What we call today “Western Music” has been turning over millennia into a gigantic accumulation of intellectual crap seasoned with religious necromancy without anyone stopping to try to put order in this mess. The abuse of so much rancid irrationality has made it a forbidden ground for reason and that it is only accessible through the abuse of memory and repetition; of suffering, in short. From Pythagoras, who wanted to reach twelve notes by combining seven different series of seven notes each, to the monk Guido of Arezzo who had the idea of recording music with ink so that his melodies would not degenerate when going from one monastery to another. He designs the solfeggio with the obsessive idea of avoiding playing the cursed tritone that would invoke Satan, dragging any good Christian into the most terrible hells, an idea that excited the Pope of the time and that ordered his learning. Another monk could not be missing, Miguel García alias “Padre Basilio” who at the end of the 18th century put so many strings on the guitar that he found himself with the problem that he did not have enough fingers to play three notes with six strings using only four fingers, so he dedicated himself to arranging orthopedic postures so that the new instrument would not sound horrendously bad. Most musicians are unaware that we are in the 21st century, that we know how to count to twelve, that we have devices for recording music that are better than India ink, and that we have five fingers on our right hand with which to select which strings to play and not just a deformed stump to tear them. We know that sound is produced in the auditory consciousness. We also know how we hear based on our anatomy and we have done neuroscientific studies with which we have defined harmony based on subjective relative dissonances and even that the most important thing, rhythm, is what music draws. Music differs from noise in its simplicity, and if there is anything a healthy brain hates more than complex sounds.
