Echoing in Celebration: The Studying of Beauty and Harmony in Music
By Leigh Bortins
We no longer dare to believe in beauty and we make of it a mere appearance in order the more easily to dispose of it. Our situation today shows that beauty demands of itself as least as much courage and decision as do truth and goodness, and she will not allow herself to be separated and banned from her two sisters without taking them along with herself in a mysterious act of vengeance.
The Glory of the Lord by Hans Urs von Balthasar
Quoted in Beauty for Truth’s Sake by Stratford Caldecott
Classical, Christian educators see the goals of education as a passionate pursuit of truth, goodness, and beauty. Instruction in beauty must include instruction in music.
People in ancient times had a very different understanding of music than we do today. Music had a vital role in a classical education. In fact, the ancients regarded the study of music as a study of numbers. They divided education into seven liberal arts and subdivided them into three language arts—the Trivium—and four arts of number—the Quadrivium. The Trivium trained students in the arts of Grammar, Dialectic and Rhetoric, while the Quadrivium trained them in Arithmetic, Geometry, Astronomy, and Harmony (music).
The ancients included music with the arts of number because they focused musical study on harmony. The Pythagoreans and later students studied the ratios between notes that were played together to form chords. Even more foreign to our modern minds is the fact that the ancients linked music to the virtues. In fact, Plato argued in The Republic that music is critical to the development of a rightly ordered, harmonious soul: (more…)