“Music, therefore, is a most excellent training, because rhythm and harmony find their way into the inner parts of the soul ‘imparting grace, and making the soul of him who is rightly educated graceful.’ Our souls resound with the same harmonies as the cosmos, because the circles in our souls can execute revolutions answering those of the cosmos. But it is only through philosophy that we are able to attain to this highest music, as our circles are thrown out of gear by birth. Consequently music has the power to lead back the soul from the state of unrest to that of harmony, to correct the character, to heal mental diseases. On this power Greek philosophers from Plato onwards laid particular stress; for the same reason they considered music to be a perfect instrument of education….” from A history of Byzantine music and hymnography by Egon Wellesz
I think I may have found the beginning of some support for a little idea that I’ve had about the perfection of music. Since learning about the different tuning systems from Pythagoras to equal-tempered, I’ve had this nagging idea that music along with the rest of the world is corrupt because of the fall. As a side note, that does not mean that we should reject music because it is corrupt, but rather we should pursue it like anything else and cause its improvement.
I have two theses about the corruption of music. I haven’t decided which I’d rather go with, maybe both. First, that music is just another extension of creation and is thus corrupted, but will eventually be restored to its original nature. Or second, that the way we hear sounds and music is reflected from our corrupt nature only, i.e. it’s because our ears are corrupted that we hear music differently. I guess it could be a mixture of both.
All tuning systems have some sort of error that they have to account for. Pythagorean tuning lumps all the error into unusable keys, but it has perfect intervals (according to his ratio and number system) in other keys. Equal – tempered tuning spreads the error out into all keys, so we have the same distance between all notes in all keys. There are varying systems that go between those two.
Our ears, in the western world, are accustomed to hearing the well-tempered tuning system. Other cultures, like China and India, indiginously, do not have the same type of system that we have, and their ears are suited to a different way of hearing music. We perpetuate the sounds we like to hear, what we think sounds ‘good.’ Therefore it could be that our ears are what’s making the music sound good, even though technically, it could be more pure if thought of in a different way.
In the way that the Greeks thought about music, the ratios and numbers to describe the way a string gives off certain frequencies have a direct correlation between the cosmos and music. It is interesting to me that he mentions that birth throws our connection to the world off, and we must be musically educated to get our circles back in alignment. Music, they say, can heal you (maybe this is why musical therapy is getting more popular now). I wonder as well, if one of the reasons why the Byzantine Liturgy is sung is because it is a ‘means of grace’ as my old Calvinist buddies would call it. I guess in Orthodox terms it would be living a sacramental life, and everything that occurrs in Church is an outpouring of God’s grace and love.
