About the book: 2023 / The Flood and the murder of Abel; Belshazzar's feast and the adoration of the Magi; The Baptism of the Lord and the capture of Jericho - many of us are accustomed to recognizing these subjects when we encounter them in the visual arts, and can place them in the chronology of biblical events... or not? This book is about music based on major stories from the Old and New Testaments. The reader's path will lie from the Creation of the world to the Last Judgment, and in musical chronology - from a madrigal by an unknown author of the 16th century. to the words of the Song of Songs of King Solomon to a surreal vocal cycle of the 21st century, based on American spirituals. A mysterious gift - a new life that Adam, an as yet unnamed woman, finds next to him when he wakes up. These lines, again striving upward, shed even more light on the listener: harmony for the first time comes to a stable, bright major. At this point, a microscopic arioso is skillfully inserted into the song, paraphrasing the biblical words of Adam in the second person - “Behold, this is bone of your bone and flesh of your flesh”; solemn and tender, dancing and enthusiastic, where the descending vocal and ascending lute lines form an elegant mirror symmetry. “Biblical motives” by music journalist Lyalya Kandaurova will allow you to remember the main plots of the Bible, and most importantly, to recognize the music created on their basis by composers of six centuries. Among them are famous authors such as Stravinsky or Brahms, and those whom the reader may yet discover for himself, such as Johann Kuhnau or Gideon Klein. The book contains QR codes - with their help you can, without being distracted from reading, find and hear the works in question. The mosaic of spiritual texts, personally selected by Brahms for the motet, constitutes a kind of “plot”. It starts without any prelude, at the point of maximum despair: with Job’s cry, “Why is light given to the sufferer, and life to those to whom it is a burden?” Expressive in themselves, these words are musically interpreted in such a way that they sound very personal, subjective: the question “why” (German warum) is turned by Brahms into a refrain, several times cutting through the polyphonic fabric of the movement with a general choral exclamation. Cold and bright sound of cluster chords , performed by woodwinds against the backdrop of quietly stirring darkness in the bass, the afterlife timbre and priestly exclamations of trombones, since ancient times associated with the element of the sacred, the ritual muttering of horns - everything could be written by the hand of a single author and instantly evokes in the listener’s memory the “Symphony of Psalms” and others spiritual works of Stravinsky. One could say that the six-minute score of "Babel" seems to be made of the same musical substance - perhaps in a slightly simplified and concentrated form. For whomFor music lovers, musicians, musicologists, religious scholars.