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1 Proportions in Ancient and Medieval Music Manuel Pedro Ferreira This paper deals with a particular mode of thought embedded in both Ancient and Medieval music theory: a mathematical bent stemming from the idea that Music, based on proportional relationships which embody Number, is an audible symbol of a God-given ontological order. This mode of thought influenced the aesthetics of the Ancients and had a crucial impact on the rationalization of musical composition in the late Middle Ages!. Reporting the ideas of ancient Greek philosophers, an anonymous second- century writer known as the Pseudo-Plutarch wrote: “Everything, they say, was constructed by God on the basis of musical harmony”?. A similar train of thought led St. Jerome, about two hundred years later, to conclude that “(he who examines] the harmony of the world and the order and concord of all creatures, sings a spiritual song”?. These two quotes illustrate the continuity between pagan and Christian modes of thought in the late ancient world concerning the harmonious con- stitution of the universe’. But these quotes also suggest that the concept of Music was then far more comprehensive, and more widely applied, than it is today. In the Ancient and Medieval world, Music was more than just intentional, organized sound, as we now tend to think; it was, above all, the theoretical knowledge of the principles illustrated by organized sound. These are propor- tional, mathematical principles, coextensive with those which were thought 1 Written on request to be read at the IV Diderot Mathematical Forum for a non- musicological audience, this paper does not attempt to exhaust or to redefine the subject matter; for different, complementary approaches, see Willi Apel, “Mathematics and Music in the Middle Ages”, Musica e Arte Figurativa nei secoli X-XII, Todi: Accademia Tudertina, 1973, pp. 135-65, and Christian Meyer, “Mathématique et musique au Moyen Age”, Quadrivium. Musiques et Sciences, Paris: Editions ipmc, 1992, pp. 107-21. Andrew Barker, Greek Musical Writings: I. The Musician and his Art, Cam- bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984, pp. 248-49. Oliver Strunk, Source Reading in Music History. Antiquity and the Middle Ages, New York: W.W. Norton, 1965, p.72. Russell A. Peck, “Number as Cosmic Language”, By Things Seen: Reference and Recognition in Medieval Thought, ed. David Jeffrey, Ottawa: The University of Ottawa Press, 1979, pp. 47-80 (this essay appears also in Essays in the Numeri- cal Analysis of Medieval Literature, ed. Caroline Eckhardt, Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press. 1979). 2 M_P. Ferreira to rule the created world; Music was therefore regarded as fit to lift the soul from sensorial experience to the contemplation of eternal, cosmic truth. According to Cassiodorus, writing in the sixth century, Mathematics, “that science which considers abstract quantity”, has four divisions: Arith- metic, Music, Geometry and Astronomy. Music “is the discipline which treats of numbers in their relation to those things which are found in sounds, such as duple, triple, quadruple, and others called relative that are similar to these”. And he continues: “The parts of music are three: Harmonics, Rhythmics, Metrics. Harmonics is the musical science which distinguishes the high and low in sounds. Rhythmics is that which inquires whether words in combina- tion sound well or badly together. Metrics is that which by valid reasoning knows the measures of the various metres”>. Music, as a scientific discipline, was thus understood to be a mathematical science which encompassed the various aspects of ordered sound, including the sound of formal speech and poetry. The instrumental piece, the modu- lating voice, the poetic song, all were recognized as transient, yet organized phenomena. Sound, being, in St. Augustine’s words, “an impression upon the sense”, which “flows by into the past and is imprinted upon the memory”®, could only be apprehended by the intellect as abstract organization, which was identified with number, i.e. proportional conformity. This is why music could be defined as “the science of discrete, non-permanent quantity”, as Roger Bacon later put it in his Communia mathematica’. The Greek Heritage This view of Music as a theoretical discipline had already, by this time, had a long intellectual history. It had started, at least in the Western world, with Pythagoras, a philosopher who lived in the sixth century B.C. but from whom we do not have a single written line. We are nevertheless told, in no uncer- tain terms, by later writers, that he speculated about the correspondence between the consonant quality of some musical intervals and the simplicity and manifold mutual relations of the first four whole numbers*. , pp. 88-89. p.93, n. 2. The idea was later taken over by St. Isidore of 5 ©. Strunk, op. cit. 6 0. Strunk, op. ci Seville. 7 Roger Bacon, Communia Mathematica, ed. Robert Steele, London, 1940, p.51: Sciencia vero de quantitate discreta non-permanente est Musica. Bacon speaks often of Music in his mathematical writings, although with little originality. See also Robert Belle Burke (trans.), The Opus Majus of Roger Bacon, I, Philadel- phia, 1928, and Don Michael Randel, “Al-Farabi and the Role of Arabic Music Theory in the Latin Middle Ages” , Journal of the American Musicological Society, 29 (1976), pp. 173-88 [183-85, 187]. 8 Cf. GS. Kirk & J. Raven, The Pre-Socratic Philosophers, Cambridge: Cam- bridge University Press, 1966 (Portuguese translation, Lisbon: Gulbenkian, 1979, 1 Proportions in Ancient and Medieval Music 3 To illustrate, let us have a stretched string attached to a horizontal ruled scale, with a maximum vibrating lenghth of twelve units, whose sound, when pulled, we will take as reference. A vibrating portion of six units, i.e. half the maximum length, produces another sound an octave above the first. The interval of an octave can thus be identified with the proportion 1:2. A vibrating portion of four units, which corresponds to the proportion 1:3, sounds an octave and a fifth, or twelfth, above. A vibrating portion of three units, corresponding to the proportion 1:4, sounds two octaves above. We have thus three consonances related to three ratios, 1:2, 1:3, and 1:4, which are said to be multiple ratios, for the larger term is a multiple of the lesser one, which may be represented as n:rn. If we now take the numbers 1,2,3 and 4 and try to find other possible proportional, unequal combinations among them, we are left with two new ratios, 2:3 and 3:4. In both of them the larger term exceeds the smaller by one unit, illustrating the form n:n + 1. These ratios are called “epimore” or “superparticular”. We will be able to hear the interval corresponding to these ratios, selecting vibrating portions of eight against twelve units for the “hemiolic” 2:3 ratio (“hemiolic” meaning that the whole is exceeded by its half); and, again, nine against twelve units for the “epitrite” 3:4 ratio (“epitrite” meaning that the whole is exceeded by its third). We will then find, respectively, the intervals of a fifth and a fourth; both were considered consonant by the Greeks, not only on account of the interaction between their physical properties and human perception, but also because their relational use within the prevailing stylistic conditions allowed, in the absence of con- ventional assumptions to the contrary, the recognition of their “harmonious”, blending quality. Thus all the ratios comprised by the numbers 1, 2,3 and 4 imply, according to Pythagoras, consonant intervals. Two of them, the twelfth (1:3) and the double octave (1:4), can be decomposed into intervals of octave and fifth; the octave, the fifth and the fourth correspond to 1:2, 2:3 and 3:4, where 1:2 is not only multiple, but also superparticular as are the remaining ratios. Moreover, the successive ratios 1:2, 2:3 and 3:4, when combined using as reference the larger vibrating lenghth (| 12), form an octave (6:12) with a fourth and fifth inside, both when reckoned from top to bottom (e. g. 6:8:12) and from bottom to top (12:9:6). When these same ratios are combined in sucession (3:4:6:12), they form a double octave (3:12) with an octave down below (6:12), a fifth above it pp. 219-34); Andrew Barker, Greek Musical Writings, II: Harmonic and Acous- tic Theory, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989, pp. 28-45; Richard L. Crocker, “Pythagorean Mathematics and Music”, in id., Studies in Me- dieval Music Theory and the Early Sequence, Aldershot: Variorum, 1997 (chap- ter II).

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