Talk:Musical harmony
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 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.AlanE 04:20, 23 May 2007 (EDT)
- Indeed. Didn't Pythagoras discover the 4:5:6 ratio in the frequencies of the major chord? And it seems unlikely, to say the least, that he invented that chord. Dpbsmith 08:05, 23 May 2007 (EDT)
He did. Once again I have to rely on my faithful books. Groves defines a chord as: "The simultaneous sounding of two or more notes." The Oxford Companion, when describing harmony, calls it a "...a succession of chords,..." It may be that my books are describing the harmonization of melody as removed from the, um, static sound of a chord. Certainly Oxford goes on about the ninth century being the time when the "tune" or melodic line, "formally sung by all the voices in unison", was given to the middle voices (tenors) whilst the other voices "enwrapped them". And my Chamber's Encyclopedia calls the period 850-1160 "the advent of polyphony".
That was church music of course, which is all we have that is described - the songs of the field and feast have not come down to us, and it may be that these lusty folk were not as imprisoned in the form of the music, and harmonized like mad. I too find it hard to understand something so basic as a harmonized tune would be so relatively recent. I tend to hope you are right. AlanE 16:03, 23 May 2007 (EDT)