David Glidden

I am a violist, based in Barcelona. For more than twenty years I have worked at the center of historically informed performance — as principal violist of Le Concert des Nations under Jordi Savall, and of Les Musiciens du Louvre under Marc Minkowski. In chamber music, I am a founding member of L’Harmonie Universelle. That work has been my longest education: in listening, in ensemble responsibility, in what it means to inhabit a musical world that was built by the dead and belongs, ultimately, to the unborn. What made the work possible was given before training, in a music that came to me as family. The life it has become, in Spain, has the form of a homecoming.

I have always thought of myself as a ligature — the living tissue that connects what has been handed down to what will be passed on. That is what a musician in the historically informed tradition actually does: holds the inner voice, transmits the rhetoric, keeps faith with a form of attention that does not belong to the present moment alone. It is also what I understand teaching to be, and writing, and the design of the spaces in which thinking happens.

I have always written. Liner notes, program notes, correspondence that became essays before I knew that’s what they were. The attention that writing requires is not different from the attention that music requires — the bow listening for what the string will permit, the sentence for what the meaning is asking. Both demand fidelity to meaning, and fidelity to meaning is what I have tried to practice in everything I do. I am a man who wants to be taken at his word. That word is my honour.

Animal Rationis Capax is where that writing becomes visible — and where the full range of my preoccupations can coexist without having to justify themselves to a single discipline. Essays on Monteverdi and the acoustics of a Cremonese church. On what an instrument keeps and what it can lose. On what we owe the unborn in an age that has stopped being able to wait. On pedagogy and transmission — how things pass from person to person, and what conditions make that passing faithful rather than merely efficient. On the ethics of attention, and on whether artificial intelligence can be made to mean what it says.

Animal Rationis Capax is also itself a designed object. I have been building it on the conviction that how thought is housed changes what thought can become — that the vessel is not neutral, that form is an ethical commitment. The typographic framework, the threshold objects that open each essay, the household of voices acknowledged in the Hearth — these are not decoration. They are the same argument as the writing, made in a different material.

I do not have a clean account of how all of this fits together across music, writing, pedagogy, design, and the governance of intelligent systems. What I have is a consistent fidelity — to the things that were handed to me, to the people who will inherit what I do with them, and to the obligation of meaning something when I speak.

A formal record of dates, ensembles, recordings, and lineage is at the CV.