He Set a Devilishly Clever Tone

From a parchment journal found buried in the ruins of an abbey in Arezzo, Italy, dated 1030, translated from the Latin.

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Guido, damn you Guido d’Arezzo, this time you’ve gone too far! It wasn’t enough for you to pollute young minds in the schola cantorum here with that sacrilegious system of yours. No, now you’ve infested the Vatican with it.

You’ve seen the pope. The pope! You’ve taught him this system, this solmization (Satanization, more like it), this do-re-mi. And, if what they are all saying is true, thanks to that system of notation you’ve also invented, you were able to instruct His Holiness himself to instantly chant sequences he had never heard before.

Because of you, Guido d’Arezzo, Guido the Devil, no longer will chant require years and years of diligent study. No longer will we show our devotion to the Lord through discipline. Now, it is almost as if a machine can do it for us. And no longer will we, who lived our lives through music, who zealously kept the secrets of an art that couldn’t--that shouldn’t!--be written down, be its guardians.

Music that couldn’t be retained in man’s memory was lost. And we who have devoted our lives to music are meant to be the chosen receptacle of all its mysteries. But now with your system, with its five-lined staff for ordering the notes, who will need our memories anymore? And with solmization, chants that took 10 years to learn can be learned in 10 minutes. You, evil Guido, have made music something that even the filthy masses will be able to possess.

Oh, how we had feared the coming of the new millennium. The threat of divine retribution, of apocalypse, seemed evident. And how we celebrated, how we bathed in the glow of divine light when the new day dawned, that cold but glorious morning of Jan. 1, 1000. The world didn’t end, so we chanted our sequences with voices so sweet we hardly recognized them as our own. Never had music seemed so beautiful, so moving, so profound, so obviously the Voice of God.

We were good. We were very good. We thanked the Lord for His grace. We demonstrated our gratitude by building splendid cathedrals such as the world had never seen. We strived to be worthy sons of the Almighty Father. We filled those new cathedrals with fervent singing, our chants carrying to every corner of their magnificent spaces. Not in the thousand years since the birth of our Lord had we praised Him with such majesty.

It is now 30 years into the new millennium. I, a humble monk who has lived his life serving God through music, am old and dying. And in my last days I see with a remarkable clarity what a terrible, terrible folly our millennial excesses have been. We have been deceived. Our new cathedrals haven’t been houses for God--but for Satan! And you, Guido, who are the very embodiment of Satan come to Earth, has shown that to me.

It was, in the end, vanity that undid us. In the old days, music had one purpose, to illuminate the word of God through sound, so much more magnificent than those silly colored drawings illuminating text on parchment. But before long, our old chants, perfectly though we sang them, didn’t satisfy the new buildings, which demanded ever bigger, fuller, richer sounds. And, yes, I’ll admit that some of the new music that started to be created for these grand spaces was very beautiful, very seductive, and perhaps did do justice to the Wonder of Creation. But it was also inevitable that monks who created these chants would start to think that the music itself was the message, not the holy words it was meant to serve.

In a German Benedictine monastery, the pompous ass called Hermannus Contractus, but whom we dubbed “the Lame,” was the first to succumb to this arrogance. Early on we thought that the sublime nature of his chants indicated a sublime soul inside that twisted body. But then he started to puff himself up with his music. And then other monks wanted to be identified with their music. It didn’t take long for the French or the Germans to endorse one style of chanting, while we in Italy insisted upon another, as if there were more than one God.

Even so, we monks, at least, still controlled music. But now that you, Guido, have written down the very sounds themselves and assigned to every note an easy syllable, the end cannot be far. Before we gave tongue-twisting Greek names to the notes, not this devilishly easy do, re and mi.

I had a dream last night. I saw the next millennium unfold before me. With each passing century, music became more elaborate, more sensual, more impure. Eventually, music became something anyone could learn, and it was used for the most shocking of entertainments; it was used for, and I fear even writing this down, sex and seduction. It was used for killing and war too.

And worse. As the second millennium drew to its end, music was ubiquitous. People didn’t even need to learn it, it magically followed them everywhere they went, its divine spark entirely vanished.

And worse yet--music could be anything. Last night while I slept, a dog barked all night (someone has to talk to Father Poncius about that infernal mutt), but in my dream even his squeals became something the people of the future called music. I woke in a cold sweat.

I must stop writing now. My candle is burning to its end, and I don’t have another. All these big new churches need so many candles that they have become scarce here in the monastery, yet another example of the Insanity of Progress. I know things will never be the same again, and frankly I am glad that my time is nearly up. I don’t think I can stand to witness much more.

Thus I must try to compose my thoughts. I don’t want to die cursing, even if it is cursing someone who deserves the worst curses any man could muster. I know Guido has won for now. The pope requests his return to the Vatican for another visit. Guido the Insufferable will next parade around Arezzo wearing the pope’s accolades like so many medals, trailed by those awful brats singing do-re-mis as if there could be music apart from the word of God.

I, however, must take solace in the fact that I am headed to a better place where music will never change. And where there will be no dogs. *