Reading the philosophy of music…
Pythagoras (490 BC) believed that music embodied unique mathematical mysteries. Musical order & beauty was the result of a mathematical harmony carved out of noise. Originated the idea of the heavenly ‘music of spheres’. Inaudible, made by the movements of the planets around the earth. Plato (380 BC) highlighted the role of music in the management of emotions (The Republic). Harmony was an elegant expression of simplicity, delight & temperance.
Schelling, a transcendental idealists thought that instrumental music was the purest of arts, a rare glimpse into the absolute, the divine. Schopenhauer loved & correlated music to an inexplicable experience into the sensory realms, inspiring a feeling of oneness with something beyond ourselves. Nietzsche proposed that the two essential elements of music need to be carefully balanced – the creative order or organisation & the chaotic inspiration or imagination. Interesting insights.
