LYCOS RETRIEVER Beta Retriever Home  |  What is Lycos Retriever?   
Pythagoras: Music
built 264 days ago
Pythagoras was exceptional amongst the great philsophers for having been a musician and having discovered the most important musical relationships. His ideas of divine harmony have no less importance today more than 2500 years after he described them.
Source:
Pythagoras taught that each of the seven planets produced by its orbit a particular note according to its distance from the still centre which was the Earth. The distance in each case was like the subdivisions of the string refered to above. This is what was called Musica Mundana, which is usually translated as Music of the Spheres. The sound produced is so exquisite and rarified that our ordinary ears are unable to hear it. It is the Cosmic Music which, according to Philo of Alexandria, Moses had heard when he recieved the Tablets on Mount Sinai, and which St Augustine believed men hear on the point of death, revealing to them the highest reality of the Cosmos. (Carlo Bertelli, Piero della Francesca, p. 60.) This music is present everywhere and governs all temporal cycles, such as the seasons, biological cycles, and all the rhythms of nature. Together with its underlying mathematical laws of proportion it is the sound of the harmony of the created being of the universe, the harmony of what Plato called the "one visible living being, containing within itself all living beings of the same natural order".
Pythagoras Pythagoras of Samos, a very wise teacher of ancient Greece, knew how to work with sound. He taught his students how certain musical chords and melodies produce definite responses within the human organism. He demonstrated that the right sequence of sounds, played musically on an instrument, can change behavior patterns and accelerate the healingprocess.
Pythagoras was born on the Greek island of Samos, site of a "monumental" temple to Hera, queen of the Olympian gods. His mother Pythias was a native of the island and his father was granted citizenship for giving grain to islanders during a drought. His birth was predicted by the oracle at Delphi, and Pythagoras was considered a semi-diety, the son of Apollo by a virgin birth. He spoke in parables called akousmata, the basis of many biblical parables, and was said to have worked miracles, conversed with daemons and heard the music of the stars.
Pythagoras was very interested in music, and so were his followers. The Pythagoreans were musicians as well as mathematicians. Pythagoras wanted to improve the music of his day, which he believed was not harmonious enough and was too hectic.
SEARCH
MORE ABOUT