The philosophy of music of Pythagoras

Abstract

The article reproduces the image of the great thinker Pythagoras - one of the most popular scientists and the most mysterious personality, the philosopher.

Pythagoras created the brightest and most modern "religion": he nurtured in humanity a belief in the power of reason, the belief that the key to the mysteries of the worldview is mathematics. Music for Pythagoras became not only a means of inspiration but also a subject of scientific research, it was in music that Pythagoras found direct proof of his statement: "Everything is a number." 2,500 years ago, Pythagoras guided people on the path of triumph of the Mind. The whole world, Pythagoras argued, is a harmonious number. And these numbers form the ratio as well as the intervals between different degrees of scale. From time immemorial, numbers seemed to people to be something mysterious. Any object could be seen. The number cannot be touched and, at the same time, numbers really exist, because all objects can be counted... Pythagoras and his followers believed that everything in nature is measured, everything is subject to numbers, and to know the world means to know the numbers that control them.

If before Pythagoras, music was understood magically and understood as the embodiment of the forces of nature, used mainly in ritual and religious rites, it is Pythagoras who became the progenitor of the mathematization of the musical phenomenon.

The main grain of Pythagorean world harmony is the idea of ​​harmony in a mathematically ordered whole. Pythagoras came to this idea when he discovered that the basic harmonic intervals: octave, pure fifth and pure fourth - occur when the lengths of the strings are 2:1, 3:2 and 4:3. Drawing analogies between the orderliness of the material world and the orderly mathematical relationship in music, he suggested that each planet in its rotation around the Earth emits a tone of a certain height, passing through the clean upper air - the ether. All the celestial sounds of all the planets, merging, form what is called "harmony of the spheres" or "music of the spheres."

The laws of music and mathematics are the basic essence of natural existence, according to which the universe is not only built, but also moves and develops.
The teachings of Pythagoras showed the unity of everything in the set, and the main purpose of man was expressed in the fact that through self-development man must achieve a connection with the cosmos.