Attempt at a New Theory of Music

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For in his attempt to break [the previous system], he retreated too far in the opposite direction, striving to strip all power of numbers and ratios from music. In the meantime, however, not even this Aristoxenus Aristoxenus (4th century BCE) was a Greek philosopher who argued that the human ear, rather than mathematical ratios, should be the judge of musical intervals. dared to assert that a well-composed melody pleases the ears at random and without any underlying reason: he only denied that the cause of pleasure was located in the proportions established by Pythagoras Pythagoras (6th century BCE) famously discovered that musical intervals could be expressed as mathematical ratios, such as 2:1 for an octave.. And while he thought the entire judgment concerning consonances consonances: intervals that sound harmonious or stable to the ear should be left to the ears, he preferred to remain ignorant of the source itself rather than admit the doctrine of Pythagoras, which was insufficient and still entangled in many errors.

Indeed, at this time, it seems we should doubt with much greater justification whether any musical theory original: "theoria musica" can be given at all, through which it might be explained why any given melody pleases or displeases. For not only do we find the music of barbarians In this context, "barbarians" refers to non-European or non-Western cultures whose musical scales differed from the Latin tradition. abominable, though it usually pleases them wonderfully, but they in turn [find the same] in our music