Music: Art of the Muses Since ancient times music was regarded as the art par excellence. It goes to show the origin of the name "music" (from the greek musik), meaning "art of the Muses."
In fact, the Greeks, while each of the other arts attributed to one of the nine daughters of Zeus and Mnemosyne, the music was not only referring to two (Euterpe, Muse dell'auletica, that is the art of playing wind instruments, and lyrical Polinnia, inventor of the lyre, Muse of sacred hymns), but was headed to the Muses in general. The Olympus was filled with the inventors and guardians of music: Pan with pastoral syrinx (or pan flute), Dionysus, songwriter of intoxicating dithyrambs; Apollo lyre, harp virtuoso and guidance of the Muses, winner of the Silenus Marsyas, which had dared to challenge him with the flute, invented by Athena and thrown away because in the play is deformed cheeks. Apollo with the lyre consoled himself during his servitude at Admetus, calms the hostile forces of nature, enchanting animals. His follower Orpheus, in addition to the animals, charms and moves to pity Pluto and Cerberus in a bid to bring back Eurydice from underworld.
To resist the Siren song that drags the sailors in the swirling sea, Odysseus is tied to the mast of his ship. In the mythical Greek music can not only move the gods, demigods, men and animals can move even the stones: with the help of the pound of gold donated by Hermes, the twins Amphion and Zeto build the walls of Thebes. By contrast the biblical Joshua's trumpets bringing down the walls of Jericho.
Given these powers given to the music, the Greek philosophers and legislators give it a determining role in education and in civil law (ah.. Good times!).
Each of the ways of the greek music system was assigned a particular ethos , that is, a specific character defined not only by virtue of precise expression, but also capable of influencing human behavior. In Read in Symposium and especially in Republic, Plato outlines the role that music should play in the ideal state. He admits only two "modes": the Phrygian considered relevant to arouse enthusiasm and lead to the measured non-violence, and the Doric, "severe, serious, manly," suitable for chanting to encourage such noble enterprises (especially war).
Fragment of the first stasimon (choral) Oreste the tragedy of Euripides (fifth century BC.) Vocal notation and interpolation instrumental.
The rhythm is right in the songs of intense and vehement dramatic, with alternating feet and ternary quinari and that, for its dicing and the strength of accents, just has an ethos of great excitement . Author: Anonymous (Euripides?)
listen to an example of what could be the time of Euripides:
The choral piece is Euripides' old most conspicuous example of a music we own color.
Apart the fact that the music from ancient Greece we have received no more than a dozen songs (some fragmentary and of uncertain origin), the 'ethos and the expressive power of this music are noticeably weakened, but not directly graspable .
must consider, however, that even today the Serbian music its striking effectiveness is demonstrated, inter alia by the fact that advertising that floods us with a continuous stream of media almost always uses mass media to music, even if often trivial. (The sad thing is that music, for the general public is only "support" .. in advertising support, support in the movies, when support is traveling and listening to the radio, in public support ... etc. ..).
Plato assigned to music instead of high task: he must not only help maintain civil order and social, but also to govern the state and the entire cosmos. In Timaeus, Plato tells how God proceeded to the formation of the 'soul of the world "by means of musical intervals characteristic of the Dorian mode, as he had calculated Pythagoras. Proportionate intervals between the seven notes are matched also the distances between the seven heavenly spheres and orbits of the planets.
An echo of this theory of the harmony of the spheres will no Treaty on The harmony of the world that G. Kepler publish in 1619. In the mythical traditions of various primitive peoples, but also Chinese, Indians and Egyptians, the sound appears to originate in factors that trigger the creation of the world.
The Word which St. John stands at the beginning of all things, is sung in the Indian cosmogony. Prayapati, the god of creation, is identified with a melody detonated the first rumble of thunder from the image. Its shares become distinctive sky, atmosphere, land. Come to think of the big-bang theory "advocated today by some of the greatest living scientists, according to which our universe could have originated about 20 billion years ago by a huge explosion that would fill the space (previously empty) of each species of material particles.
would echoes of that "big sound" that began the world the microwave radiation coming from all over the cosmos and that were discovered in 1964 by A. Penzias and R. Wilson.
the legendary music coelestis that, according to medieval theorists, resounded from the heavens, to the music that rule the world (music mundana ) which begins in the heart of man "as he wrote Lih Pu-wei (239 BC ) talking about symbolic Chinese legends about the origins of musical genres and scales. Throughout the history of civilization the concepts and definitions of music ranges from a mystical spiritualism and metaphysical humanism aimed at a direct expression of subjective feelings.
San Basilio considers the music of the angels, "St. Gregory the Great is depicted in the act of writing music under the dictation of the Holy Spirit: a white dove told him about the ear. N. Cusano, echoing Plato, asserts that God would have been worth of music in creating the world in order to establish between the various elements of harmonic relationships such that "the machine in the world can not perish." Not for nothing, the music was part of the medieval liberal arts Quadrivium these mathematical set arithmetic, geometry and astronomy.
the early eighteenth century GWLeibnitz define the music "exercitium Arithmeticae occultum nescientis if numeraries minds" (an occult practice of arithmetic in which the soul seeks the numbers without knowing it). Schopenhauer parafraserà this definition: "Musica est exercitium metaphysicae occultum nescientis if philosophari minds" that "Music is an occult practice of metaphysics in which the soul makes philosophy without knowing it" (what's more just the words of German philosopher !).
Conversely idealistic currents in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the prevailing conception of music as an expression of irrational emotional subjectivity.
G. Bruno emphasizes the power of music to move the affections. B. Spinoza rebels against the idea of \u200b\u200ba music coelestis considered to result from a wrong anthropomorphic concept of God: "What excites It is called the hearing sound, noise, harmony, the latter has so enchanted the men they thought that even God was delighted with the harmony ... "
Even the French philosophers, from Descartes to Rousseau R., in general are inclined to subjective interpretation of the music.
considered to be too subjective and irrational, the leading exponents of classical rationalism, N. Boileau to JBBoussuet and F. Fenelon, show a "total lack of confidence in music as an autonomous art." I Notes to the definitions given by the opera-C.Saint Evremond: "c'est une magnifique opéra sottise" (the work is a magnificent nonsense), and the ironic question of B. Fontanelle: "Sonate, que me veux-tu? "(What do you want from me, sonata?)
prevailing conceptions of the nineteenth century romantic music such as that standard which defines it as" the art of expressing feelings through sounds.
Against similar conceptions of content directs his polemic E. Hanslick, the relentless opponent of R. Wagner.
For Hanslick, the music is nothing but a series of "sound forms in motion." This statement riecheggierà in the twenties (the 900 , s' is) in the joke that I threw Strawinskij when acting as the leader of the neo-classical reaction against the expression "the music is too stupid to express something." Hanslick explained his attitude by claiming that "only by denying the emotional content of music if they can save the spiritual content." Strawinskij, for its part, recognizing the controversy exaggeration of his irreverent wit, claiming the music with the task of "promoting a communion, a union of man with his neighbor and Being", as well as to organize , "to order the time," to reflect the "Great universal order." Hanslick was among the first to admit that the aging, the aging of the music are much more rapid than in the other arts. In his essay "The beauty of Music" says: "There is no art that will knock out many forms such as music ...". This finding is based on observation of the "extraordinary diversity of the effect that many compositions by Mozart, Beethoven and Weber produced on the soul of the listeners of the time as opposed to now. How many works of Mozart are judged on their time as the most passionate music, hotter and more daring that could exist, as the maximum that could be achieved in the representation of moods! The sense of serenity and well being of pure Haydn was opposed to the burst of violent passions, the most severe fighting, bitter and sharp pain in the music of Mozart. Twenty years later he did exactly the same distinction between Mozart and Beethoven. The place of Mozart as a representative of the overwhelming passion alive and was occupied by Beethoven, Mozart and Haydn's classicism was promoted to the Olimpico.
Roman Vlad (built by myself)
( Autograph of the first page, introduction and first theme ) 
