Chronology of Harmony

The Corpus Publishing House published the “Book of Music” – a 700-page volume about the history and modernity of music in human society, invented by leading Russian music journalists. I was not afraid of the volume and title of the book Boris Barabanov.

The Book of Music is a quite convincing attempt, under the guise of a monumental non-fiction about the history of music, to give the reader a history of everything in the world, from astronomy to electronics, and even written in an accessible, far from academic musicology language. The authors involved for these purposes have extensive experience in mass, if not fashionable, publications and are accustomed to addressing the public in such a way that it does not get bored from the abundance of terms. To the group of authors, consisting of Anna Sokolskaya, Lev Gankin and Yulia Bederova, a veteran of the intellectual gloss Maxim Semelyak was added. There is a suspicion that all these witty titles of chapters and chapters – derived from book titles, phrases from films, lines from songs and Internet memes – are his work. But the merit of the book is not limited to this move.

“The Book of Music” is built on the following principle. Its first part is devoted to the actual history of music as an art form and form of life: from bone flutes to electronics, from Pythagorean modes to dodecaphony, and from Tsar Pea to the Shtroch violin. The second part allows you to navigate the current musical reality, which consists of concert and studio sound, classical music festivals, record labels, ensembles, orchestras and, finally, specific people – representatives of musical specialties. The third part is the most “party-like” part, here people of non-musical arts talk about music, including the writer Lyudmila Ulitskaya, cinematographers Andrey and Ilya Khrzhanovsky, and actor John Malkovich. Their choice as commentators is not too obvious, but this does not make the stories of their personal relationships with music less interesting, perhaps. The fourth part is a glossary of terms. But the fifth one is the most interesting.

Four parallel timelines are presented here: music, other arts, science, and “general history” (that is, the history of human society). By and large, the whole work as such is devoted to this – to demonstrate how musical creativity, throughout its development, repelled from society, science and religion, intertwined with their history, reacted to it technically and ideologically.

In a table compiled from these chronologies, the music is described from the creation of the Oxyrhynchus hymn (the earliest Christian hymn known to historians) to the evacuation of the composer Valentin Silvestrov from Kyiv to Germany. The Other Arts begins with the construction of the Hagia Sophia in Constantinople and ends with the burning of Notre Dame de Paris. The history of science dates back to the invention of matches in China and ends with the sequencing of the human genome at Stanford University. Finally, the general history starts in 476 with the fall of the Western Roman Empire and ends with the entry of Russian troops into the territory of Ukraine.

You can look at this table for a long time, it does not bother you. Russian Znamenny chant appeared around the same time that the Knights Templar was founded. The Sorbonne was founded around 1150, and the first known chronicle mention of Moscow dates back to 1147. The flowering of the Venetian school of music occurred at about the same time as the publication of Montaigne’s Essays and the introduction of the Gregorian calendar. The first opera that has come down to us appeared at the same time that Giordano Bruno was burned, and Shakespeare wrote Hamlet shortly after the establishment of the British East India Company. Henry Purcell created “Dido and Aeneas”, and Peter I at the same time suppressed the streltsy rebellion. He, Peter I, founded the court Singing Chapel the following year after the founding of St. Petersburg. La Scala Theater was opened in the year of the adoption of the first US constitution. Haydn created the Russian Quartets at the same time that Kant wrote the Critique of Pure Reason. Etc.

In this comparative chronology, there is no cross-cutting idea that beautiful music was being composed somewhere, and at the same time in other places, for example, witches were being burned. Both in terms of social metamorphoses, and in terms of the development of sciences, and in terms of the development of musical thought, there have been both bad and good times in the life of any European country. Russia did not compete with Europe, but was inscribed in the processes taking place in it, sometimes lagging behind its neighbors, sometimes overtaking it. Based on the tables presented in The Book of Music, a website could probably be created, on which events in various fields, from wars to human rights movements and from the great geographical discoveries to cellular communications, would be placed in an even more visual format. But even so it is clear that in the world everything is always both good and bad at the same time. Composers write beautiful music, armies take cities by storm, and heavenly bodies make their run in space. We can only try to imagine the threads of interaction between these processes – and not the fact that we are right.