Program

The ancestral rite is a way of organizing time. And music is probably the most beautiful way to reconstruct it.
Inspired by the guiding theme of the 2025–2026 season at the Palau, this course by Dr. Carlos Calderón explores the fertile territory of ritual through the history of music and its great creators. Ritual runs through the lives of human beings and nature: from birth to death, through endless meanders in the search for transcendence and meaning. The rite as an act in which, with all the necessary complexity, the profane acquires a sacred character. Suffering, celebration, love, the creative act… as extraordinary events with deep meaning. Spring always returns, death is a certain fate, celebrations end, emotions quicken the pulse, and even imagination longs to be encapsulated in an orderly algorithm. But everything that is ordinary finds in music a form of Time—a mysticism capable of ritualizing what could otherwise be banal or predictable.