Читать книгу When the Music Stops… - Joe Heap - Страница 5

Greek myth tells of Orpheus, who travelled to the underworld to win back his lost lover, Eurydice. His means of transport was music – music that made the gods weep to hear it, music that stopped the rivers and made nature pause. The Hymns of Orpheus are lost to us now, but their voices are still ours to use, that we may each bring back our own Eurydice.

Musicologists disagree about how many of these voices, called modes, there are. Some say five, or nine, or twelve. For this book, we will cover the seven commonly accepted modes used in antiquity. The number seven was important to the ancients – seven Olympian gods, seven days of the week, seven ages of man. Seven is a mystical number, a magical number, and perhaps this little book yearns to do something magical.

I do not believe in gods, but I believe in music. Music can draw the dead close to us, for a while. If we could meet them, in the sunlit fields of song, surely we would stay forever.

– Jack Shapiro, The Songs of the Dead