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Regardless of your familiarity with Pythagoras, this article will aim to put the hype in hypotenuse and take you through the full complement of the contributions of Pythagoras in music theory.
Pythagoras—the Greek philosopher, initiate, and teacher—stood at the point of the marriage of music, science, and mysticism.2 He was one of the first “scientists,” and as an initiate, he asked deep questions of the universe.
Pythagoras taught the belief that numbers were a guide to the interpretation of the universe. Mathematics could explain everything, including music. Legend states that one day Pythagoras was walking past a smithy’s workshop, listening to the sound of the blacksmith’s hammers on the anvil.
Having once established music as an exact science, Pythagoras applied his newly found law of harmonic intervals to all the phenomena of Nature, even going so far as to demonstrate the harmonic relationship of the planets, constellations, and elements to each other.
Within Ancient Greek music, the system had been mainly attributed to Pythagoras (who lived around 500 BCE) by modern authors of music theory; Ancient Greeks borrowed much of their music theory from Mesopotamia, including the diatonic scale, Pythagorean tuning, and modes.
Beginning in ancient Greece and reaching the 20th century, I will examine various theories of music as well as mathematics with the apex of Pythagoras, the father of musical theory and Ianis Xenakis, the excellent and pioneering architect.
How does music work? What did an Ancient Greek philosopher have to do with it? Why did he keep drowning people?Discover the answers to these questions and mo...
Pythagoras (~570 BC) was the first to link music and mathematics. He built a monochord (a tensioned string with a movable bridge that determines how much of the string is free to vibrate). Plucking the free string produced a sound. Pythagoras called this sound base pitch.
While Pythagoras took the mysticism of music and turned it into a mathematical language, Sappho took the ancient tradition of sacred singing and turned it into a new literary genre of personal poetics.
Pythagoras (~570 BC) was the first to link music and mathematics. He built a monochord (a tensioned string with a movable bridge that determines how much of the string is free to vibrate). Plucking the free string produced a sound. Pythagoras called this sound base pitch.