jung's psychology, Gestalt psychology, analytical psychology, transpersonal psychology, neuropsychology). It ramifies towards aesthetics, acoustics, hermeneutics, symbolism, metaphysics, sociology, music therapy, pedagogy, psycho - pedagogy, and rhetoric, and includes research on the interpretation (Aufführungspraxis) allowing to execute the old repertoires according to their authenticity. It revalues the orality as a living vehicle of traditional practices and knowledge, bearing precious values: vital, human, spiritual (cf. Marcel Jousse). This broad, open, spiritualist conception of musical science confers their originality to the works that Jacques Viret has published since 2004 at éditions Pardès [fr], about gregorian chant, Medieval music, Richard Wagner, musicothérapy, Baroque music, and opera. Among the transverse problems that they expose, one will particularly mention that of singing in relation (vocal, rhythmic, emotional) with the speech, as the most direct expression of the feeling or musical instinct, and this, from the early childhood (spontaneous childish chantings where emerge elementary musical materials, melodic and rhythmic archetypes).

According to the same spirit, the series Diaphonia, created by Jacques Viret in 2000 with the "À Cœur Joie" publishing house in Lyon, provides amateur choristers with a repertoire of medieval songs transcribed in modern musical notation so as to restore all the finenesses of the original notations and add data which are not included therein and come from other sources.

Born in Lausanne, Viret is a pianist and organist, graduated in classic literature from the University of Lausanne, habilitated for the teaching of music theory (Société suisse de pédagogie musicale), Jacques Viret perfected his studies in musicology at the Paris-Sorbonne University, with Jacques Chailley who conducted his Ph.D. thesis on gregorian chant (1981). Since 1972, Jacques Viret has been teaching musicology at the university of Strasbourg, as an assistant and then lecturer and professor, emeritus since 2009.

The research and reflection of Jacques Viret refer essentially to the notion of tradition as defined by René Guénon in the line of the perennialism (or Gnosis): Not as the preservation of a fixed legacy, more or less ancient, but as the manifestation, diversified according to cultures, epochs and disciplines, of a "sacred, universal and timeless truth", a fruitful source of inspiration and creativity, in perpetual becoming and renewal. For music, Pythagoras remains, in this respect, a permanent reference. The series of harmonics thus appears, as an audible expression of numbers and proportions, as an image of the cosmic order. The universal creative principle is symbolized by the fundamental frequency in the har:monic order, by the tonic of the modes in the melodic order (all traditional music is of modal essence). In particular, the tonic sol, "sun" in Latin, the central element of the theological and esoteric cryptogram that Jacques Viret discovered in 1978 in the notes of the range (ut, ré, mi, taken from the hymn to Saint John the Baptist Ut queant laxis) and of which Jacques Chailley completed the explanation.

Jacques Viret (born 19 October 1943) is a contemporary French musicologist of Swiss origin.