Alessandro Baricco: "We cannot forget all the good things that we have just because fascists exist"

BarcelonaIf the life of Alessandro Baricco (Turin, 1958) had a soundtrack, it would be classical music. As a young man, he already attended concerts, worked as a music critic, and his partner is the pianist Gloria Campaner. Despite the chronic leukemia he suffers from, which led him to undergo a bone marrow transplant in the hospital, he remains active and has just published A Brief Heretical History of Classical Music (Ara Llibres, translated by Maria Llopis). These days he has been touring Catalonia to give a talk at the CCCB with composer Joan Magrané and has inaugurated the meetings at the Cap Roig Gardens with a conversation with Josep Ramoneda.

When did you decide to rewrite the history of classical music?

— Classical music has always been present in my life. I saw that there was so much to say about its history, especially because I realized that a large part of it is invented. That is to say, it is a cultural creation. Classical artists did not know they were making classical music. I started to document myself on it and the more I read, the more excited I became. I wanted to destroy many preconceived ideas. That is why it is called "heretical", because it does not respect the official narrative about classical music, which may offend many experts.

In what way can it offend them?

— Of many. My point of view focuses on the times, on the processes, on the context. A perspective that is my own, but which has liberated many musicians who have read it.

The beginning of the book is ambitious. Attempting to explain the origin of music in general.

— I define it as the era of the gatherers, since they gathered the sounds of nature. And of the divinities, just as they believed. They were people radically different from us. The history of music evolves in a very slow way. Initially, it was a ritual of welcoming the sounds that for them were a divine message. Therefore, there was no need to make it evolve. Do not doubt divine creation. It will not be until centuries later that everything accelerates. A new man arrives who wants to dominate the world, who defies God.

Was it necessary to write this book to understand humanity through music?

— That is how it is. It is worth telling this story, as it tells us about ourselves. Through classical music, you end up feeling very close to those men and you understand them more.

How can we get closer to those very different men? In a fragment, it speaks of the moment when polyphony is born. In the 12th century, in a church in Paris, the monk Léonin is the first to compose while thinking of having two voices. A magical moment, but we know almost nothing about who he was.

— I cannot know what he was like or what he thought. And that is part of the charm. But we do know the exact date when he composed with two voices. When I give presentations of this book, I play his Gregorian chant and suddenly... bam! I let them hear the second voice. And a whole world really opens up. That is to say, for us, accustomed to Wagner, it might seem like little... But going from one voice to two was incredible. We should not take these things for granted; we must continue to marvel at them. One of the things I like about this story is that it says: "Look at this precise point." And it is exciting. I wanted to highlight key moments in the history of music that are not the ones many expect. For example, Bach barely appears in it.

In a society as technological as ours, asking for the step of moving from one voice to two to be valued seems like a challenge.

— I do it in the book. It is enough to explain the story with passion and precision. But in the form of a story, let it be an epic adventure. Anyone who listens to it will value it, young people too. It is easier for young people to understand Léonin's second voice than Berlioz's music. Usually, it is music that has only been explained by scholars thinking of scholars... On the other hand, if a narrator takes it and explains it, it is a fascinating story. That first voice was a sound of God. Why did you have to enhance and expand it? This famous second voice must have been born from an excess of narcissism in this Léonin. At the time it surely bothered people. But when they saw that the faithful were fascinated, everything was different. It is like when they started to make frescoes with the correct perspective in churches. People would stay. These technical improvements meant having more power over the people. Official musicology thinks that music evolved slowly because they were dim-witted, ignorant. It is not true.

Did evolving mean challenging God?

— At that moment, carrying the music forward meant saying: "Perhaps we are going in a different direction than God's".

Then more than one ended up at the stake.

— Correct. It is a story of brave people. Visionary people who, when it was necessary to make revolutions, did so with incredible determination. The gesture of reducing all sounds to twelve in an octave is a very violent gesture that generated a lot of opposition. It was about simplifying everything to work better... and bam! That is how we reach Beethoven. And then they went on making instruments more and more precise. And then they started making music without words, which is a totally visionary thing! They were geniuses.

Has music always been revolutionary?

— Always, continuously. But not in the sense that is generically believed, that is to say, of improvement and progress. It has not always been like that. To progress is not always to improve. But when they perceived a drastically different landscape that attracted them, they went there. And they always had people who paid them. That is to say, behind the musicians there was an intellectual elite that was brave and that carried out revolutions. The people who invented lyrical opera! They risked a lot of money, because opera was extremely expensive. It is a story of visionaries who were very brave.

A moment that exemplifies this is when Beethoven presents his Eroica, since he first does it in private to a banker, then to a prince. And finally, in public.

— A good summary of the 19th century. Who pays and who is in charge, before the public. A new century was being born and everything explodes. A century that begins with Beethoven and ends with Wagner. Musicians were very orderly, they were born and died just in time to start and end the centuries. Corelli, key in instrumental music, was just from 1700.

In Italy, they have presented the book in nightclubs. With live musicians. How has the public received it?

— When I hold these heretical nights in nightclubs or other places, it is very interesting, because the audience does not understand exactly where it is going, because they are all somewhat strange rituals. Live, I explain the book backwards, going towards the past. First, I play Wagner. And I start cutting. That is to say, I take out instruments. We move on to Beethoven, Vivaldi, Corelli and I keep taking out instruments. Until I take them all out. And eight voices remain. Then four. Then two. And it ends with a single voice singing a medieval antiphon by Hildegard of Bingen. And the magic happens. Many things are stirred up in the audience. I do it this way to ward off the laziness with which people usually listen to classical music.

Talk about the importance of the piano.

— The piano is like the mobile phone, a revolution. It is the decisive instrument.

What is the first memory of a piano that you have?

— At my house there had always been a piano. There was no one who knew how to play it really well, but my grandfather and father would try. There was no real musician among us. I lived in a miserable house... but there was a piano. Since the 19th century, it was a symbol. It meant that that family could afford the luxury of culture. It was like having a bookcase with books. It meant that you were not in the world just to survive.

In a digital world, books and pianos resist.

— They have survived many things. For example, the paper book has brilliantly survived digital devices. It continues to be a great success; it is a type of tool that works. We have many people studying musical instruments to play all over the world. And that means there will be musicians who will continue to play better and better. And if they are there, it means there is an audience, right? Otherwise, they wouldn't study it. I don't believe AI will have a major impact on creative crafts. Artificial intelligence works on what has already been done. But what a human can do, that is to say, invent a completely different scenario, it cannot do. It was not born for that, let's put it that way. It is not structured to do that. There is no need to waste time wondering if novels will be written with artificial intelligence. There are more serious problems.

How can they bring classical music closer to young people?

— I am convinced that this music is not made for young people. When you are 20 years old, it is better to do something else. It is a type of pleasure and knowledge that starts to be really attractive when you are 30 years old. And from then on, it becomes very interesting. Classical music is a slow passion that requires commitment. And when you are 20 years old, everything goes fast. It is not necessary. But it is necessary to think about how to update certain ancient rituals, such as the duration of concerts. Thinking more about those of us who are 60 or those who are 80 years old! Do intermissions make sense nowadays? Intermissions were made to allow aristocrats to look at each other. They would look at how they were dressed, exchange news about their children... Then they would return to listen to music. It needs to be made more agile, then, because concerts last too long. I do not want to be for four hours in a place where they want to kill you if you have a slight cough. We need to do lively things, not have music be a museum of dead things. And that way, young people will also come sooner or later.

But you did go to concerts when you were young.

— I was a maladjusted youth [smiles]. At 16, you shouldn't be going to listen to Bruckner like I did. A friend played the bassoon and was at the conservatory, where the concert hall was, which is why I went there for the first time. They were playing Bach's Brandenburg Concertos. You could sit on the floor near the stage, it was quite a lively thing. And look. I went back home to put on my father's vinyl records. The boys my age were going out dancing and I wasn't. That's why I had to learn to dance at 40, which was traumatic, because when I was a teenager I didn't do it. I didn't do the things that young people did.

Some he did attend. He went to football to cheer on his beloved Torino, a club for sufferers.

— That's right. To see Torino with my father. We are a club that always suffers, very tragic. The other day we won a league match, but because the opposing goalkeeper made an incredible mistake. We only win when things like that happen.

AI, the growing far-right, a world that is too digital... How can one be optimistic? At home, we are all a bit scared.

— We must be realistic. Look around you. I see young people who do not stop doing things. The theaters are full. When I was young in Italy there wasn't a single music festival and now we have 2,500. What the far-right defends is ugly, true. They defend a world that denies culture. But look the other way. There is more culture than ever. Logically, we must understand why we have so much far-right, but we cannot let ourselves be dragged into pessimism. We cannot forget all the good things we have just because fascists exist. In many things we are better off, we have a society that is more alive and much more intelligent than when I was 20 years old. When they tell me that this digital age has caused the death of culture, I answer them that it has not. And I make it clear to them that it is not that I am an optimist, it is that they are blind.