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Please add citations. Also, harmony likely predates your guess by thousands of years. If yours is the first WRITTEN instance, please state that.
Please add citations. Also, harmony likely predates your guess by thousands of years. If yours is the first WRITTEN instance, please state that.
The 'Oxford Companion to Music' mentions the ninth century as when harmony arrived, calling it "the clothing of melody". Groves, which is generally considered the final word on musical matters, states that music, for some inexplicable reason, has been always lagged far behind the other arts. When western Europe was creating wonders in architecture and art and literature, its music was still quite unsophisticated. It also states that, at the same time, harmony in western music is far more developed than in other cultures.
I find it hard to believe that two fellows wandering home from the field on a summers evening in ancient Greece wouldn't "harmonize"....but there you go. I do know that the harmonies in Debussy's "Afternoon of a Faun" were considered positively painful in the 1890s; and listen to it now! I'm no musicologist, just a devout lover, but when I listen to 11th century Hildegarde von Bingham, or Peter Abelard, I can see that those harmonies had not been around for thousands of years. They were so fundamentally simple that if they had been around for a millenium or so,then there was a serious case of arrested development going on.[[User:AlanE|AlanE]] 04:20, 23 May 2007 (EDT)