Welcome to Ancient Greece

Our music was once divided into its proper forms...It was not permitted to exchange the melodic styles of these

established forms and others. Knowledge and informed judgment penalized disobedience. There were no whistles,

unmusical mob-noises, or clapping for applause. The rule was to listen silently and learn; boys, teachers, and the crowd were kept in order by threat of the stick. . . . But

later, an unmusical anarchy was led by poets who had natural talent, but were ignorant of the laws of

music...Through foolishness they deceived themselves into thinking that there was no right or wrong way in

music, that it was to be judged good or bad by the pleasure it gave. By their works and their theories they

infected the masses with the presumption to think themselves adequate judges. So our theatres, once silent,

grew vocal, and aristocracy of music gave way to a pernicious theatrocracy...the criterion was not music, but

a reputation for promiscuous cleverness and a spirit of law-breaking.[

Welcome to Ancient Greece

Ancient Greece Platos Socrates Aristotle

• Philosophy• Math• Science

Accident? Music = Mathemetics of the Cosmos???

Music in Greek Life Culture not unlike our own: Weddings Funerals Festivals Games (Olympics were born here after

all) Theater!

› But we will talk more about that later…

Music was a big part of life

But Music Theory = MATH music of the spheres

› the stars, the sun, the planets, all vibrating in harmony

mathematical and philosophical description of how the universe works

Pythagoras of Samos Math guy “Pythagorian

theorem”› `Don’t Worry Ms.

Askins will teach you later….

a2+b2=c2

Pythagoras of Samos According to legend, the way

Pythagoras discovered that musical notes could be translated into math equations was when one day he passed blacksmiths at work, and thought that the sounds from their anvils being hit were beautiful and musical and decided that whatever scientific law caused this to happen must be mathematical and could be applied to music.

Pythagoras of Samos He went to the

blacksmiths to learn how this had happened by looking at their tools, he discovered that it was because the hammers were "simple ratios of each other, one was half the size of the first, another was 2/3 the size, and so on."

Pythagoras of Samos MYTHBUSTED these ratios are only

work with string length (such as the string of a and not to hammer weight

However, Pythagoras probably discovered these properties of string length.

Music in Math Where else does MATH play a BIG part

in MUSIC?