The New York Times today carries a fascinating article about a recently rediscovered Vivaldi work called Andromeda. The work was located by a violinist in an old Venetian orphanage where Vivaldi worked as a music teacher.
The violinist is an amatuer Vivaldi scholar, and developed some traditional evidence for the provenance of the manuscript. However, some of his most compelling evidence is the “feel” of the piece under his fingers as he plays through it. Having played and performed Vivaldi works many times, this violinist believes he has an intuitive sense for how Vivaldi pieces play.
Some traditional music scholars disagree. In particular, a leading academic Vivaldi scholar believes the work is an amalgam that contains only a very small contribution from Vivaldi. Perhaps not coincidentally, this same scholar had a copy of the same manuscript in his possession years before, and had summarily dismissed it.
The New York Times writer describes his own visit to the Venetian orphanage’s archives. Over two hundred years ago, the orhpanage was brimming with infants who had been left by abandoned mothers. Many mothers would leave broken pieces of religious pin-medallions with the babies, in the hope that they could some day reclaim their child with the matching half of the medallion. The Times writer had examined some of these medal pieces, and sensed the desperation of the mothers who left them, never to reclaim their child. He writes:
There are issues only scholarship can settle. But the boundaries of our knowledge are still limited enough to leave us mired in guesswork. And while scholars speak their guesses in the voice of reason, there’s something to be said for hte interpretive force of hands-on-experience: for the touch of a 200-year-old pin or the feel of a violinist’s fingers.
A lovely illustration, I think, of the limits of “objective” propositions, and the need for other ways of knowing to flesh out the Truth.