Harmony is derived from the classical Greek harmonia (meaning a joint between the planks of a ship or a joining of those planks). From the beginning, the term was also used in its current metaphorical sense, that of a combination of parts or related things to form a consistent whole or an agreement.
At some point Plato's sirens were replaced by Muses, possibly in the lost commentary on the Republic by the Neoplatonist Porphyry (c. 234–c. 305). A unique passage transmitting the "musical" version of Plato's image is found in the first book of Martianus Capella's fifth-century Neoplatonic treatise, De nuptiis Philologiae et Mercurii (On the marriage of P…
By about the middle of the ninth century, during the Carolingian era, writers on the subject of music began to produce treatises that contained large excerpts from the writers cited above, but that attempted to place the Pythagorean–Platonic harmonic tradition within a Christian framework and adapt it to the current need to codify and regulate the performance of liturgical chant within the …
In a significant departure from its original meaning in Greek music theory as the melodic or horizontal combination of two different notes, the term harmony, beginning with the two-voice polyphony of the Middle Ages, came to refer to the simultaneous or vertical combination of two or more notes, as well as the horizontal or linear relationships between the complex sounds thus produced. The primary…
Aurelian of Réôme. Musica disciplina. Translated by Joseph Ponte. Colorado Springs: Colorado College Music Press, 1968. Boethius. De institutione musica. Translated, with introduction and notes, by Calvin M. Bower. Edited by Claude V. Palisca. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989. Martianus Capella. De nuptiis Philologiae et Mercurii. Edited by James Willis. Leipzig: B. G. Teubner, 198…
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