Epilogue. The Instrument That Disappeared

The flute from Hohle Fels, carved from a griffon vulture’s bone thirty-five thousand years ago, demanded breath and fingers from a person. For the melody playing in his head to get out, he had to breathe into the hollow bone and cover the right holes with his fingers, and that could only be learned over years. Between the music inside and the music in the air stood the body.

Since then everything that stood between them has gradually grown thinner. In 1922 Leon Theremin brought to the Kremlin a box that is played without being touched, and the body was still needed there, but only as the movement of a palm in the invisible field of an antenna. Then came keys and knobs that can be mastered in an evening, then a screen where the knobs are drawn, then a line of code, then an adjective in a box. Each new layer asked less body and fewer years of a person, gave more possibilities and took away precision, and each time it seemed there was nowhere thinner left to go.