Thomas Levenson
A Perfect Order

from Measure for Measure

The Madonna holds the infant Jesus on her lap. The baby reaches out to his right, placing a ring on the finger of a demure beauty, before whose feet lies a wooden wheel – Catherine of Alexandria, saint. The two Johns, Baptist and Evangelist, watch on while an angel plays the wedding music. In the background one can see through the windows to the streets of a town, a large one, possibly those of the town in which this altarpiece was painted: Bruges in the Burgundian provinces of the Netherlands.

Hans Memling left his native Germany for the Low Countries around 1467, already a master painter. Bruges was then at the height of its wealth and glory, a center of the arts-its population then three times the size it would be by 1900. Jan Van Eyck had painted there his sharply focused images of life and faith. Memling’s was a different art, more peaceful and still. In this, his Mystic Marriage of Saint Catherine, there is only a hint of the rest of the legend: beatings, imprisonment, torture (on the wheel- hence her emblem and the name of the children’s firecracker), and finally beheading. Memling’s vision is one of comfort-a good room, well appointed, and the joyful consummation of belief. His Bruges was a fine city, smiled upon by heaven. His saints are richly dressed, placid, beautiful. Monied donors commissioned his work to adorn the houses of the church-the Saint Catherine altarpiece remains in Saint John’s Hospital. “Gloria in Excelsis Deo” (“Glory to God in the Highest”) that they did live in such times.

There is a delightful detail in Memling’s picture. In the background, the angel plays. Her instrument is a portative, a tiny pipe organ held in the crook of her arm. Her left hand is out of sight, pumping the bellows, while her right fingers a keyboard that runs for just over two octaves. The (for the sexless angel is here represented as a young girl) is a creature of heaven, playing the music of divine love on an instrument built to an ideal of perfection. There is harmony in the scene, harmony between heaven and earth; harmony in the sounds that the artist allows us to hear within our minds’ ear, issuing from the double rank of pipes, sounding to an angel’s touch.

Little organs recur in medieval and early Renaissance art, often in the hands of angels. There is some evidence that portable organs existed in Europe as early as the tenth century. Later, they served as a convenient motif for painters, conveying an image of luxury – even small organs were not cheap – and sanctity: small organs evoke large ones, the heralds of the church. And they were beautiful, pipes and woodwork delicately figured, gracefully proportioned. For Memling the instrument was an easy, common, clearly understood symbol, and he used it more than once in his work. In time, though, portable organs disappeared. Their passing marked an end and a beginning: the loss (that we still perceive) of an idea of perfection, the start of a renewed attempt (still under way) to replace it, to come up with a picture of the world as complete as that reflected in the panels of Memling’s masterpiece.

Begin here: an angel sounds a tone, and then another, an octave apart. The modern definition of an octave uses the notion of frequency: sound travels through a medium – air, for example – as a wave; two notes form an octave when the wave sounding the higher pitch oscillates at twice the frequency of the lower tone. The octave, thus defined, is an abstraction, an arithmetical construct imposed on the physics of waves – an invention. But there is an intuitive sense of the octave that is as old as humanity: the register of adult male voices is, on average, about an octave below that of adult females. A man and a woman singing together would have discovered the pleasant sound of a doubled melody ringing out at an octave’s remove.

Within the confines of the musical scale, the ancients constructed a theory of everything. The modern, Western scale descends, in part, from the holy arithmetic of Pythagoras, his followers and his antagonists. The discovery that transfixed the Pythagoreans was that the octave and other intervals that like the octave sounded harmonious and smooth occurred not simply by chance but as if by design. Pythagoras was credited in antiquity with the realization that there was a deep connection between mathematics, numbers, and sound: he discovered that the fundamental intervals in music were created by the perfect ratios of the lengths of string or pipe used to generate the notes.

In legend Pythagoras stumbled across the numerical ratios that define musical intervals while walking past a blacksmith’s shop. As his devoted follower Nichomaeus tells it: “Once upon a time . . . by miraculous chance he [Pythagoras] walked by a smithy and heard the hammers beating out iron on the anvil and giving off the sounds that are the most harmonious in combinations with one another. Delighted, therefore, since it was as if his purpose was being achieved by a god, he ran in to the smithy and found by various experiments that the difference of sound was consistent with the weight of the hammers, hut not with the force of the blows, nor with the shapes of the hammers. nor the alteration of the iron being forged.” As the medieval music theorist Boethius takes up the tale, Pythagoras discovered that “those two [hammers] which gave the consonance of an octave were found to weigh in the ratio 2 to 1. He took that one which was double the other and found that its weight was four-thirds the weight of a hammer with which it gave the consonant of a fourth. Again he found that this same hammer was three-halves the weight of a hammer with which it gave the consonance of a fifth.” Pythagoras then ran home, according to later Pythagorean hagiographers, and repeated the experiment on his own, fixing a stake into the wall of his house, to which he tied four identical pieces of string. He then hung from each string a weight comparable to one of the hammers he heard at the blacksmith’s shop, and plucked. Harmony reappeared, in ratios identical to those he’d observed in the beating of hammers against metal.

This particular account is certainly legend rather than fact. Pythagoras himself may have had a keen experimental bent, but clearly his followers did not. Hammers of different weights striking the same anvil give off the same tone, at different volumes-it is the bell, not the clapper, that sounds the note. And the strings that Pythagoras allegedly played to discover the harmonious conjunction of number and pitch would, in fact, sound horribly dissonant: a change in tension does alter the pitch of a string, but the pitch varies not directly but with the square root of a change in tension. Simply doubling the weight at the end of the string supposed to give off the octave would produce a note with a pitch in the ratio of 1.414 to the 1 of the original tone – which could sound harsh and clashing. To get the doubling of frequency required for an octave, Pythagoras would have had to multiply the weight hanging from his string by four, not two.

So the tale is a myth. Pythagoras is a strange and shadowy figure anyway, represented as almost godlike in the acuteness of his perception. Similar stories exist in other traditions, telling of the origins of music itself, and the Pythagoreans may simply have adopted an older tale to glorify their sage. But though the tale is false, the moral is true.

In reality, Pythagoreans later used an instrument called a monochord, a device with one string strung against a body, divided into two lengths by a bridge, like that on a violin to investigate musical ratios. The bridge of a monochord was movable, permitting the Pythagoreans to divide the string into the right lengths to discover each of the essential ratios ascribed to Pythagoras’s impossibly fortunate stroll past the blacksmith. The ratios thus discovered do work: two strings, one precisely 3/2 times as long as the other will sound together in a perfect fifth, as will strings matched in the correct ratios for the octave or the fourth. Almost certainly, the fundamental arithmetic of the musical scale was built up of the relations between the numbers 1, 2, 3, and 4, a system identified by a living man called Pythagoras during the sixth century B.C. This discovery of the direct relationship between the pitch of a note and the length of string or pipe that produces it remains the oldest mathematically expressed law of nature. The Pythagoreans were not scientists; they sought magic in numbers. But still, here is where science begins.

Almost three thousand years separates us from the extraordinary sense of revelation Pythagoras must have felt at the moment he recognized the meaning of what he was hearing. We are accustomed now to the notion that experience – the roar of a church organ, a breath of air the motion of the moon across the sky – is governed by the rules we call laws of nature. These are universals: the same mathematical abstraction can describe the behavior of an apple falling from a tree and the orbit of a star around a galaxy. But for Pythagoras no such certainty could have existed until he plucked his strings, heard his tones, and recognized the relations of number that governed absolutely the resulting harmony. For the first time the ephemeral evidence of the senses could he accounted for by an idea that would hold true for anyone, at any time.

Such perfection was intoxicating. From the sounds of a monochord, the Pythagoreans deduced a universe. The planets moving through the heavens gave off sounds, “the music of the spheres,” which exemplified the perfect organization of nature on the largest scale. The original thought, as Aristotle records it, was that the great bodies of heaven could not move without making noise, but later traditions created a musical cosmology. The regular motions of the planets suggested ratios of number, of intervals; the suggestion was enough to produce the image of celestial bodies ringing harmony throughout the universe. Such glorious music would yet be imperceptible – continuous, unbroken, it surrounded the listener from birth to death, with never a moment of true silence to act as its foil. The Pythagorean tradition has it that the master himself, alone among mortal men, could hear the perfect harmony of the spheres. But others, their senses less acute, could still discern the organization of nature in the patterns set out in the musical scale. Heaven and earth could be seen as a “cosmic monochord” – as the Englishman Robert Fludd, writing at the far end of the Pythagorean tradition (in the seventeenth century), would represent it. God’s hand stretches the string of monochord, which passes through two octaves, from a high G in the sphere of the angels through the solar system to the sun at the middle G, down past Venus, Mercury, and the moon, through the elements, fire, air, water – on down to the resonant bottom G of earth itself.

And what of Memling’s angel, up there in the realm of a high G? She is a symbol of perfection, of course, a creature of heaven. But she plays an instrument of this world, the organ, making music that saints, at least, may hear. The tones of her organ are fixed in the harmonies built into the lengths of the pipes she sounds. We may take her, for the moment, as an emblem of the glorious unity of God’s creation, a Christian version of Pythagoras’s credo that all the world rings to the same music.

As in a sense it does. Leonard Bernstein in his Norton Lectures at Harvard in 1973 spent much of an evening trying to recapture something of the first discovery of the musical scale. [Using a piano rather than a monochord, he performed the following demonstration, easily replicable on any reasonably resonant instrument. Strike a note – C', as the note two octaves below middle C is written. Hold it, listen to it, get a feel for it. Now hold down the note C, one octave up the keyboard. Just depress the key, don’t sound the note. This lifts the hammer off the strings, unclamping them and allowing them to resonate freely. Now strike C' hard; release the key, cutting off the note, and listen. Faintly that next C sounds, the higher string ringing at the strike of the lower in what is called the first overtone of C. Now undamp the G above the C, pressing down on that key without striking a sound; play the original C again; and listen for the sound of the fifth, the second overtone. Go up a fourth, to middle c, play the tonic again, and listen for the third partial. It is almost impossible for humans to hear further partials, but the higher overtones are there. The next falls on e, the third, above middle c. Above that the partials crowd in closer and closer together, with what is called the harmonic series cumulatively providing that sense of color, the richness of sound that surrounds the pure tone of the original C'. (There is another factor that gives depth to a piano’s sound: Its notes are struck on three strings, each just slightly out of tune with the other, which together produce a complex, powerful tone. But the overtones still ring out, creating the full envelope of every note played on the piano.)

In the modern account of the wave dynamics of sound, the overtones occur because the original string vibrates in a very particular pattern. There is the wave formed by the whole string-the loudest sound heard. But the string will also vibrate in parts, so long as those parts add up to the length of the whole string. Thus the first string vibrates as if it were cut precisely in half – the old ratio of 2:1, the octave, or first overtone. Next, it divides into three, producing the ratio of 3:2 over the first overtone, the G, or the fifth; likewise in four parts we get the ratio of 4:3, and hear the second C above the fundamental. And so on- 5:4; 6:5; 7:6; 8:7; 9:8 – an infinite (if soon inaudible) series of tones. All those vibrations set up sympathetic vibrations on the strings of the piano that correspond to particular overtones, and hence produce the faint echo one can hear at the piano bench.

For Bernstein the harmonic series led further. The first six in the series of overtones, the octave, the fifth, the fourth, the third, and the next one, the second, create a five-note “pentatonic” scale – the scale that can be heard by just playing the black keys on the piano. (For the black keys: C-sharp to C-sharp is the octave, the first partial. G-sharp is the fifth, F-sharp the fourth. A-sharp is a minor third below the higher C-sharp, and D-sharp is the second-six partials, five intervals, five black keys: the pentatonic scale). That scale, Bernstein suggested, is amazingly widely used, heard in gospel hymns and symphonies, rages and highland ballads. And the series exposes why the Western scale has twelve tones: take the fifth, the second overtone, and keep adding fifths on top. Go from C to G; then from G to D; from D to A, and so on. Twelve different notes come up until finally the round of fifths lands at the thirteenth turn on C, where the cycle may begin again. The perfect fifths divide the perfect octave and create the scale of twelve notes that still forms the scaffolding for all Western music.

And as for Saint Catherine, Memling has given her angel a portative in which these developments can be clearly seen. There is a twelve-note scale breaking up the octave, and the five “black” keys – here just pegs elevated above and behind the first rank of keys – can be seen as well. In fact, both of the crucial discoveries of Pythagorean music theory – the whole-number ratios and the cycle of fifths creating the scale of twelve notes – were in place at the time the organ appeared: it was the organ that brought together the technological developments of applied Greek science and the abstractions of Greek theory. Its name derives from the Greek organon (tool or instrument) and it was as a tool that it was first conceived.

There was such a beast-the first organ. The instrument was not developed slowly over time; it was built, invented, by one man, Ktesibios of Alexandria, who flourished around 270 B.C. Ktesibios was an engineer, specializing in the study of pneumatics. One of his inventions was a device to produce “intermittent bird song.” It worked by regulating the flow of water into a closed cistern. As the cistern filled, air was forced out a pipe in the top, which led to a whistle hidden inside a figurine of a bird.

Ktesibios built several versions of this toy, but it had limitations that must have been frustrating: the air pressure produced in such a device is very low, so the bird song must have been faint indeed – and every time the cistern filled up completely, the music stopped. The invention was hardly original, anyway – Archimedes (who discovered the concept of specific gravity while sitting in his hash) is said to have built his own version, which Ktesibios probably knew. Ktesibios’s next effort, though, was a breakthrough, the creation of an instrument whose essential features have remained unchanged to the present day.

What his bird whistle lacked was sufficient air pressure and a steady source of pressurized air. It also couldn’t be controlled – whatever whistle or whistles were built into the device played when there was air and shut Up when there wasn’t. They contained one element that the organ would require – the whistle or pipe. Ktesibios added the three others that now define the instrument: the pump, to supply air; the wind chest, to distribute it properly; and the manual, to allow a player to control which pipe or pipes would sound and which would not.

Of them all, the pump represented Ktesibios’s greatest technological achievement. He had already invented a double-barreled cylinder pump, used apparently to help fight fires. It was made of bronze, highly polished, with a bronze piston fitted tightly within the body of each cylinder and a handle attached to the piston rod. The pump could suck up water from a well and force it into a holding tank, which would compress the air within that tank. Release a valve, and the compressed air would expel the water from the tank through a tube or hose onto a fire.

For his organ Ktesibios modified this arrangement to create a continuous source of air compressed to a roughly constant pressure. As the Roman author Hero reports from the first century B.C., Ktesibios used three major components to build his wind source: a single-cylinder air pump, a large cistern mostly filled with water, and a smaller vessel, called the pigneus, fixed to the bottom of the cistern to serve as a regulator. The air pump had an intake valve, to draw air into the cylinder, and an outflow valve, which led to a conduit carrying the compressed air down to the pigneus, a hemisphere of brass with an outlet at the bottom through which water from the cistern could flow. The compressed air forced water out of the pigneus, while flowing up through another conduit toward the organ and its pipes. When the pump relaxed, the outtake valve shut, air pressure in the pigneus dropped, and the water forced out by the pump could reenter the smaller hemisphere. That flow of water into the regulator chamber compressed the air there again, and with the valve to the pump shut, there was no place for the pressurized air to go but back up into the organ. That provided the continuity – no matter whether the pump was on its upstroke or its downstroke, air from the pigneus remained under fairly steady pressure.

The other three parts of the Ktesibios organ were somewhat simpler. The air from the pump entered a wind chest, or reservoir. The pipes rested on the wind chest, mounted in holes. Beneath each pipe was a slot, or drawer, with a hole in the lower slat opening to the main cavity of the wind chest below. The slots were blocked by pieces of wood, or sliders, which were perforated by holes that precisely matched those at the bottom of the pipes. The sliders were controlled by the keys of the manual, or keyboard; when a player pressed a key, the hole in the slider aligned with the opening of the corresponding pipe. Air from the wind chest would then enter the pipe, and a note would play. The keys were attached by cord to springs, and when the player released a key, the spring would recoil, pushing the key hack up, which dragged the slider to its original position and out off the note.

That was it: the first organ, called a hydraulis in recognition of the crucial role of water in producing its sound. Except for the use of hydraulic technology to serve as a regulator, however, the basic design of Ktesibios’s organ is recognizably similar to all subsequent organs-every one possesses a wind source, a wind chest, a keyboard and the pipes. Everything else hung onto an organ is in some sense bells and whistles. The core of the instrument has remained unchanged for more than two millennia.

The use to which the organ has been put, however, has evolved continuously since that moment. There is a legend that Ktesibios’s wife, Thais, was the first organist, which, as one writer put it, “has an apocryphal air about it.” Ktesibios himself seems to have had purely an engineer’s motivation: the complexity of the machine, and the opportunities the problem afforded, attracted him more than any love of music. From his perspective, the hydraulic was a tool with which to explore the practical implications of the new science of pneumatics, the study of the behavior of compressed air. He is credited with war machines-he is reported to have built a compressed air-driven catapult-various pumps, and, in a slightly different technological tradition, water clocks. ’I’he hydraulic demonstrated his grasp of the most sophisticated scientific and technological knowledge of his day – he clearly recognized in the design of his regulator, for example, that air is compressible but water is not – and it displayed his mastery of precision engineering, with the fine machining of the pumps and the delicate work needed to build the wind chest, sliders, and keyboard.

It was the technological sophistication of the machine that attracted the notice of ancient commentators, certainly. Jean Perrot, whose book The Organ is one of the best sources of information on the early history of the instrument, reports that Ktesibios, a master of “the science dealing with the construction of marvelous appliances,” was placed in the same class as Archimedes by the Roman writer Pliny the Elder and the Alexandrian mathematician Proclus. Ktesibios himself, along with several of his contemporaries and successors, some of whom appear to have been his students, participated in one of the last great flowerings of Greek science, out of which grew a major body of work on the theory of gases. They knew that air was a material substance; they argued that it was made of discrete chunks of matter “composed of tiny particles, light and generally invisible,” as Hero of Alexandria wrote. Philo, one of Ktesibios’s near contemporaries, even performed an experiment on the burning of gases similar in design (though not in intent) to the one that Lavoisier was to use two thousand years later to demonstrate the consumption of oxygen during combustion.

In this community, among men who performed some of the first significant experimental inquiry, the hydraulic must have appeared as a kind of virtuoso performance, a public demonstration of the remarkable feats inspired by the new knowledge being created in Alexandria. The actual sounds the hydraulic produced were less important than that it could make sound at all. Pythagorean notions of divine intervals mattered less than the precise arithmetic of the engineer’s compass and ruler; numbers counted for more than Number. The contraption worked: the sounds of flutes and trumpets spoke forth, audible above the creak of the pump, and the burble of water. It was, literally, a marvel – Athenaeus, a Greek living under Roman rule in the second century B.C., describes a feast at which all manner of novelty was discussed: “The sound of the hydraulic was heard close by. So pleasant and charming was it that we all turned towards the sound, fascinated by the harmony. Then Ulpian looked at the musician Alcides and said: ‘You who are the most musical of men, do you hear that wondrous symphony that caused us to look around in rapture?’

That was how the hydraulic was heard, as an amusement in the midst of dinner, a diversion, a kind of carnival instrument. The first reference to it actually being played honors the skill of one Antipatros, performing at the Delphic games of 90 B.C. The Romans readily adopted the Greek invention. Nero was known to be an organist, and organs provided musical effects for the theater, and entertainment at banquets and circuses, even gladiatorial contests. The oldest archaeological remains of an organ were found at Roman Aquincum, near Budapest, dedicated in A.D. 228 to the college of weavers there – evidence, according to Perrot, of the extraordinary popularity of the organ within the Roman empire.

But if Ktesibios’s masterpiece soon became commonplace, a plaything for dilettantes like Nero or a perquisite for the worthy guildsmen of Aquincum, it possessed from its inventor’s day its essential attribute as the most sophisticated product of what we would now see as science. It retained from its origins a double character: it captured in one machine the elements of what we would now divide into the realms of experiment and theory. In itself it provides one of the first examples of technology inspired by the study of physical questions. Ktesihios’s program is recognizable, was recognized by his peers, as a sustained application of reason to the understanding of nature. The organ carries within it the entire story: problem and solution, and even some sense of the method with which that problem, such problems, may be solved. Ktesibios’s writirings are lost, hut his instrument. unchanged in its essentials, remained a text in wood and metal for whoever encountered it over time.

At the same time, it provided an interpretation, fixed again in ranks of metal pipes, of one of the fundamental theories the ancients possessed. The construction of the Western musical scale presented certain problems to the Greeks (and others, later, as will be discussed), but the underlying verities of the perfect consonances were built into the lengths of pipe. The organ gave its listeners the direct experience of concord and demonstrated for all to see that this sensation of perfection could be directly related to physical reality: the pipes were real objects, their lengths set and visible. A listener could hear the perfect consonances and see their cause; the connection between abstract mathematics and the real world was made. Little else remains of the details of Greek scientific thought, but this does. Let those who doubt come and listen.

Some did, and those who listened to the sounds of the hydraulis must have heard what the Pythagorean Philolaus proclaimed: “The nature of number and harmony admits no falsehood . . . . But in fact number, fitting all things in to the soul through sense-perception makes them recognizable and comparable with one another.” There is a tantalizing air to such passages, for the Greeks did so much, and so much was later let go. Ktesibios and his near contemporaries did in fact lay the foundation upon which science as we understand it would be built. But their followers forgot much of what had been achieved, and their accomplishment virtually vanished within a few centuries.

With hindsight, one can see the disaster beginning in the last years of the Roman republic, when rogue generals embarked on freelance missions of conquest. Lucullis, himself educated in Greece and a lover of the older culture, led the invasion of Asia, the kingdoms of Bythnia and Pontus. He set out to capture the wealthy Greek cities there, the outposts of Hellenistic civilization on the Black Sea. When Amisus finally surrendered in 71 B.C., the legions gorged themselves. Lucullus himself ran among his troops, trying to restrain them, but failed, and the city fell to the sack. The tone was set. In 48 B.C., Julius Caesar invaded Cleopatra’s Egypt, and when suddenly trapped within the palace at Alexandria sought to destroy the fleet threatening him. He set fire to the ships, but the blaze blew out of control, onto shore. It swept through the city, and though the great library was spared, 40,000 books in a depository near the docks were destroyed. The Dark Ages are said to have begun in 410, when Alaric the Goth conquered Rome itself, but long before the barbarians came, the smoke from the fires of the cities put to the torch by Roman armies carried the first hint of how much could be forgotten, how much rejected. With the rise of Christianity, and the doctrines of faith, Western Europe had an alternative to Greek reason: truth could come from God, not Number. Christians did not love mathematics; Euclid, geometry, algebra were simply abandoned. In the twelfth century Western men would have to learn from the Arabs what Greeks had discovered long before, as well as a great deal that had been discovered in China, India, Persia and beyond.

And music, as the Greeks used it to interpret nature, was unpopular with the divines of the early church. Systematic scientific investigation mattered considerably less than contemplation of divine revelation, and the sense of beauty, the emotional impact, that music could inspire was downright distracting. Organs disappeared from Western Europe with the fall of Rome, and it is not simply barbarism that can account for the loss, for organs were still known at the court of Byzantium and among the Moors. Rather, just as the organ embodied specific accomplishments of the Greek mind, its banishment from the Western tradition and its subsequent return reveals where priorities lay for many years.

Saint Augustine, bishop of Hippo in what is now Algeria, a thinker and a man of some humor, was more honest than many. Writing in the early fifth century, he found music in any form suspect, but, he allowed: “Now when I hear sung in a sweet and well-trained voice those melodies into which your words breathe life, I do, I confess, feel a pleasurable relaxation. But,” he added, “this bodily pleasure to which the mind should not succumb through enervation, often deceives me . . . in these matters I sin without realizing it . . . . I pray that you, my Lord God, will hear me and look down upon me and observe and heal me. In your eyes I have become a question to myself, and that is my infirmity.”

Augustine and the early church fathers clearly recognized the danger: the power that music has to elevate, exalt, to speak directly to the emotions might speak to the greater glory of God, but it could just as well he the devil’s snare, to trap the unwary into pursuing pleasure for its own sake. Augustine himself explicitly condemned only the music of human voices, but his proscription was clear enough, and no organs appeared in church until the ninth century at the earliest – and then only after they had been reintroduced to the West for a completely different purpose. The first organ to reach Western Europe since the ultimate sack of Rome in 476 came as a gift from the Byzantine emperor Constantine V to the Frankish king Pepin in the year 757. The gift was so marvelous that, as Perrot reports, it was the main, perhaps even the sole, entry for the year in the various monastic chronicles, as “an instrument never before seen in France.“

This organ almost certainly made use of the major technological improvement in organ building since Ktesibios’s day – the use of pairs of bellows, rather than a water-regulated pump, to supply a constant flow of pressurized air. But the organ remained a foreign device, a mechanical wonder that the lord of the Eastern Roman Empire could use to remind the barbarian kings of the west of Greek preeminence. Such arrogance could not sit well with Pepin’s son, C2harlemagne, crowned emperor by the pope of Rome, nor with Charlemagne’s son, Louis, styled “the pious.” In 826, a priest, Georgius, a Venetian, came to Louis’s court with a proposition: he would manufacture an organ, then and there. Venice was nominally under the protection of Constantinople and was, even then, the commercial center that linked Asia to Italy and the European hinterland; whether Georgius learned his craft at home, or had traveled in the east and studied the art of organ building closer to its roots is unknown. But on his arrival at Louis’s court, the Carolingian emperor put him straight to work, building at that far end of the world an instrument “in the Byzantine style.“

Even from the fragmented records that remain there is an air of haste in the drive to build that first post-Roman organ at a barbarian court, an urgency that seems to have little to do with an inordinate love of music. The motivation was partly technological, perhaps, but truly political: to display power through the demonstration of technological mastery. To possess an organ was to possess civilization. The Byzantine emperor had it; the Carolingian meant to get it. The court poets were quick to recognize the organ’s symbolic meaning. Ermold le Noir’s epic, written praise of Louis, proclaimed: