For Jordi Savall - early-music pioneer and master of the viola da gamba - music is always more than fleeting sounds. It enfolds histories. It reflects worlds. To draw a distinction between musicology and the sheer joy of performance is next to impossible.

“I combine both,” Mr. Savall, 68, said recently by Skype from his home in Bellaterra, Spain, outside Barcelona. “Reality is always somewhere between theory and practice. It’s difficult to know.”

The chronicle of Mr. Savall’s voyages of discovery is written in the discography of Alia Vox, a label founded in 1998 to produce and release his recordings and those of his circle of like-minded adventurers: his wife, the crystalline soprano Montserrat Figueras; their children, Arianna and Ferran Savall, instrumentalists and singers; the vocal consort La Capella Reial de Catalunya; and the periodinstrument ensembles Hesperion XXI and Le Concert des Nations.

But the project that may illustrate Mr. Savall’s vision at its most majestic is “Jerusalem,” a homage, as the liner notes put it, to “the city endlessly built and destroyed by man in his quest for the sacred and for spiritual power.”

According to a contested etymology, the name Jerusalem translates as “City of the Twofold Peace,” referring to peace on earth and in heaven. But through century after century of crusade and jihad, that peace has existed more as a wish than as a reality. In more than two and a half hours of music on two CDs the transcendental longings of Jew, Christian and Muslim are accorded equal dignity, with distinguished guests from Israel, Palestinan territories, Armenia, Greece, Iraq, Syria, Turkey, Morocco and Afghanistan enhancing the exotic palette. The printed material appears in eight languages, including Arabic, Hebrew and, as always, Mr. Savall’s native Catalan.

“For believers the earthly Jerusalem was always the mirror of the heavenly Jerusalem,” Mr. Savall said. “When the earthly city was destroyed, they thought the heavenly city still existed. At the beginning of the recording we represent the heavenly aspect of Jerusalem by three different prophecies of the Last Judgment, which all three religions predict will take place there. That’s why the cemetery space is so expensive.”

Songs that fall gently on the ear advocate the slaughter of the depraved. As a matter of historic conscience, Mr. Savall also incorporates Pope Urban II’s call to arms of 1095, which set off the crusades. But the delivery of the text, in French, is bland, and the fire and brimstone will be lost on listeners who fail to read along.

Mr. Savall stepped onto the earlymusic scene as a scholar and virtuoso four decades ago; his broader celebrity dates from 1992 and the release of Alain Corneau’s film “Tous les Matins du Monde.” It revolved around the French Baroque composer Marin Marais, whose austere meditations for viol (a Renaissance string instrument that has frets, like a guitar, but is played with a bow and held between the knees, like a cello) are among the glories of a long-forgotten repertory.

On screen Gerard Depardieu mimed the aged Marais at his instrument, but Mr. Savall’s hand drew the bow off camera. The soundtrack remains the Number 1 seller in the Alia Vox catalog, with 130,000 copies sold, a formidable figure in the niche within a niche of early music.

For the Jerusalem project he and his collaborators gathered musical impressions in the city’s synagogues and churches and in the Arab quarters. For “The Forgotten Kingdom” they traveled to Carcassonne and Montaillou in southern France, centers of the radically spiritual, ruthlessly suppressed Cathar faith. “Real life plays as important a role in our work as what we discover in libraries,” Mr. Savall said.

“Real places help us understand many things that are not written in books. The process of discovery takes a long time. With study you can get close to ancient times, to feel how people sang and improvised long ago. But when we put all that together with our musicality, our taste, our fantasy, what you hear is something contemporary, the same as when you see living actors in a scene from ‘Hamlet.’ ”


By MATTHEW GUREWITSCH

DAVID SILVERMAN/GETTY IMAGES; BELOW, JAMES ESTRIN/THE NEW YORK TIMES


Jordi Savall’s ‘‘Jerusalem’’ is an homage to the city. Top, Dome of the Rock and Al-Aqsa mosque.