|The Growth of Music (H.C.

Colles)|
All that a book can do is to help the study of music by pointing out what influence
helped to mould the work of each master and what resources were added to the art
of the birth of each master piece.

[A note on the use of this book]

If growth is understood to mean an even-increasing expansion of ways and means

rather than a progress towards some unimaginable ultimate perfection, it may still
serve.
[Preface to the third edition]

| Medieval songs and dances |

If we consider that all music began with making of tunes we see how men learnt to
write polyphonic music, for in the process of finding out how their tunes might be
made to fit together they discovered that certain notes sounded simultaneously
make harmonious chord and others inharmonious ones.
-page 5
It would be impossible to find a time when tunes of some sort were not made up
and sung to poetry or used as dances and as both poetry and dance steps suggest
strong rhythm most of the early tunes were more remarkable for their rhythm than
for any other feature. In the thirteenth century we find the Trobadours and
Trouvres of France, the Ministries of England and the Minnesinger of Germany all
busily engaged in composing and singing both tunes and poetry; and besides these
there were the songs of the people, that is to say, songs made by unknown authors
which were passed from mouth to mouth and altered and often improved in the
process, some of which have lasted to the present day and are generally called folk
songs.
There were

[Concise Encyclopaedia]
Music is the art concerned with combining vocal or instrumental sounds for beauty of form or
emotional expression, usually according to cultural standards of rhythm, melody, and, in most
Western music, harmony. Music most often implies sounds with distinct pitches that are arranged
into melodies and organized into patterns of rhythm and metre. The melody will usually be in a
certain key or mode, and in Western music it will often suggest harmony that may be made
explicit as accompanying chords or counterpoint. Music is an art that, in one guise or another,
permeates every human society. It is used for such varied social purposes as ritual, worship,
coordination of movement, communication, and entertainment.

MUSIC: The Grolier Childrens Encyclopedia

I have said already that art is not imitation of nature, but the shaping and forming of
nature. In music, fortunately, there can be no question of imitating nature; music is
autonomous, belonging to another intellectual world, another sphere of the
imagination than all the other arts

Pages 45-46
F. KEPLER'S HELIOCENTRIC THEORY

1. Pythagorean Mysticism
Both Tycho Brahe and Galileo Galilei used a relatively modern approach to
scientific problems. Brahe insisted on the importance of systematic, extensive,
and accurate collection of data. Galileo was not content simply to make observations,
but recognized the necessity to alter experimental conditions in order to
eliminate extraneous factors. Both men were very rational and logical in their

approach to their work. Copernicus, on the other hand, and Kepler (of whom
more will be said later) even more so, were concerned with the philosophical
implications of their work. Kepler was well aware that the ancient Pythagoreans
had set great store on finding simple numerical relationships among phenomena.
It was the Pythagoreans who recognized that musical chords are much more
pleasing if the pitches of their component notes are harmonics, that is, simple
multiples of each other. The Pythagoreans also discovered that the pitch of notes
from a lyre string, for example, are simply related to the length of the string, the
KEPLER'S HELIOCENTRIC THEORY 45

Figure 2.8. The Platonic solids. From left to right: tetrahedron, cube, octahedron,
dodecahedron, icosahedron.
higher harmonics being obtained by changing the length of the string in simple
fractions. Turning to the heavens, they asserted that each planetary sphere, as well
as the sphere of the stars, emits its own characteristic musical sound. Most humans
never notice such sounds, if only because they have heard them continuously
from birth. The spatial intervals between the spheres were also supposed to be
proportional to musical intervals, according to some of the legends abo

***Credits to the authors of the books from which these quotations are taken.