Music theory - Wikipedia

Music theory - Wikipedia

Music theory

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Jubal, Pythagoras and Philolaus engaged in theoretical investigations, in a woodcut from Franchinus Gaffurius, Theorica musicæ (1492)

Music theory is the study of the practices and possibilities of music. The Oxford Companion to Music describes three interrelated uses of the term "music theory". The first is the "rudiments", that are needed to understand music notation (key signatures, time signatures, and rhythmic notation); the second is learning scholars' views on music from antiquity to the present; the third is a sub-topic of musicology that "seeks to define processes and general principles in music". The musicological approach to theory differs from music analysis "in that it takes as its starting-point not the individual work or performance but the fundamental materials from which it is built."^[1]

Music theory is frequently concerned with describing how musicians and composers make music, including tuning systems and composition methods among other topics. Because of the ever-expanding conception of what constitutes music, a more inclusive definition could be the consideration of any sonic phenomena, including silence. This is not an absolute guideline, however; for example, the study of "music" in the Quadrivium liberal arts university curriculum, that was common in medieval Europe, was an abstract system of proportions that was carefully studied at a distance from actual musical practice.^{[n 1]} But this medieval discipline became the basis for tuning systems in later centuries and is generally included in modern scholarship on the history of music theory.^{[n 2]}

Music theory as a practical discipline encompasses the methods and concepts that composers and other musicians use in creating music. The development, preservation, and transmission of music theory in this sense may be found in oral and written music-making traditions, musical instruments, and other artifacts. For example, ancient instruments from prehistoric sites around the world reveal details about the music they produced and potentially something of the musical theory that might have been used by their makers. In ancient and living cultures around the world, the deep and long roots of music theory are visible in instruments, oral traditions, and current music-making. Many cultures have also considered music theory in more formal ways such as written treatises and music notation. Practical and scholarly traditions overlap, as many practical treatises about music place themselves within a tradition of other treatises, which are cited regularly just as scholarly writing cites earlier research.

In modern academia, music theory is a subfield of musicology, the wider study of musical cultures and history. Etymologically, music theory, is an act of contemplation of music, from the Greek word θεωρία, meaning a looking at, a viewing; a contemplation, speculation, theory; a sight, a spectacle.^[3] As such, it is often concerned with abstract musical aspects such as tuning and tonal systems, scales, consonance and dissonance, and rhythmic relationships. In addition, there is also a body of theory concerning practical aspects, such as the creation or the performance of music, orchestration, ornamentation, improvisation, and electronic sound production.^[4] A person who researches or teaches music theory is a music theorist. University study, typically to the MA or PhD level, is required to teach as a tenure-track music theorist in a US or Canadian university. Methods of analysis include mathematics, graphic analysis, and especially analysis enabled by western music notation. Comparative, descriptive, statistical, and other methods are also used. Music theory textbooks, especially in the United States of America, often include elements of musical acoustics, considerations of musical notation, and techniques of tonal composition (harmony and counterpoint), among other topics.

Contents

• 1History
  • 1.1Prehistory
  • 1.2Antiquity
    • 1.2.1Mesopotamia
    • 1.2.2China
    • 1.2.3India
    • 1.2.4Greece
  • 1.3Post-classical
    • 1.3.1China
    • 1.3.2Arabic countries / Persian countries
    • 1.3.3Europe
  • 1.4Modern
    • 1.4.1Middle Eastern and Central Asian countries
    • 1.4.2Europe
  • 1.5Contemporary
• 2Fundamentals of music
  • 2.1Pitch
  • 2.2Scales and modes
  • 2.3Consonance and dissonance
  • 2.4Rhythm
  • 2.5Melody
  • 2.6Chord
  • 2.7Harmony
  • 2.8Timbre
    • 2.8.1Dynamics
    • 2.8.2Articulation
  • 2.9Texture
  • 2.10Form or structure
  • 2.11Expression
  • 2.12Notation
• 3As academic discipline
  • 3.1Analysis
  • 3.2Music perception and cognition
  • 3.3Genre and technique
  • 3.4Mathematics
  • 3.5Serial composition and set theory
  • 3.6Musical semiotics
  • 3.7Education and careers
• 4See also
• 5Notes
• 6References
  • 6.1Sources
• 7Further reading
• 8External links

History[edit]

Main article: History of music

Prehistory[edit]

Main article: Prehistoric music

Preserved prehistoric instruments, artifacts, and later depictions of performance in artworks can give clues to the structure of pitch systems in prehistoric cultures. See for instance Paleolithic flutes, Gǔdí, and Anasazi flute.

Antiquity[edit]

Mesopotamia[edit]

See also: Music of Mesopotamia

Several surviving Sumerian and Akkadian clay tablets include musical information of a theoretical nature, mainly lists of intervals and tunings.^[5] The scholar Sam Mirelman reports that the earliest of these texts dates from before 1500 BCE, a millennium earlier than surviving evidence from any other culture of comparable musical thought. Further, "All the Mesopotamian texts [about music] are united by the use of a terminology for music that, according to the approximate dating of the texts, was in use for over 1,000 years."^[6]

China[edit]

See also: Music of China and Chinese musicology

Much of Chinese music history and theory remains unclear.^[7]

Chinese theory starts from numbers, the main musical numbers being twelve, five and eight. Twelve refers to the number of pitches on which the scales can be constructed. The Lüshi chunqiu from about 239 BCE recalls the legend of Ling Lun. On order of the Yellow Emperor, Ling Lun collected twelve bamboo lengths with thick and even nodes. Blowing on one of these like a pipe, he found its sound agreeable and named it huangzhong, the "Yellow Bell." He then heard phoenixes singing. The male and female phoenix each sang six tones. Ling Lun cut his bamboo pipes to match the pitches of the phoenixes, producing twelve pitch pipes in two sets: six from the male phoenix and six from the female: these were called the lülü or later the shierlü.^[8]

Apart from technical and structural aspects, ancient Chinese music theory also discusses topics such as the nature and functions of music. The Yueji ("Record of music", c1st and 2nd centuries BCE), for example, manifests Confucian moral theories of understanding music in its social context. Studied and implemented by Confucian scholar-officials [...], these theories helped form a musical Confucianism that overshadowed but did not erase rival approaches. These include the assertion of Mozi (c. 468 – c. 376 BCE) that music wasted human and material resources, and Laozi's claim that the greatest music had no sounds. [...] Even the music of the qin zither, a genre closely affiliated with Confucian scholar-officials, includes many works with Daoist references, such as Tianfeng huanpei ("Heavenly Breeze and Sounds of Jade Pendants").^[7]

India[edit]

See also: Music of India

The Samaveda and Yajurveda (c. 1200 – 1000 BCE) are among the earliest testimonies of Indian music, but they contain no theory properly speaking. The Natya Shastra, written between 200 BCE to 200 CE, discusses intervals (Śrutis), scales (Grāmas), consonances and dissonances, classes of melodic structure (Mūrchanās, modes?), melodic types (Jātis), instruments, etc.^[9]

Greece[edit]

See also: Musical system of ancient Greece and List of music theorists § Antiquity

Early preserved Greek writings on music theory include two types of works:^[10]

• technical manuals describing the Greek musical system including notation, scales, consonance and dissonance, rhythm, and types of musical compositions
• treatises on the way in which music reveals universal patterns of order leading to the highest levels of knowledge and understanding.

Several names of theorists are known before these works, including Pythagoras (c. 570 – c. 495 BCE), Philolaus (c. 470 – c. 385 BCE), Archytas (428–347 BCE), and others.

Works of the first type (technical manuals) include

• Anonymous (erroneously attributed to Euclid) Division of the Canon, Κατατομή κανόνος, 4th–3rd century BCE.^[11]
• Theon of Smyrna, On Mathematics Useful for the Understanding of Plato, Τωv κατά τό μαθηματικόν χρησίμων είς τήν Πλάτωνος άνάγνωσις, 115–140 CE.
• Nicomachus of Gerasa, Manual of Harmonics, Άρμονικόν έγχειρίδιον, 100–150 CE
• Cleonides, Introduction to Harmonics, Είσαγωγή άρμονική, 2nd century CE.
• Gaudentius, Harmonic Introduction, Άρμονική είσαγωγή, 3d or 4th century CE.
• Bacchius Geron, Introduction to the Art of Music, Είσαγωγή τέχνης μουσικής, 4th century CE or later.
• Alypius, Introduction to Music, Είσαγωγή μουσική, 4th–5th century CE.

More philosophical treatises of the second type include

• Aristoxenus, Harmonic Elements, Άρμονικά στοιχεία, 375/360 – after 320 BCE.
• Aristoxenus, Rhythmic Elements, Ρυθμικά στοιχεία.
• Claudius Ptolemy, Harmonics, Άρμονικά, 127–148 CE.
• Porphyrius, On Ptolemy's Harmonics, Είς τά άρμονικά Πτολεμαίον ύπόμνημα, 232/3–c. 305 CE.

Post-classical[edit]

See also: List of music theorists § Post-classical

See also: List of medieval music theorists

China[edit]

The pipa instrument carried with it a theory of musical modes that subsequently led to the Sui and Tang theory of 84 musical modes.^[7]

Arabic countries / Persian countries[edit]

Medieval Arabic music theorists include:^{[n 3]}

• Abū Yūsuf Ya'qūb al-Kindi († Bagdad, 873 CE), who uses the first twelve letters of the alphabet to describe the twelve frets on five strings of the oud, producing a chromatic scale of 25 degrees.^[12]
• [Yaḥyā ibn] al-Munajjim (Baghdad, 856–912), author of Risāla fī al-mūsīqī ("Treatise on music", MS GB-Lbl Oriental 2361) which describes a Pythagorean tuning of the oud and a system of eight modes perhaps inspired by Ishaq al-Mawsili (767–850).^[13]
• Abū n-Nașr Muḥammad al-Fārābi (Persia, 872? – Damas, 950 or 951 CE), author of Kitab al-Musiqa al-Kabir ("The Great Book of Music").^[14]
• 'Ali ibn al-Husayn ul-Isfahānī (897–967), known as Abu al-Faraj al-Isfahani, author of Kitāb al-Aghānī ("The Book of Songs").
• Abū 'Alī al-Ḥusayn ibn ʿAbd-Allāh ibn Sīnā, known as Avicenna (c. 980 – 1037), whose contribution to music theory consists mainly in Chapter 12 of the section on mathematics of his Kitab Al-Shifa ("The Book of Healing").^[15]
• al-Ḥasan ibn Aḥmad ibn 'Ali al-Kātib, author of Kamāl adab al Ghinā' ("The Perfection of Musical Knowledge"), copied in 1225 (Istanbul, Topkapi Museum, Ms 1727).^[16]
• Safi al-Din al-Urmawi (1216–1294 CE), author of the Kitabu al-Adwār ("Treatise of musical cycles") and ar-Risālah aš-Šarafiyyah ("Epistle to Šaraf").^[17]
• Mubārak Šāh, commentator of Safi al-Din's Kitāb al-Adwār (British Museum, Ms 823).^[18]
• Anon. LXI, Anonymous commentary on Safi al-Din's Kitāb al-Adwār.^[19]
• Shams al-dῑn al-Saydᾱwῑ Al-Dhahabῑ (14th century CE (?)), music theorist. Author of Urjῡza fi'l-mῡsῑqᾱ ("A Didactic Poem on Music").^[20]

Europe[edit]

The Latin treatise De institutione musica by the Roman philosopher Boethius (written c. 500, translated as Fundamentals of Music^[2]) was a touchstone for other writings on music in medieval Europe. Boethius represented Classical authority on music during the Middle Ages, as the Greek writings on which he based his work were not read or translated by later Europeans until the 15th century.^[21] This treatise carefully maintains distance from the actual practice of music, focusing mostly on the mathematical proportions involved in tuning systems and on the moral character of particular modes. Several centuries later, treatises began to appear which dealt with the actual composition of pieces of music in the plainchant tradition.^[22] At the end of the ninth century, Hucbald worked towards more precise pitch notation for the neumes used to record plainchant.

Guido d'Arezzo' wrote in 1028 a letter to Michael of Pomposa, entitled Epistola de ignoto cantu,^[23] in which he introduced the practice of using syllables to describe notes and intervals. This was the source of the hexachordal solmization that was to be used until the end of the Middle Ages. Guido also wrote about emotional qualities of the modes, the phrase structure of plainchant, the temporal meaning of the neumes, etc.; his chapters on polyphony "come closer to describing and illustrating real music than any previous account" in the Western tradition.^[21]

During the thirteenth century, a new rhythm system called mensural notation grew out of an earlier, more limited method of notating rhythms in terms of fixed repetitive patterns, the so-called rhythmic modes, which were developed in France around 1200. An early form of mensural notation was first described and codified in the treatise Ars cantus mensurabilis ("The art of measured chant") by Franco of Cologne (c. 1280). Mensural notation used different note shapes to specify different durations, allowing scribes to capture rhythms which varied instead of repeating the same fixed pattern; it is a proportional notation, in the sense that each note value is equal to two or three times the shorter value, or half or a third of the longer value. This same notation, transformed through various extensions and improvements during the Renaissance, forms the basis for rhythmic notation in European classical music today.

Modern[edit]

Middle Eastern and Central Asian countries[edit]

• Bᾱqiyᾱ Nᾱyinῑ (Uzbekistan, 17th century CE), Uzbek author and music theorist. Author of Zamzama e wahdat-i-mῡsῑqῑ ("The Chanting of Unity in Music").^[20]
• Baron Francois Rodolphe d'Erlanger (Tunis, Tunisia, 1910–1932 CE), French musicologist. Author of La musique arabe and Ta'rῑkh al-mῡsῑqᾱ al-arabiyya wa-usῡluha wa-tatawwurᾱtuha ("A History of Arabian Music, its principles and its Development")

D'Erlanger divulges that the Arabic music scale is derived from the Greek music scale, and that Arabic music is connected to certain features of Arabic culture, such as astrology.^[20]

Europe[edit]

• Renaissance

Further information: List of music theorists § 15th and 16th centuries

• Baroque

Further information: List of music theorists § 17th century

Further information: List of music theorists § 18th century

• 1750–1900
  • As Western musical influence spread throughout the world in the 1800s, musicians adopted Western theory as an international standard—but other theoretical traditions in both textual and oral traditions remain in use. For example, the long and rich musical traditions unique to ancient and current cultures of Africa are primarily oral, but describe specific forms, genres, performance practices, tunings, and other aspects of music theory.^[24][25]
  • Sacred harp music uses a different kind of scale and theory in practice. The music focuses on the solfege "fa, sol, la" on the music scale. Sacred Harp also employs a different notation involving "shape notes", or notes that are shaped to correspond to a certain solfege syllable on the music scale. Sacred Harp music and its music theory originated with Reverend Thomas Symmes in 1720, where he developed a system for "singing by note" to help his church members with note accuracy.^[26]

Further information: List of music theorists § 19th century

Contemporary[edit]

See also: List of music theorists § 20th century, and List of music theorists § 21st century

Fundamentals of music[edit]

Main article: Aspect of music

Music is composed of aural phenomena; "music theory" considers how those phenomena apply in music. Music theory considers melody, rhythm, counterpoint, harmony, form, tonal systems, scales, tuning, intervals, consonance, dissonance, durational proportions, the acoustics of pitch systems, composition, performance, orchestration, ornamentation, improvisation, electronic sound production, etc.^[27]

Pitch[edit]

Main article: Pitch (music)

Middle C (261.626 Hz)0:00

Pitch is the lowness or highness of a tone, for example the difference between middle C and a higher C. The frequency of the sound waves producing a pitch can be measured precisely, but the perception of pitch is more complex because single notes from natural sources are usually a complex mix of many frequencies. Accordingly, theorists often describe pitch as a subjective sensation rather than an objective measurement of sound.^[28]

Specific frequencies are often assigned letter names. Today most orchestras assign concert A (the A above middle C on the piano) to the frequency of 440 Hz. This assignment is somewhat arbitrary; for example, in 1859 France, the same A was tuned to 435 Hz. Such differences can have a noticeable effect on the timbre of instruments and other phenomena. Thus, in historically informed performance of older music, tuning is often set to match the tuning used in the period when it was written. Additionally, many cultures do not attempt to standardize pitch, often considering that it should be allowed to vary depending on genre, style, mood, etc.

The difference in pitch between two notes is called an interval. The most basic interval is the unison, which is simply two notes of the same pitch. The octave interval is two pitches that are either double or half the frequency of one another. The unique characteristics of octaves gave rise to the concept of pitch class: pitches of the same letter name that occur in different octaves may be grouped into a single "class" by ignoring the difference in octave. For example, a high C and a low C are members of the same pitch class—the class that contains all C's. ^[29]

Musical tuning systems, or temperaments, determine the precise size of intervals. Tuning systems vary widely within and between world cultures. In Western culture, there have long been several competing tuning systems, all with different qualities. Internationally, the system known as equal temperament is most commonly used today because it is considered the most satisfactory compromise that allows instruments of fixed tuning (e.g. the piano) to sound acceptably in tune in all keys.

Scales and modes[edit]

Main articles: Musical scale and Musical mode

A pattern of whole and half steps in the Ionian mode or major scale on C0:00

Notes can be arranged in a variety of scales and modes. Western music theory generally divides the octave into a series of twelve pitches, called a chromatic scale, within which the interval between adjacent tones is called a half step, or semitone. Selecting tones from this set of 12 and arranging them in patterns of semitones and whole tones creates other scales.^[30]

The most commonly encountered scales are the seven-toned major, the harmonic minor, the melodic minor, and the natural minor. Other examples of scales are the octatonic scale and the pentatonic or five-tone scale, which is common in folk music and blues. Non-Western cultures often use scales that do not correspond with an equally divided twelve-tone division of the octave. For example, classical Ottoman, Persian, Indian and Arabic musical systems often make use of multiples of quarter tones (half the size of a semitone, as the name indicates), for instance in 'neutral' seconds (three quarter tones) or 'neutral' thirds (seven quarter tones)—they do not normally use the quarter tone itself as a direct interval.^[30]

In traditional Western notation, the scale used for a composition is usually indicated by a key signature at the beginning to designate the pitches that make up that scale. As the music progresses, the pitches used may change and introduce a different scale. Music can be transposed from one scale to another for various purposes, often to accommodate the range of a vocalist. Such transposition raises or lowers the overall pitch range, but preserves the intervallic relationships of the original scale. For example, transposition from the key of C major to D major raises all pitches of the scale of C major equally by a whole tone. Since the interval relationships remain unchanged, transposition may be unnoticed by a listener, however other qualities may change noticeably because transposition changes the relationship of the overall pitch range compared to the range of the instruments or voices that perform the music. This often affects the music's overall sound, as well as having technical implications for the performers.^[31]

The interrelationship of the keys most commonly used in Western tonal music is conveniently shown by the circle of fifths. Unique key signatures are also sometimes devised for a particular composition. During the Baroque period, emotional associations with specific keys, known as the doctrine of the affections, were an important topic in music theory, but the unique tonal colorings of keys that gave rise to that doctrine were largely erased with the adoption of equal temperament. However, many musicians continue to feel that certain keys are more appropriate to certain emotions than others. Indian classical music theory continues to strongly associate keys with emotional states, times of day, and other extra-musical concepts and notably, does not employ equal temperament.

Consonance and dissonance[edit]

Main article: Consonance and dissonance

Perfect octave, a consonant interval0:07

Minor second, a dissonant interval0:00

Consonance and dissonance are subjective qualities of the sonority of intervals that vary widely in different cultures and over the ages. Consonance (or concord) is the quality of an interval or chord that seems stable and complete in itself. Dissonance (or discord) is the opposite in that it feels incomplete and "wants to" resolve to a consonant interval. Dissonant intervals seem to clash. Consonant intervals seem to sound comfortable together. Commonly, perfect fourths, fifths, and octaves and all major and minor thirds and sixths are considered consonant. All others are dissonant to a greater or lesser degree.^[32]

Context and many other aspects can affect apparent dissonance and consonance. For example, in a Debussy prelude, a major second may sound stable and consonant, while the same interval may sound dissonant in a Bach fugue. In the Common practice era, the perfect fourth is considered dissonant when not supported by a lower third or fifth. Since the early 20th century, Arnold Schoenberg's concept of "emancipated" dissonance, in which traditionally dissonant intervals can be treated as "higher," more remote consonances, has become more widely accepted.^[32]

Rhythm[edit]

Main article: Rhythm

Metric levels: beat level shown in middle with division levels above and multiple levels below

Rhythm is produced by the sequential arrangement of sounds and silences in time. Meter measures music in regular pulse groupings, called measures or bars. The time signature or meter signature specifies how many beats are in a measure, and which value of written note is counted or felt as a single beat.

Through increased stress, or variations in duration or articulation, particular tones may be accented. There are conventions in most musical traditions for regular and hierarchical accentuation of beats to reinforce a given meter. Syncopated rhythms contradict those conventions by accenting unexpected parts of the beat.^[33] Playing simultaneous rhythms in more than one time signature is called polyrhythm.^[34]

In recent years, rhythm and meter have become an important area of research among music scholars. The most highly cited of these recent scholars are Maury Yeston,^[35] Fred Lerdahl and Ray Jackendoff,^[36] Jonathan Kramer,^[37] and Justin London.^[38]

Melody[edit]

Main article: Melody

"Pop Goes the Weasel" melody^[39]0:12

A melody is a series of tones perceived as an entity,^{[citation needed]} sounding in succession that typically move toward a climax of tension then resolve to a state of rest. Because melody is such a prominent aspect in so much music, its construction and other qualities are a primary interest of music theory.

The basic elements of melody are pitch, duration, rhythm, and tempo. The tones of a melody are usually drawn from pitch systems such as scales or modes. Melody may consist, to increasing degree, of the figure, motive, semi-phrase, antecedent and consequent phrase, and period or sentence. The period may be considered the complete melody, however some examples combine two periods, or use other combinations of constituents to create larger form melodies.^[40]

Chord[edit]

Main article: Chord (music)

C major triad represented in staff notation.
Play (help·info) in just intonation
Play (help·info) in Equal temperament
Play (help·info) in 1/4-comma meantone
Play (help·info) in Young temperament
Play (help·info) in Pythagorean tuning

A chord, in music, is any harmonic set of three or more notes that is heard as if sounding simultaneously.^{[41]: pp. 67, 359 [42]: p. 63} These need not actually be played together: arpeggios and broken chords may, for many practical and theoretical purposes, constitute chords. Chords and sequences of chords are frequently used in modern Western, West African,^[43] and Oceanian^[44] music, whereas they are absent from the music of many other parts of the world.^{[45]: p. 15}

The most frequently encountered chords are triads, so called because they consist of three distinct notes: further notes may be added to give seventh chords, extended chords, or added tone chords. The most common chords are the major and minor triads and then the augmented and diminished triads. The descriptions major, minor, augmented, and diminished are sometimes referred to collectively as chordal quality. Chords are also commonly classed by their root note—so, for instance, the chord C major may be described as a triad of major quality built on the note C. Chords may also be classified by inversion, the order in which the notes are stacked.

A series of chords is called a chord progression. Although any chord may in principle be followed by any other chord, certain patterns of chords have been accepted as establishing key in common-practice harmony. To describe this, chords are numbered, using Roman numerals (upward from the key-note),^[46] per their diatonic function. Common ways of notating or representing chords^[47] in western music other than conventional staff notation include Roman numerals, figured bass (much used in the Baroque era), chord letters (sometimes used in modern musicology), and various systems of chord charts typically found in the lead sheets used in popular music to lay out the sequence of chords so that the musician may play accompaniment chords or improvise a solo.

Harmony[edit]

Main article: Harmony

Barbershop quartets, such as this US Navy group, sing 4-part pieces, made up of a melody line (normally the second-highest voice, called the "lead") and 3 harmony parts.

In music, harmony is the use of simultaneous pitches (tones, notes), or chords.^{[45]: p. 15} The study of harmony involves chords and their construction and chord progressions and the principles of connection that govern them.^[48] Harmony is often said to refer to the "vertical" aspect of music, as distinguished from melodic line, or the "horizontal" aspect.^[49] Counterpoint, which refers to the interweaving of melodic lines, and polyphony, which refers to the relationship of separate independent voices, is thus sometimes distinguished from harmony.^[50]

In popular and jazz harmony, chords are named by their root plus various terms and characters indicating their qualities. For example, a lead sheet may indicate chords such as C major, D minor, and G dominant seventh. In many types of music, notably Baroque, Romantic, modern, and jazz, chords are often augmented with "tensions". A tension is an additional chord member that creates a relatively dissonant interval in relation to the bass. It is part of a chord, but is not one of the chord tones (1 3 5 7). Typically, in the classical common practice period a dissonant chord (chord with tension) "resolves" to a consonant chord. Harmonization usually sounds pleasant to the ear when there is a balance between the consonant and dissonant sounds. In simple words, that occurs when there is a balance between "tense" and "relaxed" moments.^{[51][unreliable source?]}

Timbre[edit]

Main article: Timbre

Spectrogram of the first second of an E9 chord played on a Fender Stratocaster guitar with noiseless pickups. Below is the E9 chord audio:0:13

Timbre, sometimes called "color", or "tone color," is the principal phenomenon that allows us to distinguish one instrument from another when both play at the same pitch and volume, a quality of a voice or instrument often described in terms like bright, dull, shrill, etc. It is of considerable interest in music theory, especially because it is one component of music that has as yet, no standardized nomenclature. It has been called "... the psychoacoustician's multidimensional waste-basket category for everything that cannot be labeled pitch or loudness,"^[52] but can be accurately described and analyzed by Fourier analysis and other methods^[53] because it results from the combination of all sound frequencies, attack and release envelopes, and other qualities that a tone comprises.

Timbre is principally determined by two things: (1) the relative balance of overtones produced by a given instrument due its construction (e.g. shape, material), and (2) the envelope of the sound (including changes in the overtone structure over time). Timbre varies widely between different instruments, voices, and to lesser degree, between instruments of the same type due to variations in their construction, and significantly, the performer's technique. The timbre of most instruments can be changed by employing different techniques while playing. For example, the timbre of a trumpet changes when a mute is inserted into the bell, the player changes their embouchure, or volume.^{[citation needed]}

A voice can change its timbre by the way the performer manipulates their vocal apparatus, (e.g. the shape of the vocal cavity or mouth). Musical notation frequently specifies alteration in timbre by changes in sounding technique, volume, accent, and other means. These are indicated variously by symbolic and verbal instruction. For example, the word dolce (sweetly) indicates a non-specific, but commonly understood soft and "sweet" timbre. Sul tasto instructs a string player to bow near or over the fingerboard to produce a less brilliant sound. Cuivre instructs a brass player to produce a forced and stridently brassy sound. Accent symbols like marcato (^) and dynamic indications (pp) can also indicate changes in timbre.^[54]

Dynamics[edit]

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Main article: Dynamics (music)

Illustration of hairpins in musical notation

In music, "dynamics" normally refers to variations of intensity or volume, as may be measured by physicists and audio engineers in decibels or phons. In music notation, however, dynamics are not treated as absolute values, but as relative ones. Because they are usually measured subjectively, there are factors besides amplitude that affect the performance or perception of intensity, such as timbre, vibrato, and articulation.

The conventional indications of dynamics are abbreviations for Italian words like forte (f) for loud and piano (p) for soft. These two basic notations are modified by indications including mezzo piano (mp) for moderately soft (literally "half soft") and mezzo forte (mf) for moderately loud, sforzando or sforzato (sfz) for a surging or "pushed" attack, or fortepiano (fp) for a loud attack with a sudden decrease to a soft level. The full span of these markings usually range from a nearly inaudible pianissississimo (pppp) to a loud-as-possible fortissississimo (ffff).

Greater extremes of pppppp and fffff and nuances such as p+ or più piano are sometimes found. Other systems of indicating volume are also used in both notation and analysis: dB (decibels), numerical scales, colored or different sized notes, words in languages other than Italian, and symbols such as those for progressively increasing volume (crescendo) or decreasing volume (diminuendo or decrescendo), often called "hairpins" when indicated with diverging or converging lines as shown in the graphic above.

Articulation[edit]

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Main article: Articulation (music)

Examples of articulation marks. From left to right: staccato, staccatissimo, martellato, accent, tenuto.

Articulation is the way the performer sounds notes. For example, staccato is the shortening of duration compared to the written note value, legato performs the notes in a smoothly joined sequence with no separation. Articulation is often described rather than quantified, therefore there is room to interpret how to execute precisely each articulation.

For example, staccato is often referred to as "separated" or "detached" rather than having a defined or numbered amount by which to reduce the notated duration. Violin players use a variety of techniques to perform different qualities of staccato. The manner in which a performer decides to execute a given articulation is usually based on the context of the piece or phrase, but many articulation symbols and verbal instructions depend on the instrument and musical period (e.g. viol, wind; classical, baroque; etc.).

There is a set of articulations that most instruments and voices perform in common. They are—from long to short: legato (smooth, connected); tenuto (pressed or played to full notated duration); marcato (accented and detached); staccato ("separated", "detached"); martelé (heavily accented or "hammered").^{[contradictory]} Many of these can be combined to create certain "in-between" articulations. For example, portato is the combination of tenuto and staccato. Some instruments have unique methods by which to produce sounds, such as spicatto for bowed strings, where the bow bounces off the string.

Texture[edit]

Main article: Musical texture

Introduction to Sousa's "Washington Post March," mm. 1–7 features octave doubling ^[55] and a homorhythmic texture0:00

In music, texture is how the melodic, rhythmic, and harmonic materials are combined in a composition, thus determining the overall quality of the sound in a piece. Texture is often described in regard to the density, or thickness, and range, or width, between lowest and highest pitches, in relative terms as well as more specifically distinguished according to the number of voices, or parts, and the relationship between these voices. For example, a thick texture contains many "layers" of instruments. One of these layers could be a string section, or another brass.

The thickness also is affected by the number and the richness of the instruments playing the piece. The thickness varies from light to thick. A lightly textured piece will have light, sparse scoring. A thickly or heavily textured piece will be scored for many instruments. A piece's texture may be affected by the number and character of parts playing at once, the timbre of the instruments or voices playing these parts and the harmony, tempo, and rhythms used.^[56] The types categorized by number and relationship of parts are analyzed and determined through the labeling of primary textural elements: primary melody, secondary melody, parallel supporting melody, static support, harmonic support, rhythmic support, and harmonic and rhythmic support.^{[57][incomplete short citation]}

Common types included monophonic texture (a single melodic voice, such as a piece for solo soprano or solo flute), biphonic texture (two melodic voices, such as a duo for bassoon and flute in which the bassoon plays a drone note and the flute plays the melody), polyphonic texture and homophonic texture (chords accompanying a melody).^{[citation needed]}

Form or structure[edit]

A musical canon. Encyclopaedia Britannica calls a "canon" both a compositional technique and a musical form.^[58]

Main article: Musical form

The term musical form (or musical architecture) refers to the overall structure or plan of a piece of music, and it describes the layout of a composition as divided into sections.^[59] In the tenth edition of The Oxford Companion to Music, Percy Scholes defines musical form as "a series of strategies designed to find a successful mean between the opposite extremes of unrelieved repetition and unrelieved alteration."^[60] According to Richard Middleton, musical form is "the shape or structure of the work." He describes it through difference: the distance moved from a repeat; the latter being the smallest difference. Difference is quantitative and qualitative: how far, and of what type, different. In many cases, form depends on statement and restatement, unity and variety, and contrast and connection.^[61]

Expression[edit]

Main article: Musical expression

A violinist performing

Musical expression is the art of playing or singing music with emotional communication. The elements of music that comprise expression include dynamic indications, such as forte or piano, phrasing, differing qualities of timbre and articulation, color, intensity, energy and excitement. All of these devices can be incorporated by the performer. A performer aims to elicit responses of sympathetic feeling in the audience, and to excite, calm or otherwise sway the audience's physical and emotional responses. Musical expression is sometimes thought to be produced by a combination of other parameters, and sometimes described as a transcendent quality that is more than the sum of measurable quantities such as pitch or duration.

Expression on instruments can be closely related to the role of the breath in singing, and the voice's natural ability to express feelings, sentiment and deep emotions.^{[clarification needed]} Whether these can somehow be categorized is perhaps the realm of academics, who view expression as an element of musical performance that embodies a consistently recognizable emotion, ideally causing a sympathetic emotional response in its listeners.^[62] The emotional content of musical expression is distinct from the emotional content of specific sounds (e.g., a startlingly-loud 'bang') and of learned associations (e.g., a national anthem), but can rarely be completely separated from its context.^{[citation needed]}

The components of musical expression continue to be the subject of extensive and unresolved dispute.^{[63][64][65][66][67][68]}

Notation[edit]

Main articles: Musical notation and Sheet music

Tibetan musical score from the 19th century

Musical notation is the written or symbolized representation of music. This is most often achieved by the use of commonly understood graphic symbols and written verbal instructions and their abbreviations. There are many systems of music notation from different cultures and different ages. Traditional Western notation evolved during the Middle Ages and remains an area of experimentation and innovation.^[69]In the 2000s, computer file formats have become important as well.^[70] Spoken language and hand signs are also used to symbolically represent music, primarily in teaching.

In standard Western music notation, tones are represented graphically by symbols (notes) placed on a staff or staves, the vertical axis corresponding to pitch and the horizontal axis corresponding to time. Note head shapes, stems, flags, ties and dots are used to indicate duration. Additional symbols indicate keys, dynamics, accents, rests, etc. Verbal instructions from the conductor are often used to indicate tempo, technique, and other aspects.

In Western music, a range of different music notation systems are used. In Western Classical music, conductors use printed scores that show all of the instruments' parts and orchestra members read parts with their musical lines written out. In popular styles of music, much less of the music may be notated. A rock band may go into a recording session with just a handwritten chord chart indicating the song's chord progression using chord names (e.g., C major, D minor, G7, etc.). All of the chord voicings, rhythms and accompaniment figures are improvised by the band members.

As academic discipline[edit]

The scholarly study of music theory in the twentieth century has a number of different subfields, each of which takes a different perspective on what are the primary phenomenon of interest and the most useful methods for investigation.

Analysis[edit]

Main articles: Musical analysis, Schenkerian analysis, and Transformational theory

Typically a given work is analyzed by more than one person and different or divergent analyses are created. For instance, the first two bars of the prelude to Claude Debussy's Pelléas et Melisande are analyzed differently by Leibowitz, Laloy, van Appledorn, and Christ. Leibowitz analyses this succession harmonically as D minor:I–VII–V, ignoring melodic motion, Laloy analyses the succession as D:I–V, seeing the G in the second measure as an ornament, and both van Appledorn and Christ analyse the succession as D:I–VII. Play (help·info)

Musical analysis is the attempt to answer the question how does this music work? The method employed to answer this question, and indeed exactly what is meant by the question, differs from analyst to analyst, and according to the purpose of the analysis. According to Ian Bent, "analysis, as a pursuit in its own right, came to be established only in the late 19th century; its emergence as an approach and method can be traced back to the 1750s. However, it existed as a scholarly tool, albeit an auxiliary one, from the Middle Ages onwards."^{[71][incomplete short citation]} Adolf Bernhard Marx was influential in formalising concepts about composition and music understanding towards the second half of the 19th century. The principle of analysis has been variously criticized, especially by composers, such as Edgard Varèse's claim that, "to explain by means of [analysis] is to decompose, to mutilate the spirit of a work".^[72]

Schenkerian analysis is a method of musical analysis of tonal music based on the theories of Heinrich Schenker (1868–1935). The goal of a Schenkerian analysis is to interpret the underlying structure of a tonal work and to help reading the score according to that structure. The theory's basic tenets can be viewed as a way of defining tonality in music. A Schenkerian analysis of a passage of music shows hierarchical relationships among its pitches, and draws conclusions about the structure of the passage from this hierarchy. The analysis makes use of a specialized symbolic form of musical notation that Schenker devised to demonstrate various techniques of elaboration. The most fundamental concept of Schenker's theory of tonality may be that of tonal space.^[73] The intervals between the notes of the tonic triad form a tonal space that is filled with passing and neighbour notes, producing new triads and new tonal spaces, open for further elaborations until the surface of the work (the score) is reached.

Although Schenker himself usually presents his analyses in the generative direction, starting from the fundamental structure (Ursatz) to reach the score, the practice of Schenkerian analysis more often is reductive, starting from the score and showing how it can be reduced to its fundamental structure. The graph of the Ursatz is arrhythmic, as is a strict-counterpoint cantus firmus exercise.^[74] Even at intermediate levels of the reduction, rhythmic notation (open and closed noteheads, beams and flags) shows not rhythm but the hierarchical relationships between the pitch-events. Schenkerian analysis is subjective. There is no mechanical procedure involved and the analysis reflects the musical intuitions of the analyst.^[75] The analysis represents a way of hearing (and reading) a piece of music.

Transformational theory is a branch of music theory developed by David Lewin in the 1980s, and formally introduced in his 1987 work, Generalized Musical Intervals and Transformations. The theory, which models musical transformations as elements of a mathematical group, can be used to analyze both tonal and atonal music. The goal of transformational theory is to change the focus from musical objects—such as the "C major chord" or "G major chord"—to relations between objects. Thus, instead of saying that a C major chord is followed by G major, a transformational theorist might say that the first chord has been "transformed" into the second by the "Dominant operation." (Symbolically, one might write "Dominant(C major) = G major.") While traditional musical set theory focuses on the makeup of musical objects, transformational theory focuses on the intervals or types of musical motion that can occur. According to Lewin's description of this change in emphasis, "[The transformational] attitude does not ask for some observed measure of extension between reified 'points'; rather it asks: 'If I am at s and wish to get to t, what characteristic gesture should I perform in order to arrive there?'"^[76]

Music perception and cognition[edit]

Further information: Music psychology, Fred Lerdahl, and Ray Jackendoff

Music psychology or the psychology of music may be regarded as a branch of both psychology and musicology. It aims to explain and understand musical behavior and experience, including the processes through which music is perceived, created, responded to, and incorporated into everyday life.^[77][78] Modern music psychology is primarily empirical; its knowledge tends to advance on the basis of interpretations of data collected by systematic observation of and interaction with human participants. Music psychology is a field of research with practical relevance for many areas, including music performance, composition, education, criticism, and therapy, as well as investigations of human aptitude, skill, intelligence, creativity, and social behavior.

Music psychology can shed light on non-psychological aspects of musicology and musical practice. For example, it contributes to music theory through investigations of the perception and computational modelling of musical structures such as melody, harmony, tonality, rhythm, meter, and form. Research in music history can benefit from systematic study of the history of musical syntax, or from psychological analyses of composers and compositions in relation to perceptual, affective, and social responses to their music. Ethnomusicology can benefit from psychological approaches to the study of music cognition in different cultures.^{[79][citation needed]}

Genre and technique[edit]

Main articles: Music genre and Musical technique

A Classical piano trio is a group that plays chamber music, including sonatas. The term "piano trio" also refers to works composed for such a group.

A music genre is a conventional category that identifies some pieces of music as belonging to a shared tradition or set of conventions.^[80] It is to be distinguished from musical form and musical style, although in practice these terms are sometimes used interchangeably.^{[81][failed verification]}

Music can be divided into different genres in many different ways. The artistic nature of music means that these classifications are often subjective and controversial, and some genres may overlap. There are even varying academic definitions of the term genre itself. In his book Form in Tonal Music, Douglass M. Green distinguishes between genre and form. He lists madrigal, motet, canzona, ricercar, and dance as examples of genres from the Renaissance period. To further clarify the meaning of genre, Green writes, "Beethoven's Op. 61 and Mendelssohn's Op. 64 are identical in genre—both are violin concertos—but different in form. However, Mozart's Rondo for Piano, K. 511, and the Agnus Dei from his Mass, K. 317 are quite different in genre but happen to be similar in form."^[82] Some, like Peter van der Merwe, treat the terms genre and style as the same, saying that genre should be defined as pieces of music that came from the same style or "basic musical language."^[83]

Others, such as Allan F. Moore, state that genre and style are two separate terms, and that secondary characteristics such as subject matter can also differentiate between genres.^[84] A music genre or subgenre may also be defined by the musical techniques, the style, the cultural context, and the content and spirit of the themes. Geographical origin is sometimes used to identify a music genre, though a single geographical category will often include a wide variety of subgenres. Timothy Laurie argues that "since the early 1980s, genre has graduated from being a subset of popular music studies to being an almost ubiquitous framework for constituting and evaluating musical research objects".^[85]

Musical technique is the ability of instrumental and vocal musicians to exert optimal control of their instruments or vocal cords to produce precise musical effects. Improving technique generally entails practicing exercises that improve muscular sensitivity and agility. To improve technique, musicians often practice fundamental patterns of notes such as the natural, minor, major, and chromatic scales, minor and major triads, dominant and diminished sevenths, formula patterns and arpeggios. For example, triads and sevenths teach how to play chords with accuracy and speed. Scales teach how to move quickly and gracefully from one note to another (usually by step). Arpeggios teach how to play broken chords over larger intervals. Many of these components of music are found in compositions, for example, a scale is a very common element of classical and romantic era compositions.^{[citation needed]}

Heinrich Schenker argued that musical technique's "most striking and distinctive characteristic" is repetition.^[86] Works known as études (meaning "study") are also frequently used for the improvement of technique.

Mathematics[edit]

Main article: Music and mathematics

Music theorists sometimes use mathematics to understand music, and although music has no axiomatic foundation in modern mathematics, mathematics is "the basis of sound" and sound itself "in its musical aspects... exhibits a remarkable array of number properties", simply because nature itself "is amazingly mathematical".^[87] The attempt to structure and communicate new ways of composing and hearing music has led to musical applications of set theory, abstract algebra and number theory. Some composers have incorporated the golden ratio and Fibonacci numbers into their work.^[88][89] There is a long history of examining the relationships between music and mathematics. Though ancient Chinese, Egyptians and Mesopotamians are known to have studied the mathematical principles of sound,^[90] the Pythagoreans (in particular Philolaus and Archytas)^[91] of ancient Greece were the first researchers known to have investigated the expression of musical scales in terms of numerical ratios.

The first 16 harmonics, their names and frequencies, showing the exponential nature of the octave and the simple fractional nature of non-octave harmonics

In the modern era, musical set theory uses the language of mathematical set theory in an elementary way to organize musical objects and describe their relationships. To analyze the structure of a piece of (typically atonal) music using musical set theory, one usually starts with a set of tones, which could form motives or chords. By applying simple operations such as transposition and inversion, one can discover deep structures in the music. Operations such as transposition and inversion are called isometries because they preserve the intervals between tones in a set. Expanding on the methods of musical set theory, some theorists have used abstract algebra to analyze music. For example, the pitch classes in an equally tempered octave form an abelian group with 12 elements. It is possible to describe just intonation in terms of a free abelian group.^[92]

Serial composition and set theory[edit]

Tone row from Alban Berg's Lyric Suite, movement I0:00

Further information: Serialism, Set theory (music), Arnold Schoenberg, Milton Babbitt, David Lewin, and Allen Forte

In music theory, serialism is a method or technique of composition that uses a series of values to manipulate different musical elements. Serialism began primarily with Arnold Schoenberg's twelve-tone technique, though his contemporaries were also working to establish serialism as one example of post-tonal thinking. Twelve-tone technique orders the twelve notes of the chromatic scale, forming a row or series and providing a unifying basis for a composition's melody, harmony, structural progressions, and variations. Other types of serialism also work with sets, collections of objects, but not necessarily with fixed-order series, and extend the technique to other musical dimensions (often called "parameters"), such as duration, dynamics, and timbre. The idea of serialism is also applied in various ways in the visual arts, design, and architecture^[93]

"Integral serialism" or "total serialism" is the use of series for aspects such as duration, dynamics, and register as well as pitch. ^[94] Other terms, used especially in Europe to distinguish post-World War II serial music from twelve-tone music and its American extensions, are "general serialism" and "multiple serialism".^[95]

Musical set theory provides concepts for categorizing musical objects and describing their relationships. Many of the notions were first elaborated by Howard Hanson (1960) in connection with tonal music, and then mostly developed in connection with atonal music by theorists such as Allen Forte (1973), drawing on the work in twelve-tone theory of Milton Babbitt. The concepts of set theory are very general and can be applied to tonal and atonal styles in any equally tempered tuning system, and to some extent more generally than that.^{[citation needed]}

One branch of musical set theory deals with collections (sets and permutations) of pitches and pitch classes (pitch-class set theory), which may be ordered or unordered, and can be related by musical operations such as transposition, inversion, and complementation. The methods of musical set theory are sometimes applied to the analysis of rhythm as well.^{[citation needed]}

Musical semiotics[edit]

Further information: Music semiology and Jean-Jacques Nattiez

Semiotician Roman Jakobson

Music semiology (semiotics) is the study of signs as they pertain to music on a variety of levels. Following Roman Jakobson, Kofi Agawu adopts the idea of musical semiosis being introversive or extroversive—that is, musical signs within a text and without.^{[citation needed]} "Topics," or various musical conventions (such as horn calls, dance forms, and styles), have been treated suggestively by Agawu, among others.^{[citation needed]} The notion of gesture is beginning to play a large role in musico-semiotic enquiry.^{[citation needed]}

"There are strong arguments that music inhabits a semiological realm which, on both ontogenetic and phylogenetic levels, has developmental priority over verbal language."^{[96][97][98][99][100][101][102][103][incomplete short citation][clarification needed]}

Writers on music semiology include Kofi Agawu (on topical theory,^{[citation needed]} Heinrich Schenker,^[104][105] Robert Hatten (on topic, gesture)^{[citation needed]}, Raymond Monelle (on topic, musical meaning)^{[citation needed]}, Jean-Jacques Nattiez (on introversive taxonomic analysis and ethnomusicological applications)^{[citation needed]}, Anthony Newcomb (on narrativity)^{[citation needed]}, and Eero Tarasti^{[citation needed]} (generally considered the founder of musical semiotics).^{[clarification needed]}

Roland Barthes, himself a semiotician and skilled amateur pianist, wrote about music in Image-Music-Text,^{[full citation needed]} The Responsibilities of Form,^{[full citation needed]} and Eiffel Tower,^{[full citation needed]} though he did not consider music to be a semiotic system^{[citation needed]}.

Signs, meanings in music, happen essentially through the connotations of sounds, and through the social construction, appropriation and amplification of certain meanings associated with these connotations. The work of Philip Tagg (Ten Little Tunes,^{[full citation needed]} Fernando the Flute,^{[full citation needed]} Music's Meanings^{[full citation needed]}) provides one of the most complete and systematic analysis of the relation between musical structures and connotations in western and especially popular, television and film music. The work of Leonard B. Meyer in Style and Music^{[full citation needed]} theorizes the relationship between ideologies and musical structures and the phenomena of style change, and focuses on romanticism as a case study.

Education and careers[edit]

Columbia University music theorist Pat Carpenter in an undated photo

Music theory in the practical sense has been a part of education at conservatories and music schools for centuries, but the status music theory currently has within academic institutions is relatively recent. In the 1970s, few universities had dedicated music theory programs, many music theorists had been trained as composers or historians, and there was a belief among theorists that the teaching of music theory was inadequate and that the subject was not properly recognised as a scholarly discipline in its own right.^[106] A growing number of scholars began promoting the idea that music theory should be taught by theorists, rather than composers, performers or music historians.^[106] This led to the founding of the Society for Music Theory in the United States in 1977. In Europe, the French Société d'Analyse musicale was founded in 1985. It called the First European Conference of Music Analysis for 1989, which resulted in the foundation of the Société belge d'Analyse musicale in Belgium and the Gruppo analisi e teoria musicale in Italy the same year, the Society for Music Analysis in the UK in 1991, the Vereniging voor Muziektheorie in the Netherlands in 1999 and the Gesellschaft für Musiktheorie in Germany in 2000.^[107] They were later followed by the Russian Society for Music Theory in 2013, the Polish Society for Music Analysis in 2015 and the Sociedad de Análisis y Teoría Musical in Spain in 2020, and others are in construction. These societies coordinate the publication of music theory scholarship and support the professional development of music theory researchers.

As part of their initial training, music theorists will typically complete a B.Mus or a B.A. in music (or a related field) and in many cases an M.A. in music theory. Some individuals apply directly from a bachelor's degree to a PhD, and in these cases, they may not receive an M.A. In the 2010s, given the increasingly interdisciplinary nature of university graduate programs, some applicants for music theory PhD programs may have academic training both in music and outside of music (e.g., a student may apply with a B.Mus and a Masters in Music Composition or Philosophy of Music).

Most music theorists work as instructors, lecturers or professors in colleges, universities or conservatories. The job market for tenure-track professor positions is very competitive: with an average of around 25 tenure-track positions advertised per year in the past decade, 80–100 PhD graduates are produced each year (according to the Survey of Earned Doctorates) who compete not only with each other for those positions but with job seekers that received PhD's in previous years who are still searching for a tenure-track job. Applicants must hold a completed PhD or the equivalent degree (or expect to receive one within a year of being hired—called an "ABD", for "All But Dissertation" stage) and (for more senior positions) have a strong record of publishing in peer-reviewed journals. Some PhD-holding music theorists are only able to find insecure positions as sessional lecturers. The job tasks of a music theorist are the same as those of a professor in any other humanities discipline: teaching undergraduate and/or graduate classes in this area of specialization and, in many cases some general courses (such as Music appreciation or Introduction to Music Theory), conducting research in this area of expertise, publishing research articles in peer-reviewed journals, authoring book chapters, books or textbooks, traveling to conferences to present papers and learn about research in the field, and, if the program includes a graduate school, supervising M.A. and PhD students and giving them guidance on the preparation of their theses and dissertations. Some music theory professors may take on senior administrative positions in their institution, such as Dean or Chair of the School of Music.

See also[edit]

• List of music theorists
• Music psychology
• Musicology
• Theory of painting

Notes[edit]

1. ^ See Boethius's De institutione musica,^[2] in which he disdains "musica instrumentalis" as beneath the "true" musician who studies music in the abstract: Multo enim est maius atque auctius scire, quod quisque faciat, quam ipsum illud efficere, quod sciat ("It is much better to know what one does than to do what one knows").
2. ^ See, for example, chapters 4–7 of Christensen, Thomas (2002). The Cambridge History of Western Music Theory. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
3. ^ See the List of music theorists#7th–14th centuries, which includes several Arabic theorists; see also d'Erlanger 1930–56, 1:xv-xxiv.

References[edit]

1. ^ Fallows, David (2011). Theory. The Oxford Companion to Music. Oxford Music Online. ISBN 978-0199579037. Retrieved 11 September 2016.
2. ^ Jump up to:^a b Boethius 1989.
3. ^ OED.
4. ^ Palisca and Bent n.d., Theory, theorists. 1. Definitions.
5. ^ Mirelman 2010; Mirelman 2013; Wulstan 1968; Kümmel 1970; Kilmer 1971; Kilmer and Mirelman n.d.
6. ^ Mirelman 2013, 43–44.
7. ^ Jump up to:^a b c Lam
8. ^ Service 2013.
9. ^ The Nāțyaśāstra, A Treatise on Hindu Dramaturgy and Histrionics, attributed to Bharata Muni, translated from the Sanskrit with introduction and notes by Manomohan Ghosh, vol. II, Calcutta, The Asiatic Society, 1961. See particularly pp. 5–19 of the Introduction, The Ancient Indian Theory and Practice of Music.
10. ^ Thomas J. Mathiesen, "Greek Music Theory", The Cambridge History of Western Music Theory, Th. Christensen ed., Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2002, pp. 112–13.
11. ^ English translation in Andrew Barker, Greek Musical Writings, vol. 2: Harmonic and Acoustic Theory, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1989, pp. 191–208.
12. ^ Manik 1969, 24–33.
13. ^ Wright 2001a; Wright 2001b; Manik 1969, 22–24.
14. ^ Rodolphe d'Erlanger, La Musique arabe, vol. I, pp. 1–306; vol. II, pp. 1–101.
15. ^ d'Erlanger 1930–56, 2:103–245.
16. ^ Shiloah 1964.
17. ^ d'Erlanger 1930–56, 3:1–182.
18. ^ Anon. LXII in Amnon Shiloah, The Theory of Music in Arabic Writings (c. 900–1900): Descriptive Catalogue of Manuscripts in Libraries of Europe and the U.S.A., RISM, München, G. Henle Verlag, 1979. See d'Erlanger 1930–56, 3:183–566
19. ^ Ghrab 2009.
20. ^ Jump up to:^a b c Shiloah, Amnon (2003). The Theory of Music in Arabic Writings (c. 900–1900). Germany: G. Henle Verlag Munchen. pp. 48, 58, 60–61. ISBN 978-0-8203-0426-7.
21. ^ Jump up to:^a b Palisca and Bent n.d., §5 Early Middle Ages.
22. ^ Palisca and Bent n.d., Theory, theorists §5 Early Middle Ages: "Boethius could provide a model only for that part of theory which underlies but does not give rules for composition or performance. The first surviving strictly musical treatise of Carolingian times is directed towards musical practice, the Musica disciplina of Aurelian of Réôme (9th century)."
23. ^ "Guy Aretini's letter to the unknown : modern translation of the letter". Hs-augsburg.de. Retrieved 3 March 2022.
24. ^ Kubik 2010, passim.
25. ^ Ekwueme 1974, passim.
26. ^ Cobb, Buell E. Jr. (1978). The Sacred Harp: A Tradition and Its Music. United States of America: The University of Georgia Press Athens. pp. 4–5, 60–61. ISBN 978-0-8203-0426-7.
27. ^ Palisca and Bent n.d.
28. ^ Hartmann 2005,^{[page needed]}.
29. ^ Bartlette and Laitz 2010,^{[page needed]}.
30. ^ Jump up to:^a b Touma 1996,^{[page needed]}.
31. ^ Forsyth 1935, 73–74.
32. ^ Jump up to:^a b Latham 2002,^{[page needed]}.
33. ^ Syncopation. Oxford Dictionary of Music. Oxford University Press. 2013. ISBN 978-0199578108. Retrieved 11 August 2017. Syncopation is achieved by accenting a weak instead of a strong beat, by putting rests on strong beats, by holding on over strong beats, and by introducing a sudden change of time‐signature.
34. ^ "Polyrhythm". Grove Music Online. Oxford University Press. Retrieved 11 August 2017. The superposition of different rhythms or metres.
35. ^ Yeston 1976.
36. ^ Lerdahl and Jackendoff 1985.
37. ^ Kramer 1988.
38. ^ London 2004.
39. ^ Kliewer 1975,^{[page needed]}.
40. ^ Stein 1979, 3–47.
41. ^ Benward and Saker 2003.
42. ^ Károlyi 1965.
43. ^ Mitchell 2008.
44. ^ Linkels n.d.,^{[page needed]}.
45. ^ Jump up to:^a b Malm 1996.
46. ^ Schoenberg 1983, 1–2.
47. ^ Benward and Saker 2003, 77.
48. ^ Dahlhaus 2009.
49. ^ Jamini 2005, 147.
50. ^ Faculty of Arts & Sciences. "Pitch Structure: Harmony and Counterpoint". Theory of Music – Pitch Structure: The Chromatic Scale. Harvard University. Retrieved 2 October 2020.
51. ^ "Chapter 2 ELEMENTS AND CONCEPTS OF MUSIC (With reference to Hindustani and Jazz music)" (PDF). Shodhganga.inflibnet.ac.in. Retrieved 3 March 2022.
52. ^ McAdams and Bregman 1979, 34.
53. ^ Mannell n.d.
54. ^ "How Loud? How Soft?" (PDF). Sheffield-Sheffield Lake City Schools.
55. ^ Benward and Saker 2003, p. 133.
56. ^ Benward and Saker 2003,^{[page needed]}.
57. ^ Isaac and Russell 2003, 136.
58. ^ "Canon | music". Britannica.com. Retrieved 17 December 2017.
59. ^ Brandt 2007.
60. ^ Scholes 1977.
61. ^ Middleton 1999,^{[page needed]}.
62. ^ London n.d.
63. ^ Avison 1752,^{[page needed]}.
64. ^ Christiani 1885,^{[page needed]}.
65. ^ Lussy 1892,^{[page needed]}.
66. ^ Darwin 1913,^{[page needed]}.
67. ^ Sorantin 1932,^{[page needed]}.
68. ^ Davies 1994,^{[page needed]}.
69. ^ Read 1969,^{[page needed]}; Stone 1980,^{[page needed]}.
70. ^ Castan 2009.
71. ^ Bent 1987, 6.
72. ^ Quoted in Bernard 1981, 1
73. ^ Schenker described the concept in a paper titled Erläuterungen ("Elucidations"), which he published four times between 1924 and 1926: Der Tonwille (Vienna, Tonwille Verlag, 1924) vol. 8–9, pp. 49–51, vol. 10, pp. 40–42; Das Meisterwerk in der Musik (München, Drei Masken Verlag), vol. 1 (1925), pp. 201–05; 2 (1926), pp. 193–97. English translation, Der Tonwille, Oxford University Press, vol. 2, pp. 117–18 (the translation, although made from vols. 8–9 of the German original, gives as original pagination that of Das Meisterwerk 1; the text is the same). The concept of tonal space is still present in Schenker (1979, especially p. 14, § 13), but less clearly than in the earlier presentation.
74. ^ Schenker 1979, p. 15, § 21.
75. ^ Snarrenberg 1997,^{[page needed]}.
76. ^ Lewin 1987, 159.
77. ^ Tan, Peter, and Rom 2010, 2.
78. ^ Thompson n.d., 320.
79. ^ Martin, Clayton; Clayton, Martin (2008). Time in Indian Music: Rhythm, Metre, and Form in North Indian Rag Performance. Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0195339680.
80. ^ Samson n.d.
81. ^ Wong 2011.
82. ^ Green 1979, 1.
83. ^ van der Merwe 1989, 3.
84. ^ Moore 2001, 432–33.
85. ^ Laurie 2014, 284.
86. ^ Kivy 1993, 327.
87. ^ Smith Brindle 1987, 42–43.
88. ^ Smith Brindle 1987, chapter 6, passim.
89. ^ Garland and Kahn 1995,^{[page needed]}.
90. ^ Smith Brindle 1987, 42.
91. ^ Purwins 2005, 22–24.
92. ^ Wohl 2005.
93. ^ Bandur 2001, 5, 12, 74; Gerstner 1964, passim
94. ^ Whittall 2008, 273.
95. ^ Grant 2001, 5–6.
96. ^ Middleton 1990, 172.
97. ^ Nattiez 1976.
98. ^ Nattiez 1990.
99. ^ Nattiez1989.
100. ^ Stefani 1973.
101. ^ Stefani 1976.
102. ^ Baroni 1983.
103. ^ Semiotica 1987, 66:1–3.
104. ^ Dunsby & Stopford 1981, 49–53.
105. ^ Meeùs 2017, 81–96.
106. ^ Jump up to:^a b McCreless n.d.
107. ^ Meeùs 2015, 111.

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Further reading[edit]

• Anon. (2011). Job: Adjunct/Affiliate in Music Theory. Philadelphia: St Josephs University.
• Anon. (2014). "Full-time, Tenure-track Position in Music Theory, at the Rank of Assistant Professor, Beginning Fall 2014". Buffalo: University at Buffalo Department of Music.
• Anon. (2015). "College of William and Mary: Assistant Professor of Music, Theory and Composition (Tenure Eligible)". Job Listings, MTO (accessed 10 August 2015).
• Apel, Willi, and Ralph T. Daniel (1960). The Harvard Brief Dictionary of Music. New York: Simon & Schuster Inc. ISBN 0-671-73747-3
• Aristoxenus (1902). Aristoxenou Harmonika stoicheia: The Harmonics of Aristoxenus, Greek text edited with an English translation and notes by Henry Marcam. Oxford: The Clarendon Press.
• Bakkegard, B. M., and Elizabeth Ann Morris (1961). "Seventh Century Flutes from Arizona". Ethnomusicology 5, no. 3 (September): 184–186. doi:10.2307/924518.
• Bakshi, Haresh (2005). 101 Raga-s for the 21st Century and Beyond: A Music Lover's Guide to Hindustani Music. Victoria, British Columbia: Trafford. ISBN 978-1412046770, 978-1412231350 (ebook).
• Barnes, Latham (1984). The Complete Works of Aristotle. Princeton: Princeton University Press. ISBN 0-691-09950-2.
• Baur, John (2014). Practical Music Theory. Dubuque: Kendall-Hunt Publishing Company. ISBN 978-1-4652-1790-5
• Benade, Arthur H. (1960). Horns, Strings, and Harmony. Science Study Series S 11. Garden City, New York: Doubleday
• Bent, Ian D., and Anthony Pople (2001). "Analysis." The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, second edition, edited by Stanley Sadie and John Tyrrell. London: Macmillan.
• Benward, Bruce, Barbara Garvey Jackson, and Bruce R. Jackson. (2000). Practical Beginning Theory: A Fundamentals Worktext, 8th edition, Boston: McGraw-Hill. ISBN 0-697-34397-9. [First edition 1963]
• Benward, Bruce, and Marilyn Nadine Saker (2009). Music in Theory and Practice, eighth edition, vol. 2. Boston: McGraw-Hill. ISBN 978-0-07-310188-0.
• Billmeier, Uschi (1999). Mamady Keïta: A Life for the Djembé – Traditional Rhythms of the Malinké, fourth edition. Kirchhasel-Uhlstädt: Arun-Verlag. ISBN 978-3-935581-52-3.
• Boretz, Benjamin (1995). Meta-Variations: Studies in the Foundations of Musical Thought. Red Hook, New York: Open Space.
• Both, Arnd Adje (2009). "Music Archaeology: Some Methodological and Theoretical Considerations". Yearbook for Traditional Music 41:1–11. JSTOR 25735475
• Bregman, Albert (1994). Auditory Scene Analysis: The Perceptual Organization of Sound. Cambridge: MIT Press. ISBN 0-262-52195-4.
• Brill, Mark (2012). "Music of the Ancient Maya: New Venues of Research". Paper presented at AMS-SW Conference Fall 2012. Texas State University^{[full citation needed]}
• Brown, James Murray (1967). A Handbook of Musical Knowledge, 2 vols. London: Trinity College of Music.
• Cavanagh, Lynn (1999). "A Brief History of the Establishment of International Standard Pitch A=440 Hertz" (PDF). Archived from the original (PDF) on 25 March 2009. (Accessed 1 May 2010)
• Charry, Eric (2000). Mande Music: Traditional and Modern Music of the Maninka and Mandinka of Western Africa. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ISBN 978-0-226-10161-3.
• Cheong, Kong F. (2012). "A Description of the Ceramic Musical Instruments Excavated from the North Group of Pacbitun, Belize". In Pacbitun Regional Archaeological Project, Report on the 2011 Field Season, edited by Terry G. Powis, 15–29. Belmopan, Belize: Institute of Archaeology.
• Chernoff, John (1981). African Rhythm and African Sensibility: Aesthetics and Social Action in African Musical Idioms. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ISBN 978-0-226-10345-7.
• Civil, Miguel (2010). "The Lexical Texts in the Schøyen Collection". Cornell University Studies in Assyriology and Sumerology 12:203–214.
• Confucius (1999). The Analects of Confucius, edited by Roger T. Ames and Henry Rosemont Jr.^{[clarification needed]} Ballantine Books. ISBN 0345434072.
• Conrad, Nicholas J., Maria Malina, and Susanne C. Münzel (2009). "New Flutes Document the Earliest Musical Tradition in Southwestern Germany". Nature 460, no. 7256 (6 August): 737–740.
• Crease, Robert P. (2011). World in the Balance: The Historic Quest for an Absolute System of Measurement. New York, London: W. W. Norton.
• Crickmore, Leon (2012). "A Musicological Interpretation of the Akkadian Term Sihpu". Journal of Cuneiform Studies 64:57–64. doi:10.5615/jcunestud.64.0057
• Chase, Wayne (2006). How Music REALLY Works!, second edition. Vancouver, Canada: Roedy Black Publishing. ISBN 1-897311-55-9 (book).
• d'Errico, Francesco, Christopher Henshilwood, Graeme Lawson, Marian Vanhaeren, Anne-Marie Tillier, Marie Soressi, Frederique Bresson, Bruno Maureille, April Nowell, Joseba Lakarra, Lucinda Backwell, Michele Julien (2003). "Archaeological Evidence for the Emergence of Language, Symbolism, and Music – An Alternative Multidisciplinary Perspective". Journal of World Prehistory 17, no. 1 (March): 1–70.
• Despopoulos, Agamemnon, and Stefan Silbernagl (2003). Color Atlas of Physiology, fifth edition. New York and Stuttgart: Thieme. ISBN 3-13-545005-8.
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• Mazzola, Guerino; Stefan Göller; Stefan Müller (2002). The Topos of Music: Geometric Logic of Concepts, Theory, and Performance, Vol. 1. Basel, Boston, and Berlin: Birkhäuser. ISBN 978-3-7643-5731-3. Retrieved 26 February 2012.
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External links[edit]

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Music theory.

Wikibooks has more on the topic of: Music theory

Library resources about Music theory

Online books Resources in your library

• Music theory resources
• Dillen, Oscar van, Outline of basic music theory (2011)
• Why A Little Bit of Theory Matters
• "Music Theory Online: Guides, Lessons & Exercises". musictheoryhelp.co.uk. Retrieved 17 December 2017.
• "Music basics | Arts and humanities". Khan Academy. Retrieved 17 December 2017.
• "Music Theory is". musictheoryis.com. Retrieved 17 December 2017.

Chinese musicology - Wikipedia

Chinese musicology - Wikipedia



Chinese musicology
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia


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Music of China

Timeline
General topics
Instruments
Musicology
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Genres
C-pop: (Cantopop, Mandopop, Hokkien pop)
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National anthem
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Northeast
Qinghai
Shandong
Shaanxi
Shanxi
Sichuan
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Zhejiang

v
t
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Chinese musicology is the academic study of traditional Chinese music. This discipline has a very long history. Traditional Chinese music can be traced back to around 8,000 years ago during the Neolithic age. The concept of music, called 乐 (yuè), stands among the oldest categories of Chinese thought; however, in the known sources it does not receive a fairly clear definition until the writing of the Classic of Music (lost during the Han dynasty).


Contents1Music scales
2Scale and tonality
3Sources
4External links
Music scales[edit]

The first musical scales were derived from the harmonic series. On the Guqin (a traditional instrument) all of the dotted positions are equal string length divisions related to the open string like 1/2, 1/3, 2/3, 1/4, 3/4, etc. and are quite easy to recognize on this instrument. The Guqin has a scale of 13 positions all representing a natural harmonic position related to the open string.

The ancient Chinese defined, by mathematical means, a gamut or series of 十二律 (Shí-èr-lǜ), meaning twelve lǜ, from which various sets of five or seven frequencies were selected to make the sort of "do re mi" major scale familiar to those who have been formed with the Western Standard notation. The 12 lü approximate the frequencies known in the West as the chromatic scale, from A, then B-flat, through to G and A-flat.

Scale and tonality[edit]

Most Chinese music uses a pentatonic scale, with the intervals (in terms of lǜ) almost the same as those of the major pentatonic scale. The notes of this scale are called gōng 宫, shāng 商, jué 角, zhǐ 徵 and yǔ 羽. By starting from a different point of this sequence, a scale (named after its starting note) with a different interval sequence is created, similar to the construction of modes in modern Western music.

Since the Chinese system is not an equal tempered tuning, playing a melody starting from the lǜ nearest to A will not necessarily sound the same as playing the same melody starting from some other lǜ, since the wolf interval will occupy a different point in the scale. The effect of changing the starting point of a song can be rather like the effect of shifting from a major to a minor key in Western music. The scalar tunings of Pythagoras, based on 2:3 ratios (8:9, 16:27, 64:81, etc.), are a western near-parallel to the earlier calculations used to derive Chinese scales.

How the scales are produced: Start with a fundamental frequency. (440 hertz is used here.) Apply the ratios to make the first column. Copy the second and all further elements in this column to the respective heads of the other eleven columns. Apply the ratios to make the second through the twelfth columns. So doing produces 144 frequencies (with some duplications). From each column five different selections of non-adjacent frequencies can be made. (See the colored blocks at the far left.) So each column can produce 60 different pentatonic scales.

Sources[edit]陈应时 (Chen Yingshi, Shanghai Conservatory). "一种体系 两个系统 Yi zhong ti-xi, liang ge xi-tong". Musicology in China. 2002 (4): 109–116.
External links[edit]More details and recorded examples.

03 A Light That Is Shining by Harvey Gillman

A Light That Is Shining by Harvey Gillman | Goodreads

A Light That Is Shining

by Harvey Gillman

 3.81  ·   Rating details ·  31 ratings  ·  6 reviews

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Gloria

May 18, 2010Gloria rated it really liked it

Shelves: for-the-spirit

I wanted to find out more about exactly what Quakers are and what they believe. This little book mostly does that and in a nice, conversational style. Very pragmatic in its approach. Terms are defined, a bit of history is covered, and current types of meetings are described in detail. What is missing is theology. The author states that there really isn't a core theology, but also makes numerous references to Quaker values and lifestyle and these are not clearly defined. Very helpful overall though. (less)

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D'face

Apr 21, 2012D'face rated it liked it

This is an approachable introduction to Quakerism that, I feel, has been supplanted by "Being a Quaker" by Geoffrey Durham which is a more complete and modern approach. Nonetheless, this book presents the Religious Society of Friends to the general public or inquirers in a readily understood way and suggests further avenues to explore if one is interested. (less)

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Libby

Sep 27, 2014Libby rated it it was amazing  ·  review of another edition

Shelves: nonfiction, owned, re-readable

If you want to learn the basics about Quakers, this is a good place to start! Feel like learning more about its interesting history, especially on its social action.

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Alan Hughes

Jul 30, 2011Alan Hughes rated it really liked it

This is a good introduction. As others have said there is only a little theology cup it does describe the main strands of thought.

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Lee Cadwallader-Allan

Aug 12, 2019Lee Cadwallader-Allan rated it it was amazing  ·  review of another edition

Despite being a member of the Religious Society of Friends, reading Harvey's words were still inspiring and useful. (less)

 

Xanthe

Sep 06, 2020Xanthe rated it liked it

Read this on the train after having a panic attack about not knowing if I was going to camp or not and then about the bushfires and climate change. Idk how I remembered any of it but I do so thumbs up for that xo

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What is Spirituality? by Harvey Gillman - Quaker Universalist Voice

What is Spirituality? by Harvey Gillman - Quaker Universalist Voice

What is Spirituality?

by Harvey Gillman

PUBLISHED

Friday, 20 Mar 2009

TOPICS

Spiritual experience mysticism spiritual growth deepening relationships religion and science ethics nature

Editor’s Introduction

We are grateful to Harvey Gillman for sending us a copy of this essay, which originated as a talk given to Forest Hill Meeting at High Leigh in the U.K. It first appeared in print as a two-part piece in the November and December, 2008, issues of Quaker Monthly, a publication of Britain Yearly Meeting, and it is reprinted here with permission.

Harvey Gillman served for many years as outreach secretary for Britain Yearly Meeting. He has published a number of books, and he is much revered on both sides of The Atlantic as a spokesperson for liberal Quakerism. His most recent work, Consider the Blackbird, was reviewed in Universalist Friends Number 48 (summer, 2008).

— Rhoda R. Gilman

I was delighted to be asked to define and explore with you the theme of spirituality. If you think about it, there is a contradiction here. To define means to put a border around, to close in, to show the limitations of; to explore a territory on the other hand may assume the territory has a border, but it is more about opening up, visiting the unknown regions, making discoveries. In fact I’d like to do both. I am not really offering a map to the territory of spirituality, more a lantern and a compass — some tools to help you on the path. If you don’t accept what I am saying, then I hope at least you will find some of the tools I am offering useful for your own journey. Do with them as you will.

So thanks for the challenge of the invitation. It has been a real privilege for me to have travelled around Friends and other groups in this country and abroad for over twenty-five years. With them I have reflected on their own understanding of the life of the Spirit and my own. I am an extravert, which means I learn as I go along, I get my energy from conversations with others. In fact I only know where I am and what I believe when I have to talk with others and explain things. Otherwise I sit there intuitively thinking in blissful, and sometimes, not so blissful, uncertainty. So I am learning all the time and am discovering as I speak.

Let’s make a journey together.

I would like to begin by quoting a poem I found in a magazine many years ago and which I used to keep on a board in my office in Friends House — I called it my wisdom board. The poem is called “Mysticism”, by Wallace E. Chappell:

I am passing on
into another era of my life:
I am looking again
at mysticism,
but not as once
I gazed a score
of years ago.

I look today as one
who has travelled through
the awe of youth,
the search for earned perfection,
the times of secularity
and scientific humanism,
the drying up of prayer,
the death of “death of god”,
the days of world-defined
agendas
for the church.

I am coming now
to wrestle once again
with the same mystery
who has followed me
persistently
along my journey.

But not as in the past.
My expectations
all are altered.
My goal is redefined.

I simply want
to hear and heed,
to know and follow.
I seek no superpower.
This hour
God has purged
my immature direction.

I journey inward
just because
I am created with capacity
for that quest,
expecting more,
not less, of world and church
and life.

As I was preparing this talk, I had a sense that this poem was right as an introduction. When I read it aloud as I was writing this, I was still as deeply moved as I was the first time I saw it. It speaks totally to my condition. OK, I am a linguist obsessed by theology; I have written a lot on this theme, but I speak to you as someone who is daily, hourly challenged by Spirit. I have called it being haunted by God. But I am not defining Spirit or God. Interestingly the poem is called Mysticism; and I guess nowadays I would call myself a mystic, an everyday sort of mystic. But the insights of the poem strike to the heart of the spiritual life. I journey because I am created with that capacity for quest — as indeed we all are. I am speaking from the awareness that I also am passing on to a new era of my life, one that makes me realise that I must put away many of the preoccupations of my younger days.

The story of Jacob struggling with the angel in the Book of Genesis is the image which speaks most to me. We struggle with the mystery on the bank of a river, at the crossing of a threshold. We struggle all night; we demand to be blessed by the angel at the threshold of a new territory; we will not let go even when we are rendered lame by the angel; but at the end we are transformed; we change from Jacob to Israel; we find in the dignity of the search for meaning a new deeper self. To hear and heed, to know and to follow the truth which reality discloses to us — that is the quest. Not with certainty, not a truth better than that of other people, but the truth which is revealed to us in our life and which we try to come to terms with in the community of seekers in which we find ourselves.

This movement of self to deeper self and of self moving out towards the other is to me at the heart of the spiritual life. I shall explore this further in a few moments. I am well aware however that the word spirituality does not please everyone. In my own meeting at Brighton one older Friend says she does not understand what the word means. Even when the word is explained she still points out that she cannot, or even will not, understand it. Possibly that is because she declares herself to be an agnostic, albeit one who often quotes Jesus. She is after all a Quaker agnostic.

For many other people the word spirituality refers spookily to spirits, things that go through walls, shadowy creatures found in many a children’s film or even horror movie. For others it overlaps with spiritualism and is about getting in contact with the spirits of the dead. And then there is the open-ended use of the word referring to anything which gives you a glow. A whole book called Selling Spirituality has been written on how the word has been used in an effort to give spurious psychological depth to the capitalist enterprise. It notes how in a world of individual-istic consumerism, the word spirituality confers a new selling advantage. In a market devoted to personal enhancement and personal well-being, it actually helps selling things. The authors of the book declare that spiritual is the new mystical, with the advantage that spiritual can be used without any reference to the divine. Though again Brighton is a planet of its own. I saw a health shop offering a mystical tan. I found the advertisement quite mind-boggling. Alas. I never pursued the offer!

Many years ago I was giving a talk about the Quaker way and I used the word spirituality. Someone in the audience challenged me on this, saying that it was a word used too often without a definition and would I give him one. I mumbled something, but on the train going home I wrote a paragraph which now forms the core for me of how I use the word. I see reality as a series of relationships: the self as it grows through its interaction with the world around, through family, friends, community, through the whole cosmos. The self grows as it were outwardly and inwardly. At one level there is only being, so that we are all part of each other; the self is not an isolated atom. I happen to believe also that there is a universal energy which animates and encourages these relationships. For want of a better word, I shall call this energy Spirit. Spirituality is thus about deepening relationships in a reality that is essentially sacred, in the sense of inspiring awe and wonder and reverence. Since all humans are part of this reality, and are on the quest for meaning and relationship, I would say that we are all on a spiritual journey, though the path is not necessarily linear. There are many windings and turnings, seeming dead-ends. We spiral through experiences and events. To be alive is to be on a pilgrimage. Each moment of the pilgrimage is itself a discovery; we seek as we find; we find as we seek. A mystic would say that a deepening understanding of our role within the world is a growing ability to see the world through the eyes of love.

In my book, Consider the Blackbird, I spent a large amount of space giving other definitions of spirituality. I should like to offer a few of them here:

Spirituality is what we do with our solitude, it is the reflection on ultimate things, it can be expressed by the Aztec “finding one’s face, finding one’s heart.” Spirituality is what we do with the flame within. Are these definitions or exploration? I leave that to you. I would add that spirituality may be seen as the call to the deep places where the one is joined to the many. But that is why I call myself a mystic.

If we consider the origins of the word, we shall see how the word has changed its meaning, and how the world in which it is used has changed also. One of the earliest usages is in the phrase “the estates spiritual.” This refers to the possessions of the priestly caste. Spiritual direction was advice given by spiritual directors, who were also priests, members of monastic communities, religious hermits and so on. Eventually the word spirituality came to refer to religious practice which led to a closeness to God — thus we find expressions such as Franciscan spirituality, Quaker spirituality etc. In a shop I visited recently all the books under the title of spirituality referred to ways of prayer.

So spiritual referred to the priestly and the monastic; then to practices related to them. But there is another wider dimension. “Spirit” is the English translation given to the Greek “pneuma.” According to Paul of Tarsus we are all filled with spirit, if we follow Christ, not just the clergy — if indeed Paul believed in a priestly caste at all — but all of us. This was also translated by the word ghostly as is found in the translation of Holy Ghost, for an original Hebrew or Aramaic phrase meaning Holy Wind. So, the wind blows where it wills in and out and through religious establishments. Now spiritual and spirituality have been liberated from the religious elite and refer to something much more universal.

The word was used first to refer to Christian life but it is now used in other religions. I have a book at home on Jewish spirituality, a sort of title which would not have been found many years ago. As the word has lost its mooring from a set-aside priesthood, it has gained a sort of independence from religion itself. To some people this is anathema. I remember a panel of a Muslim, a Jew, and a liberal Anglican discussing the word. For the Muslim, who was very orthodox, spirituality could not exist outside of religious practice; the Jew, who was on the liberal side of his faith, was somewhat suspicious that spirituality could be found outside of religion, though admitting it might take place there also; the liberal Anglican took it for granted that spirituality could be found outside of religion. For my part I see spirituality as a universal given; a call to which we may or may not respond, but which somehow we cannot completely ignore. We may use religious vocabulary to heed it; we may not. It is not whether we use the religious language or not, rather what we say in the language we use. Words are sacred not because the dictionary says so, but their sacredness depends on how we use them. We create sacredness as we encounter Spirit. We open ourselves to what is already there and establish, or re-establish relationship. In that sense the whole of life is sacred as we act with sacredness and this, as I have said, depends on our ability to learn to see with our eyes, with our minds, with our hearts, and with our souls. But the Spirit is always there. We are not.

---

Let us explore further the tension between the realm of religion and that of spirituality.

I found a useful passage written by the Dalai Lama in Ancient Wisdom, Modern World (1999) which I should like to share with you:

I believe there is an important distinction to be made between religion and spirituality. Religion I take to be concerned with faith in the claims to salvation of one faith tradition or another, an aspect of which is acceptance of some form of metaphysical or supernatural reality, including perhaps an idea of heaven or nirvana. Connected with this are religious teachings or dogma, rituals, prayer and so on. Spirituality, I take to be concerned with those qualities of the human spirit — such as love and compassion, patience, tolerance, forgiveness, contentment, a sense of responsibility, a sense of harmony — which bring happiness to both self and others. While ritual and prayer, along with the questions of nirvana and salvation, are directly connected with religious faith, these inner qualities need not be, however. There is thus no reason why the individual should not develop them, even to a high degree, without recourse to any religious or metaphysical belief system. This is why I sometimes say that religion is something we can perhaps do without. What we cannot do without are these basic spiritual qualities.

So much for the Dalai Lama.

Some Friends may well agree with this quotation, though I would add that religion is a useful historical construct. At its best it is how we communally explore and work out our spirituality at a given time, through myth, story, ritual, worship, and the way we live together. It is a language which may enable us — or not — to develop relationship and provide sources of meaning. In fact, in a new book by Keith Ward, called significantly Is Religion Dangerous? he talks of religion whose basic presumption is that “there exists a supreme objective reality and value in conscious relation to which humans can find fulfilment.” This for some people may seem to be a very spiritual definition of religious conviction. I guess this is close to my own position.

As you can see then, there is an overlap between religion and spirituality. As many people come to be suspicious of religion they may turn to spirituality. The use of these words may be generational as well — younger people may be reacting against the word religion more than older people, in whose childhood religion played a larger role than today as a source of an ethical way of living.

Another problem for anyone exploring the nature of spirituality is based on the old contradiction between spirit and matter. This goes back to the Platonic idea that there is a world of ideal forms which is perfect and eternal. This was taken over by Christians who saw it as the realm of the Spirit. Thus, in contrast, the world of matter is fallen, imperfect, a place of temptation, hence one to be escaped from as soon as possible. My emphasis on spirituality through relationship takes me to the opposite view: that of matter permeated, suffused by Spirit. In a beautiful sentence from a fascinating book called The Solace of Fierce Landscapes, Belden C. Lane wrote:

The interior truth… is that human beings do not long for another world, far beyond the ordinariness of this one. We long for our own world, perceived in all its hidden grandeur. We sense it to be filled with a glory we could see if only we had the gifts of attention and the proper rituals of entry.

So I would wish that spirituality be no longer seen as a superior form over and against the world in which we find ourselves. Rather I see spirituality as a deep attending to and communion with Spirit, fleshed out, embodied, incarnate even, in this beautiful, sacred, scarred and polluted reality of which we ourselves are a part. Spirituality is beholding with love this world in which we find ourselves.

Another part of the equation which I have not yet mentioned is that of the scientific enterprise. Michael Hallar, a Polish scientist and theologian, talks of the difference between scientific enquiry and the religious quest as being the difference between knowledge and meaning. This points up a problem in much so-called religious-scientific debate. The scientific method seeks to understand the how and what of things. The religious may try to give a picture of the why of things. For literalists in both camps, these may seem to be exclusive questions. If you take the Bible, for example, as a source of historical fact then you may have a real incompatibility between the two sources of information. If you see the scientific method as the only way of understanding the universe and how to live within it, then you will see religious truth as invalid because it is not tested by quantifiable experiment. If on the other hand you assert that truth is not just fact, but is about authenticity of relationship; is about how you treat others; if you accept that the spiritual life is about deepening and seeing connections, then you may find, as I do, the old nineteenth-century debates tedious and time consuming. The fundamental questions of spirituality are: How do we live truthfully? How do we share the planet with others? How, as the mystics declare, do we give birth to the divine in the everyday relationships, in the details of our lives?

To talk of the spiritual life without an ethical dimension and in contradiction to scientific exploration seems to me to be a futile enterprise. I see religion at its best as the way we explore together our spiritual insights, give form to the search in worship, and live out our findings, experimentally, in testimony. It is not science as such that contradicts spirituality, but science in its fundamentalist guise as a totalitarian world-view, denying that which cannot be quantified. It is not religion in its sense of corporate exploration that is the enemy of spirituality, but in its demand for hierarchy; power, conformity, and imposition of one way of being over the diversity of human experience. Indeed any totalitarian system is the enemy of the spiritual search. How can you catch the fierce wind of the Spirit in the net of any given system?

Belden Lane wrote: “if only we had the gifts of attention and the proper rituals of entry.” As I have stated, for me the first challenge of the spiritual life is that of seeing, of attending, of witnessing. The great Quaker insight and challenge is that “we answer that of God in everyone.” In a recent correspondence in the weekly, The Friend, there was a discussion as to what was meant by “answering.” Someone pointed out that George Fox’s basic idea was that there was a seed or a light from God in each of us. But actually that seed often lay dormant; the light was dim. The role of one human being for another was that we help the seed in each other to grow; we help the light to shine. In Eckhart’s famous phrase, we help each other to give birth to God. We evoke, call out the divine in each other. This is in fact the basis of our testimonies. But before we can do that we must actually see each other. We must give each other attention as each is, as it says in Advices & Queries, unique, precious, a child of God. (I am not mad on the idea of our remaining children — but that is another theme.)

We cannot build relationships unless we recognise that uniqueness, that preciousness in ourselves. So we need to attend to ourselves, see ourselves, warts and all, darkness and light. This is a real challenge. It does not need hierarchies or elaborate rituals or books or gurus or creeds. It needs eyes to see, and hearts to attend. The light shows us our darkness, but it gives us energy to overcome the ocean of darkness and leads us into community with those who also seek, and then perhaps with those who cannot seek, or who can no longer seek, or who are too afraid to seek.

In a sense, our worship is our exercise of seeing, of listening, of beholding. It is where faithfulness is practised. But the path is not linear. There are times when God is there, but we are not. There are times that we see the light in others but not in ourselves. There are times when we are too busy saving the planet to behold the details of the world around, its small beauties and its troubles. I know one Quaker who tells me that the more dust in a house, the greater the commitment to Quaker work outside it. Of course there are priorities; of course we all have different talents. I am often told by my partner that I am so clumsy in the physical world because my head is usually in the clouds. But the challenge is precisely to notice, to give time to the small links in the great chain of things. So the spiritual path is not a race to a certain goal. Perhaps it is more like a spiral which turns back on itself at a greater depth. It is not a matter of success or of a comparison with anyone else; it is what it is and we walk it with whatever feet we have, even though we may feel our feet have the heaviness of clay.

I was once asked by a group of nuns whether Quakers believe in the communion of saints. I pointed out that we do not have creeds or dogmas, but yes, we do have an awareness of the communion of saints. Go any week to meeting for worship and there they are, the saints in all their glory. We are always quoting Fox and Woolman and Penn, Jesus and the Buddha, Margaret Fell and Elizabeth Fry — even members of our own meetings are our saints. When I come into meeting, I watch other members come into the room; these are my companions; if I read from Quaker Faith and Practice, the authors there are my companions also. And when I close my eyes I hold in the light those of my friends (with a capital and a small f) who are ill or are in trouble.

Thus worship and prayer (or holding in the light if you prefer) are my ways of making firm the links, of building relationships. In worship I am also aware of the dead ends and blind alleys of my own life. I ask. I pray for light.

---

In all of this there is another essential element of spiritual awareness. That is of transcending the ego. Because I do not buy into the old myth of the sinfulness of humanity or of matter, I do not see the ego as the enemy. But it strikes me that we build up the ego, the sense of self which is at the core of our identity, in order to survive, to enable us to manipulate the world around us. There is a danger however that we assume we are our egos. There is a time when we may realise that life is not all about survival, that we do not have to defend ourselves against others, that perhaps our greatest fulfilment is when we take the ego and go beyond it. I do not find the concept of “sin” useful, but if I had to give it a definition I would say that it is the partial self which tries to separate itself from the rest of creation. The beholding of the other, the respecting the sacredness of the other, leads us to see that whatever redemption is to be found is to be found with others, in community. Thus we need to know each other, as Quakers say, “in the things which are eternal” — but this does not exclude the things that are temporal also.

A deepening of the spiritual life of the group arises from the sharing of story. In many traditions there is a common story, a given theology which we are born into, and to which we have to assent to find whatever salvation is offered. I would want to start the other way round. Part of our recognition of our self — and we cannot recognise others, without some recognition of the self — is the ability to delve into our own experience and to try to hear what our lives are saying to us. Paradoxically we can only do this when we have others to listen to us. Over the last few years I have been developing a series of propositions which I should now like to share with you. I use them also in the Blackbird book. I call this:

Each story is important.
All people have their stories.
Each story is important.
We need others to hear our stories and care.

This will help us listen to the stories of others. This will help us reflect upon our own story. From the particular details of these stories we can begin to understand the human story. This leads us to understand the divine story.

I wonder how much we live this out in our meetings. To do this we need to overcome fears about ourselves and suspicions about others; we need to have time and patience; we need to be able to deal with difference as there will be elements in each other’s stories that are alien to our own experience. Even the language of the other story may be very different from what we might use.

But a danger lies with the limited stories of our own communities. There are other stories in this world; there are stories which are so painful they may not be articulated, cannot be articulated. There is story even in the silence. One gift we can offer the other is the gift of the voice. The prophet is the one who voices the story of the unheard and of the overlooked.

Eckhart, whom I quoted before, said that the spiritual life was one of subtraction rather than of addition. Many of us have come to Friends leaving behind what we may have thought of as being an inauthentic way, as an incomplete or even false story. In my own case, however much I love Jewish culture, music, food, warmth, and mysticism, I found that I needed to go back from the promised land into the desert to strip myself bare of the burdens of ritual, orthodox legalism, exclusivity. The desert teaches you the value of vulnerability and creativity; you can only carry the minimum; you must listen to each sound and watch where you are going. You value the company of other desert life.

So I think what I am trying to convey here is quite simple, though I apologise if I have made it sound complicated. We live in Spirit; it is the glue of the universe; it suffuses all life; it gives whatever meaning there is to our fragile existences; it gives us the connection with all life, if we attend to its promptings. It leads us beyond the individualism of the separated ego to the oasis where we can meet together before the next part of our journey. But most of us are called out of the desert into the bustling market place among the traders, the shakers and the movers; among the beggars and the broken. And it is there that we are called to answer that of God in everyone.

I have always loved poetry and music. Sometimes when I need to put aside words I listen to Schubert and late Beethoven. I find the arts a rich source of spiritual insight. I would love to play for you part of Schubert’s great Quintet in C — the second movement. That to me says it all. It has both hesitancy and great daring, contemplation and dance. But instead I am going to end with a poem by Walt Whitman, another over-the-top artist:

Why, who makes much of a miracle?
As to me I know of nothing else but miracles,
Whether I walk the streets of Manhattan,
Or dart my sight over the roofs of houses toward the sky,
Or wade with naked feet along the beach just in the edge of water,
Or stand under trees in the woods,
Or talk by day with anyone I love, or sleep in bed at night with anyone I love,
Or sit at table at dinner with the rest,
Or look at strangers opposite me riding in the car,
Or watch honey-bees busy round the hive of a summer forenoon,
Or animals feeding in the fields,
Or birds, or the wonderfulness of the sundown, or of the stars shining so quiet and bright,
Or the exquisite delicate curve of the new moon in spring;
The whole referring, yet each distinct and in its place
To me every hour of light and dark is a miracle,
These with the rest, one and all, are to me miracles,
Every cubic inch of space is a miracle,
Every square yard of the surface of the earth is spread with the same,
Every foot of the interior swarms with the same,
To me the sea is a continual miracle,
The fishes that swim — the rocks — the motion of the waves — the ships with men in them,
What stranger miracles are there?

The word “miracle” comes from a Latin root meaning to wonder at. In Spanish the idea of beholding has survived — “mirar” means to look at. It seems to me that the very core of the spiritual journey is that we look, we behold, we wonder at, we respect, we affirm; we do this as individuals, in communities, in our daily work, and in our worship. Our attempts to establish a vision of peace, justice, equality, respect for the environment, are all aspects of this spiritual vision. Indeed our testimony in the world is the proof of the depths of the vision we have been granted. When I am overwhelmed yet again by the sheer negativity of the news, by the almost unrelieved darkness of so much in national and international politics, it is this amazement that gives me hope. When confronted by the fact of my own mortality and that of all I love, it is this that gives me the confidence to cherish the fragility of things.

Summary - the Compass of Needs - Google Docs

Summary - the Compass of Needs - Google Docs

From Shame to Connection 

Never do anything to avoid shame or guilt. 

Marshall Rosenberg 

Follow the four steps below to regain connection and inner balance after a shame attack. 

1. Acknowledge the shame.  

Experience the effects that shame has on your body. It can be experienced as warm waves that  will make you blush or as a discomfort in the stomach. You might already have started to avoid it  through some of the strategies described in The Compass of Needs and recognize it as you have  started to withdraw, to rebel, to attack yourself or others. 

2. Remind yourself that it is valuable to get in touch with your feelings and needs. Do not do  anything to avoid or numb the shame. If you act before you have connected with yourself, it is  possible that you will do something you will regret later. 

3. Ask yourself if your shame has anything to do with any of these 3 needs:  Belonging/Community or Acceptance or Dignity/Respect? Connecting with one of these can  usually open a door to more needs.  

4. Realize that you need support and that you will benefit from sharing how you feel with another  human being. 

5. Get in touch with someone you know who can listen and tell him about your shame attack. If  no one is available, make sure to take the time to listen to yourself with compassion. Shame  cannot keep us in its grip when we experience empathy.

From the book ”Anger, Guilt and Shame, Reclaiming Power and Choice by Liv Larsson.  (2013) Friare Liv. 

Summary of the Compass of Needs 

Never give any system the power over you to submit or rebel. 

Marshall Rosenberg. 

We can summarize the strategies we use to avoid shame into four different types of behavior. These four  ways can be combined in many ways. They have different “costs” and they all aim at helping us to  escape from shame. 

1. We submit, withdraw, become quiet and avoid expressing what we feel, need and want. This  can easily lead to depression, despair and apathy. Thoughts which are signs of submission can  be: 

Nobody wants me anyway. 

I need nothing, I can manage on my own. 

I will not show that... 

I might as well give up; it will not turn out as I was hoping anyhow. 

2. We engage in relationships but criticize ourselves as soon as we get closer to something that can  stimulate shame. Our inner critic has free reign to attack and judge us. We show that we are  victims, losers, not to be counted on, and we apologize and show that we are ashamed that we  are so insufficient. Shame often turns to guilt. Self-critical thoughts often sound similar to  those below: 

If I could just learn to not be so ... 

I’m not enough ... 

I am such a ... 

Why do I always … 

3. We rebel against what we perceive as demands or threats to our freedom or lack of respect. In  rebellion, we avoid feeling shame by showing that we are independent and free to do as we  want. The consequences are that we can easily become cold and mute. We stop giving  attention to the needs of others and thus we find it more difficult to satisfy our own needs for  care, reciprocity, solidarity and love. Thoughts associated with rebellion could be: 

I have come further than that - I do not care ...

From the book ”Anger, Guilt and Shame, Reclaiming Power and Choice by Liv Larsson.  (2013) Friare Liv. 

I have no problems! If nothing happens soon I will leave. 

Look at me and I’ll show you how things should go! 

We are not afraid of anything! More people should be like us and the world would look different. 

4. We threaten, attack, condemn, criticize, and blame others. Others are to blame when we are  angry because and they should act differently. We demand, use sarcasm, irony, argument, and  justify ourselves. This leads to anger. Thoughts that are a signs that we have moved in this  direction of the compass may be: 

It is your own fault, you must start taking responsibility! 

They are cowards and too weak to be able to do this. 

She / he / they / you are too ... 

She / he / they / you are not enough ... 

Reclaiming Power and Choice. Anger, Guilt and Shame by Liv Larsson. 

English: 

http://friareliv.se/en/e-books 

https://www.lulu.com/shop/search.ep?keyWords=Liv+Larsson&type=# 

Swedish 

http://friareliv.se/sv/e-boecker 

http://www.yourvismawebsite.com/friare-liv-ab/shop/product/ilska-skuld-skam?tm= 

German 

http://www.junfermann.de/titel-1-1/wut_schuld_und_scham-9981/ http://www.junfermann.de/titel-1-1/wut_schuld_und_scham-10100/   (Ebook)

From the book ”Anger, Guilt and Shame, Reclaiming Power and Choice by Liv Larsson.  (2013) Friare Liv.

叡知の貯蔵庫としてのラテン語 批評家・随筆家若忪英輔

日本語版刊行に寄せて

一  叡知の貯蔵庫としてのラテン語

批評家・随筆家若忪英輔

叡知の貯蔵庫としてのラテン語 

批評家・随筆家若忪英輔   

日本語版刊行に寄せて  

本書を一読して鮮やかに浮かび上がったのは、ラテン語という古い、しかし「古びることのない」言語を学ぶことは、単なる「勉強」の対象ではなく、叡知にふれる営みにほかならない、という事実だった。

  「学間とは、知るだけに留まらず、その知の窓から人間と人生を見つめ、より良い観点と代茶を提示するものである」と、作者は書いている。

言葉は、人生の秘められた意味へと私たちを導く扉だというのである。  西洋文学を読んでいると、若者たちがラテン語の学習に文字通り四苦八苦する光景にしばしば出会う。確かにこの言葉と向き合うのは容気ではない。しかし、そこで見出すのは系口すら掴むことの出来ないような難解さとは異なる何ものかだ。

作者は、ラテン語の発音にふれながら、「単なる言語的側面のみではなく、それぞれの国が歴史をどのように眺めているのかなど、たくさんの問題が複合的に反映されている」と述べる。 

 どの言語にも、それが用いられた文化の記憶が刻まれている。だが、一つの国家に限定されず、さまざまな賢者や哲学者、宗教者によって用いられたラテン語に蔵されているものの深甚さは他に類例を見ない。それと対時する中で私たちがふれるのも、言語化できる知識だけではなく、むしろ叡知と呼ぶほかない何ものかなのである。  

2022年の春まで、足かけ4年、大学に勤務していた。任期もないのにその職を離れたのは、現代の大学にある失望が大きくなったからだった。この本で作者が語っているように、自己と人生の秘密に出会う「学び」というよりも、誰かに強いられ、勉める貧しい意味での「勉強」の場になっていると強く感じたのだった。  

しかし、そうした雰囲気のなかで、ただ一つ、まったく異なる空気を宿している教室があった。ラテン語のクラスである。

大学にいるのだから、教えているだけではつまらない。興味のあるものを学びたい  と思い、50歳を過ぎた者が学生たちと机を並べた。  若者たちと同じようにラテン語を身につけることはできず、ひと月ほど過ぎた時点で、すでに落伝し始めていたが、授業がつまらなくなることはなかった。また、

私だけでなく皆が、わからなさに愛しさを感じているようにさえ見受けられた。脱落していく学生もほとんどいなかった。  このときのラテン語の教師の姿は、本書の作者の印象と強く夢き合う。2人の人物はともに、機械的に言語を教えているのではない。ラテン語という叡知の貯蔵庫を通じて、

世界の深みへと学ぶ者たちを導こうとしているのである。    この本は単なる語学入門ではない。「西洋哲学を語る上で欠かせないプラトンやストア哲学が、そのルーツを遡ればインド思想につながる」と、作者は実に興味深い事実に言及している。  私が大学で出会ったラテン語の教師もまったく同質のことを口にしていた。それを聞き、真の意味での「教養」とは何かをかいま見たように思った。

===

예지叡知의 저장고로서 라틴어

비평가·수필가 와카미네 에이스케 若忪英輔

일본어판 간행에 부친다.

이 책을 읽고 선명하게 떠오른 것은 라틴어라고 하는 낡은, 그러나 「낡을 일이 없는」언어를 배우는 것은, 단순한 「공부」의 대상이 아니고, 지혜에 접하는 일이라는 것에 틀림없다는 사실이었다.

   "학문이란, 아는 것에 머무르지 않고, 그 지식의 창으로부터 인간과 인생을 바라보고, 보다 좋은 관점과 대차를 제시하는 것이다"라고, 작자는 썼다.

말은 인생의 숨겨진 의미로 우리를 이끄는 문이라는 것이다. 서양 문학을 읽고 있으면, 젊은이들이 라틴어 학습에 말 그대로 사고팔고하는 (매우 힘든 시간을 보내는) 광경을 자주 만난다. 확실히 이 말과 마주하는 것은 용기가 아니다. 그러나, 거기서 찾아내는 것은 실마리조차 잡을 수 없는 난해함과는 다른 무엇인가이다.

저자는 라틴어 발음을 접하면서 "단지 언어적 측면뿐만 아니라 각각의 나라가 역사를 어떻게 바라보고 있는지 등 많은 문제가 복합적으로 반영되고 있다"고 말한다.

  어느 언어에도 그것이 사용된 문화의 기억이 새겨져 있다. 하지만, 하나의 국가에 한정되지 않고, 다양한 현자나 철학자, 종교자에 의해 사용된 라틴어에 담겨져 있는 것의 깊음은 그 밖에 유례를 볼 수 없다. 그것과 대시하는 가운데 우리가 접하는 것도 언어화할 수 있는 지식뿐만 아니라 오히려 예지叡知라고 부를 수밖에 없는 무엇인가일 것이다.

2022년 봄까지 4년 동안 대학에 근무했다. 임기도 없는데 그 직을 떠난 것은 현대 대학에 있는 실망이 커졌기 때문이었다. 이 책에서 작가가 말하는 것처럼 자기와 인생의 비밀을 만나는 '배우기'보다는 누군가에게 강요되어 공부하는 빈곤한 의미에서의 '공부'의 장이 되고 있다고 강하게 느껴서였다.

그러나 그러한 분위기 속에서 단 하나, 완전히 다른 공기를 갖고 있는 교실이 있었다. 라틴어 교실이었다.

대학에 있기 때문에, 가르치고 있는 것만으로는 지루하다. 흥미가 있는 것을 배우고 싶었고, 50세를 넘은 자가 학생들과 책상을 늘어놓았다. 젊은이들처럼 라틴어를 익힐 수 없었고 한 달 정도 지나면 이미 낙전하기 시작했지만 수업이 지루해지는 일은 없었다.

 또한, 나뿐만 아니라 모두가 <모르는 것의 사랑스러움>을 느끼는 것처럼 보였다. 탈락해가는 학생도 거의 없었다. 이때의 라틴어 교사의 모습은 본서의 작자의 인상과 같이 강하게 꿈을 꾸고 있다. 두 사람은 모두 기계적으로 언어를 가르치는 것이 아니었다. 라틴어라는 지혜의 저장고를 통해, 세계의 깊이로 배우는 자들을 이끌려고 하는 것이다. 이 책은 단순한 어학 입문이 아니다. "서양 철학을 말하는데 있어서 빼놓을 수 없는 플라톤이나 스토어 철학이 그 뿌리를 거슬러 올라가면 인도 사상에 이어진다"고 작가는 실로 흥미로운 사실을 언급하고 있다. 내가 대학에서 만난 라틴어 교사도 완전히 같은 것을 말하고 있었다. 그것을 듣고, 진정한 의미에서의 「교양」이란 무엇인가를 보았던 것처럼 생각했다.

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<예지 叡知>  eichi

한국어 사전에는 없고, 한자의 의미 만 나온다.

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叡 (밝을 예)

1. (사리에)밝다 

2. 밝게 하다, 통달하다(通達--: 사물의 이치나 지식, 기술 따위를 훤히 알거나 아주 능란하게 하다) 

3. 슬기롭다

知 (알 지)

1. 알다 

2. 알리다, 알게 하다 

3. 나타내다, 드러내다

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일본어사전 

에이치 [ 영지 · 지지 · 지지 ]  

1. 뛰어난 지혜 . 깊이 사물 의 도리 에 통하는 재치 .

2. 철학 에서 사물 의 진실한 이성적 , 고 성적 인식 . _ _ _ _ 또 , 그것을 획득할 수 있는 힘 . 소피아.

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에이치  출처: 윅셔너리

1. 깊이 사물 의 도리 에 통하는 지혜 . 높은 지성 .

2. 철학에서 사물 의 진실 과 진리 를 포착 할 수 있는 최고의 인식 능력 .

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系口すら掴むことの出来ない

이토-구치【실구/ ▽ 오】　실마리조차 잡지못하는

읽는 방법:이토구치

한 권 의 실의 끝. 실 끝.




2 계기 . 단서 . 「이야기―」「해결 의―

[補説] 書名別項。→叡知

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教養（きょうよう）とは、個人の人格や学習に結びついた知識や行いのこと。これに関連した学問や芸術、および精神修養などの教育、文化的諸活動を含める場合もある。