A page from the Graduale Aboense, 14th century. Via Wikimedia Commons (public domain).
There is one date, just one, that the history of music can state with notarial certainty: Christmas Day 1198, in the cathedral of Notre-Dame in Paris, when a second voice joined the chant. It is the first polyphony that can be dated exactly, and the man who led those singers was called Léonin. Of him we know almost nothing. We know what he opened: Alessandro Baricco, in the Breve storia eretica della musica classica, whose chapter on the mute Greeks we have already discussed, calls it the fan, and the slowness with which that fan unfolded is the most vertiginous thing in the book. A hundred and fifty years after Léonin, Machaut’s four-voice Mass. Another two hundred and twenty, and the forty voices of Tallis’s motet. A whole century for the news to arrive from England that the third, the interval that now seems to us the very essence of harmony, sounded good.
To explain that glacial pace, Baricco uses the most fertile metaphor in the book: medieval musicians were hunter-gatherers. Every day they went out into the forest of sounds and took what nature released, without reaching too far, making do with the fruit of the low branches. They did not hoard, did not fence, did not domesticate: they consumed on the spot, in small communities, treating every note as a dialogue with the sacred. They had no tonality, almost no names for the notes, and in five hundred years they made the technical progress that Beethoven, alone, would cover in twenty-four. Not because they were slow: because they were not on earth to possess it, but to receive it.
The consequence, and the most heretical point of the chapter, is that the First Music should not be heard as child’s music, a sketch waiting to mature into Bach and Mozart. It is somewhere else, Baricco writes: not behind, elsewhere. A different way of being in the world, not a different season of the same growth. In Bach and Beethoven he even hears the twist of the coloniser, the aestheticising ferocity of one who puts sounds under the press, and to find again the gentleness of that welcoming we will have to wait for John Cage.
One can argue with all this, and that is the fun of it. But anyone who wants to try it in practice should listen to half an hour of Josquin or Dufay with this image in mind, the wandering of one who gathers and does not sow, and then put on a Bach fugue: the jump between the two worlds is felt in the body before it is felt in judgement. The book sits in the Melos library, on the shelf of history and criticism, beside the treatises of those who afterwards put those sounds firmly on a leash.