Skip to main content

The Greeks and the music

The verbal relationship suggests that among the Greeks music was conceived as something common to all activities that concerned the pursuit of beauty and truth. In the teachings of Pythagoras and his followers music and arithmetic were not separate disciplines; The numbers were considered the key of the whole spiritual and physical universe; Thus, the system of sounds and musical rhythms, being governed by number, exemplified the harmony of the cosmos and corresponded to this harmony. It was Plato who, in the Timaeus (the best known of all his dialogues in the Middle Ages) and in the Republic, expounded this doctrine in a more complete and systematic way.


MUSIC IN LIFE AND IN THE THOUGHT OF ANCIENT GREECE


Greek mythology attributed to music divine origin and designated as its inventors and first interpreters gods and demigods, like Apollo, Amphion and Orpheus. In this obscure prehistoric world, music had magical powers: people thought it was capable of curing disease, purifying body and spirit, and working miracles in the realm of Nature. Also in the Old Testament the same powers were attributed to music: just remember the episode in which David heals the folly of Saul playing harp (1 Samuel 16: 14-23) or the sound of trumpets and voices that overturned the walls of Jericho (Joshua 6: 12-20)

Tetracordes


Two tetracordes could be combined in two different ways to form heptacordes (seven note systems) and one or two octave systems. If the last note of one tetracorde was also the first of another, the tetracordes were said to be sets; If they were separated by an entire tone, were disjoint (see example 1.2, where T = integer and m = halftone). Hence it derived, over time, the complete perfect system - a two-octave scale composed of alternately set and disjoint tetracords, as seen in Example 1.3. The most serious of this system, since it was outside the tetracord system, was considered a supplementary tone (proslambanomenos).

Aristoxene


Aristoxene argued that the true method for determining intervals was through the ear, and not of numerical quotients, as the followers of Pythagoras thought. However, to describe the amplitude of intervals smaller than the fourth divided the whole tone into twelve equal parts and used these as units of measure. From the descriptions of Aristoxene and some texts of later theoreticians we can infer that the ancient Greeks, like most of the eastern peoples, still in our day, made current use of intervals smaller than the halftone. And indeed we find such microtons in the fragment of Euripides


Comments

Popular posts from this blog

We can divide the history of music in different periods

We can divide the history of music into distinct periods, each identified by the style that is peculiar. Of course, a musical style is not made overnight. This is a slow and gradual process, almost always with styles overlapping each other, so as to allow the "new" to emerge from the "old." For this reason, musicologists hardly agree on the dates that mark the beginning and end of a period, or even on the names to be used in the description of the style that characterizes it. However, here we present a way of dividing the history of western music into six major periods, indicating the corresponding dates:

Melody Of course what is melody

Melody Of course what is melody, a very common word, whose meaning however is difficult to accurately pinpoint. A musical dictionary suggests the following definition: "sequence of notes, of different sounds, organized in a given form so as to make musical sense for the listener." However the way to react to a melody is a very personal matter. What makes "musical sense" to one may be unacceptable to another, and what is interesting and even beautiful to one person may leave another entirely indifferent. Harmony Harmony occurs when two or more notes of different sounds are heard at the same time, producing a chord. Chords are of two types: consonants, in which the notes agree with each other, and dissonant, in which the notes disclose to a greater or lesser degree, bringing the element of tension to the musical phrase. We use the word "harmony" in two ways: to refer to the selection of notes that constitute a given chord and, in the broad sense, to describ...

Musical theory and practice in the Middle Ages

Musical theory and practice in the Middle Ages    The treatises of the Carolingian era and the lower Middle Ages were much more For practice than those of the classical and post-classical or the early Christianity.     Although Boethius never ceased to be quoted with veneration and the The mathematical fundamentals of music transmitted by it have continued to constitute The basis of the construction of scales and speculation about the intervals and Consonances, his writings were not very useful when it came to Solving the immediate problems of rating, reading, classification and interpretation of Or improvising and composing organum and other primitive forms of polyphony. Such were now the dominant topics of the treaties.     For example, Guido Of Arezzo, in his Micrologus (c. 1025-1028) attributes to Boethius the exposition of quotients Intervals. Guido tells the story of the discovery of these relations Numbers from the sound of a bla...