A song can move what has no ears — stones, trees, and the cold lord of the dead. Our witness for magic music is Apollodorus's The Library (Bibliotheca), a Greek mythography of the first and second centuries CE, which files the power under Orpheus, the son who "practised minstrelsy" and by his songs "moved stones and trees." When his wife Eurydice died, "bitten by a snake," he "went down to Hades" to fetch her, and there his music did what no force could: he "persuaded Pluto to send her up."

The single condition was patience. Pluto would free her if, walking out, Orpheus "would not turn round" before he reached his own house; but "turning round beheld his wife", and "so she turned back" into the dark. The same page holds a second musician close by — Thamyris, who "engaged in a musical contest with the Muses" on a reckless wager: "if he won, he should enjoy them all", and if he lost, whatever they cared to take. Defeated, he was "bereft of what they would", losing both his eyes and his song. On this shelf the marvel cuts two ways: music opens the gate of death, and music is the wager a mortal loses to the gods.

The record's companion authority here — Hermes and Argos — is named but not wired to served text, so only the Greek Orpheus sounds for us today. If a song can persuade death to loosen its grip, why should a single backward glance be enough to undo it?