If you are someone who listens always and only to rock music or the like, it takes you time to understand classical music. You don’t follow it the first time. It’s like when my late father would drag me along, as a boy, to listen to polyphonic music, which he liked very much, and I was always angry, because I couldn’t see the order in what seemed to be a great confusion of notes and voices, in other words I didn’t have the key. The first time I began to understand something was when, at the age of thirteen I heard a choir intoning De Victoria’s Caligaverunt. After the first notes, when the second voice came in, I got the key for understanding it. From that time I have liked polyphony more and more. All of it.
Thus I began to feel enthralled by this music that seems – and often is – always the same, like a continuous repetition. And yet one never tires of it, because it fathoms the horizon of the soul and the heart, filling them with light and warmth, as De Victoria’s Christian heart must have been when he wrote these Responsories for Holy Week. All religious efforts try to interpret the Mystery; the Christian method instead is to repeat the word heard. To repeat, in other words to follow. You can’t repeat a word twenty times without its changing you.

(Excerpt from the introduction by Luigi Giussani to the booklet enclosed in the CD)