What was the first music heard on the planet? “This is a story without a beginning,” he writes in his recent (2021) book Five Straight Lines. A History of Music (published by Profile Books), musicologist Andrew Gatt.

Didn’t the rhythm of the step awaken the musical instinct in the first man? Are the birds chirping? Hunter’s yachts? In other words, the human voice?

Yes, but along with that, early people also found music in improvised instruments. Centuries after the advent of Christianity, a problem arose.

The church considered musical instruments a legacy of pagan antiquity. In the classic two-volume History of Music (translated by G. Leotsakos, ed. Subdomi, 1979), Emile Willermoz writes that “the double flute has always been associated with the hedonistic movements of naked orchestra players. (…) The executors of the court were very often partners…”.

“The double flute has always been associated with the voluptuous movements of naked women’s orchestras.”

Thomas Aquinas believed that only the human voice can lift the soul to God. The church forbade the use of tools even in the private lives of its believers.

Mr. Gray wanders the icy streets of Vienna, stopping by the city’s temples from time to time. From the iconic St. Stephen’s to St. Peter’s, modeled after the great cathedral of Rome, he stands under imposing church organs and wonders how such an organ is trumpeted! became the very voice of the church.

Church resistance continued until the 9th century. The Western clergy understood and retreated. The irony of fate is that in 250 BC. Ctesivius of Alexandria had already built hydraulics: pipes of copper alloy, tongues of which pulsated from a column of air, which, in turn, received the pressure of a column of water. The Byzantines were also popular with “satanic paraphernalia” (known as the “Organ”), but, of course, they did not pass through the gates of their own churches.

In the classic Viennese record stores Gramola and Da Capo, Mr. Gray is looking for music. Although he knows he can find them in the gallery of the Opera House in Athens, he is impatient. From Philips, he chooses Mozart’s church sonatas (Mozart: The Organ Sonatas & Solos, with Daniel Chorzempa). From Brilliant, a box set of all Handel’s organ concertos with Christian Schmidt and the Stuttgart Chamber Orchestra (conducted by Nicole Matt). From archive recordings of Deutsche Grammophon (Archiv Produktion), Helmut Wahlha plays Bach in 1959. The soul reaches God. Thomas Aquinas was wrong.