Apollo with the lyre, Attic kylix of the fifth century BC. Delphi Archaeological Museum, via Wikimedia Commons (public domain).
There is a black hole at the origin of European culture, and almost nobody looks at it. The Greeks of the fifth century, the people who gave us tragedy, philosophy, geometry and the canon of beauty, used music everywhere: in rites, in festivals, in the theatre. Of all that music, practically nothing has reached us. They did not develop a system to write it down and hand it on, they did not expand their two instruments, they ignored polyphony. The first breeze of time blew it all away.
It is the starting point of Alessandro Baricco’s Breve storia eretica della musica classica (Feltrinelli, 2025), a book that the author of these lines counts among the sharpest things published about music in recent years. The observation it starts from is simple and dizzying: when, after the year 1000, a lost Europe went looking for an origin and found classical Greece, everyone got a model. Philosophers got Plato, sculptors the bas-reliefs, poets Homer. Musicians turned to the Greeks and found not a single example of music to play and study. Baricco calls them orphans: the people of sound are the only ones, in all of European culture, who had to build their own classical age from scratch. It took seven hundred years, and when they succeeded, between the middle and the end of the eighteenth century, the name of the undertaking stuck to the whole repertoire: Classical Music.
A good deal of what we take for granted descends from that orphanhood. The first to give names to the notes was an eleventh-century Benedictine monk, Guido d’Arezzo, who took the opening syllables of a hymn to Saint John and drew from them Ut, Re, Mi, Fa, Sol, La. The Do came four centuries later, and so did the Si. Counting from Guido, European music spent more time building itself an alphabet than writing masterpieces. And the Greek legacy that was finally found, the mathematical treatises of Pythagoras and his heirs, contained no music: it contained numbers, ratios of strings, and a crack, the Pythagorean comma, that would torment tuners and theorists for two thousand years.
Why we are talking about it. Because this magazine has always held that the audience does not need to understand music, it needs to let the music pass through it; but those who tell the story of music have a duty to tell it well, and Baricco’s book is a model of how it is done: take the official history and shake it until the clichés fall out. The volume sits on the history and criticism shelf of the Melos library, and in the coming weeks we will return to plunder it: on medieval musicians as hunter-gatherers, on equal temperament as the Mp3 of the eighteenth century, on the false myth of the Well-Tempered Clavier, of which the library keeps more than one illustrious relative. The Greeks, mute since their splendour, remain the warning hung above the door: a civilisation can produce beauty for centuries and lose all of it, if it does not find a way to write it down.