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

The situation of music at the end of the ancient world Who lived in a province of the Roman Empire in the fifth century of the Christian era Could see roads where people had once traveled and now no longer Traveled, temples and arenas built for multitudes now voted to abandon them And to the mine, and life, generation after generation, a little everywhere, taking Increasingly poor, insecure and more difficult. Rome, in the time of its greatness, Peace in most of western Europe, as well as in Africa and Asia, but in the meantime had weakened and was no longer able to defend. The barbarians were coming from the North and the East, and civilization The whole of Europe was disintegrating into fragments that only many centuries later Would gradually begin to merge again, giving birth to modern nations. The decline and fall of Rome marked European history so deeply That we still find it difficult today to realize that, in parallel with the Process of destruction, an inverse process of...

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...

Musicology reports to Pythagoras

Musicology reports to Pythagoras (6th century BC) the role of being the first philosopher to organize what will later be called in general lines of musical theory, despite the contradictory data that surround this character. The first of these refers to the fact that no written account has come to us, for what came was secondary material: accounts by contemporary authors such as Herodotus, Heraclitus, and Xenophanes; Of authors who would have been students or followers of their doctrines, called Pythagoreans; Or later authors, Pythagoreans or not. The common point between these narratives is the contradiction of information, whether of the theories of their doctrine, or even of the qualities attributed. • Pythagoras From charlatan to demigod, there is a wide range of varied definitions. 'Another aspect concerns the presence of Pythagoras in the history of music. In several periods (the Middle Ages, Baroque and even in the twentieth century), there are references to him ...