I Barbari
by Alessandro Baricco
ISBN: 9788807720246
Read: 8 September 2011

I usually read a lot of books about music, improvised and otherwise, and I was surprised at how this book about cultural mutation also speaks to what is happening in the music world right now. Among other things, its references to classical music are many.

I found in it an interesting reflection on our time: a time of relationships, of connections, of a quick approach to everything, of broad knowledge that never goes deep.

These are the essential notes I underlined in the book:

"Elegance, purity and measure, which were the principles of our art, have gradually surrendered to the new style, frivolous and affected, that these times, with their superficial talent, have adopted. Minds that, by education and habit, cannot think of anything other than clothes, fashion, gossip, reading novels and moral dissipation, struggle to feel the more elaborate and less febrile pleasures of science and art. Beethoven writes for those minds, and in this he seems to enjoy a certain success, if I am to believe the praise I hear blossoming everywhere for this latest work of his." (The Quarterly Musical Magazine and Review, 1825)

"The soul is lost when one aims at aggressive commercialization."

"There is a technological revolution that suddenly breaks the privileges of the caste that held the primacy of art."

Mutation = "Aided by a specific technological innovation, a human group essentially aligned with the imperial cultural model gains access to a gesture that had been closed to it, instinctively brings it back to a more immediate spectacle and to a modern linguistic universe, and so manages to give it astonishing commercial success."

"In the step to the side, every creative tradition goes looking for meaning where it happens. It finds it in difference, not in progress."