Aristoxenus's Ghost: An Ancient Metaphysical Mystery Solved

By Mitzi DeWhitt

As Vyasa, scribe of the epic Mahabarata, said, This book is about you. At first glance the material may seem to be about the specter of ancient Greek musical theory, the ghostly remains that concern a musical system long past and forgotten. However, first glances are often very deceiving. What is offered within its pages goes far beyond arid musical theorizing. As the reader soon begins to discover, permeating through-and-through, in every word on every page, is the archetypal portrait of the ever-present Self. The original and revelatory information, overflowing with meaning, emerges into the world-at-large not only from the extensive research that comes from books and libraries and institutions of higher learning, but also from the deep, quiet, inner searching for the soul. The ideas are unquestionably rich in the nutrients that feed the mind, while also nourishing the heart. Assimilating their message cannot help but inform and transform the reader.

Utilizing simple but irrefutable musical mathematics, the author deftly erases centuries-long misunderstandings and speculations by bringing to light what has been lost for twenty-five hundred years: the enharmonic genus. Her point of departure is the Greek musician, Aristoxenus [c. 360 B. C.], a pupil of the philosopher Aristotle. Aristoxenus, the son of a musician, penned a seven-part treatise about music, called Elementa Harmonica. Harmonics was the science concerned with the laws of world creation and world maintenance: how they came into existence and how they were organized. Harmonics revealed the fundamental blueprint of creation, and subsequent theoretical structures. The Elementa Harmonica is considered the oldest theory text still in existence. Its influence was considerable and its theoretical ideas were passed on as doctrine by musical theorist of antiquity. Even so, much of what Aristoxenus wrote in Elementa Harmonica has been lost. Of its last three sections (Modes, Modulation, and Construction) very little remains, while the first four categories (Genera, Intervals, Notes, and Systems) continue to be the basis for heated controversy and endless confusion among scholars. The perplexities are immediately cleared up by the recovery of the enharmonic genus.

Suddenly, with discovery of the long lost key, we are able to read the basic blueprint, or matrix, that reveals the universal laws. What today we call the matrix, the ancient Greeks named the katapyknosis. From the shifts within the matrix structure comes the organization of the ancient Harmonia, a word that means soul. Harmonics is really about the soul: of what it is composed, and how it is made. Being the reconciling factor, the soul integrates the inner and outer octaves, enabling the image-formation that is uniquely human. By the measure of the soul one is able to view both the world and oneself objectively.

Taking a more intuitive approach than what is permitted in academia, the author describes how Aristoxenuss seven musical categories, beginning with the key of the recovered enharmonic genus, actually reveal the expanded viewpoint of an underlying hermetic tradition, one effectively preserved and transmitted by the very information contained within Elementa Harmonica itself.

The bold and innovative interpretations in this work may, in all likelihood, set off a storm of controversy that will go beyond the confines of the academic community. What has been dared is the revivifying of ideas, long considered cold and dead, so they once again vibrate the eternal truths of physical and metaphysical principles. Uniquely original yet universal, crossing the lines of science and religion and philosophy, the information emerges into the world-at-large just in the nick of time, as the world approaches the brink of an abyss that cannot be bridged by the usual attempts at diplo

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Sep 7, 2004
• ISBN: 9781465332059

Mitzi DeWhitt

Mitzi DeWhitt is a music theorist, piano teacher, composer, and the author of the landmark books, Aristoxenus’s Ghost, Nearly All and Almost Everything, Gurdjieff, String Theory, Music and The Meaning of the Musical Tree. She resides in the Philadelphia area.

Book preview

ARISTOXENUS’S GHOST

An Ancient Metaphysical

Mystery Solved

Katapyknosis Diagrams:

The Universal Blueprints

Mitzi DeWhitt

Copyright © 2004 by Mitzi DeWhitt.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

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Contents

Preface

Forward

Introduction

I

II

III

IV

V

VI

VII

Appendix

Bibliography

This Book is dedicated to the memory of my father, Charles H. Cunning, who, from the beginning, set my feet on the joyful path to musical knowledge; and to my other father, Thomas V. Forman, who led me, kicking and screaming, down the bumpy road of self-knowledge.

Preface

I suppose I was born with an intuitive need to reach for order through music, to find the clues that have been missing for so long in the fragmentary remains of earlier musical systems and how they might one day somehow be harmonized in a more complete view of the cosmos.

What follows is a rather rarified distillation of thirty years of my work in confronting the cosmological mystery in terms of music. With the help of mathematical ratio and proportions, I have found a frame of reference large enough to fit the fragments together in a way that makes sense. I am using mainly the Greek terms which have been handed down through generations who no longer understood what they meant, and somehow or other it has come to me to recover, I believe, some of the lost knowledge. Perhaps in the evolution of human consciousness it is time for that. I do not know, but I offer what I have been given so that others may go further with it when I no longer can, and that more light may enlarge the vision of what is and what I am… always and everywhere.

If you are not a musicologist with a knowledge of the ancient Greek terms, my shorthand notes using these terms and the corresponding mathematical ratios may not be clear to you, although I trust that you may have some intuitive appreciation for the order and beauty of this universal map. I realize that I am offering you answers before you have felt a burning question arising from the intelligence we share as human beings. It is my hope to publish more, from a musical perspective, about this existential question, and that book will become, so to speak, the white of the egg, around the yoke I am presenting now, making it more digestible and whole.

Forward

The current search for a Theory of Everything is showing up not only in physics, biology, and cosmology, but now in music. Without a sense of the meaning of it all, as Keats puts it, There’s nothing stable in the world: uproar’s your only music. For many hundreds of years, there has been a great uproar in musical theory because no one could explain the ancient Greek modal system, and its claims of an objective music, in a way that made sense. I invite the reader to consider the extraordinary possibility that, thanks to Mitzi DeWhitt’s tireless efforts, a major breakthrough has been made, one that not only describes the ancient musical system with mathematical rigor, but at the same time allows us to look at other reality systems through the lens of music. If so, this groundbreaking work will have exciting repercussions in other domains of knowing.

James George, Canadian Ambassador (retired), President of the Sadat Peace Foundation, Founder of the influential Threshold Foundation, and author of Asking For The Earth.

Introduction

This paper continues the Aristoxenian tradition of systematizing ostensibly musical phenomena, utilizing the seven categories as found in his treatise, Elementa Harmonica, which is the oldest treatise on music theory written in Greek. Aristoxenus (c. 360 BC) was the son of a musician and a student of Aristotle at the Lyceum. His clear definitions and subdivisions of music theory into an orderly system greatly influenced later writers. The seven categories in which Aristoxenus framed his musical reality are listed below:

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Each category will be considered in some detail. Not only the words of Aristoxenus, but those of other ancient writers—Aristides Quintilianus, Ptolemy, Nicomachus, Euclid, for example—are cited as we search for meaning as well as content. The musical fabric will incorporate the threads of contemporary ideas from many disciplinary fields, including those of religion and history, of archeology and mythology and physics. Many ideas which have, until now, been dismissed as improbabilities will be able to be viewed in a whole new light which, when directed through the prism of an objective musical framework of ratio and proportion, will reveal a sevenfold spectrum of rainbow connections.

As Aristoxenus himself said, if we begin a study of something, we must know beforehand what it is about and not adopt unwittingly a misconception of the topic. The philosopher Aristotle, who was Aristoxenus’s teacher, recounted that when people came to Plato’s lectures on the good, they supposed they would be taught how to acquire goodness (those things that make for happiness, such as health or wealth). When the lecture turned out to be about mathematics—arithmetic and geometry and astronomy—people left disgruntled, feeling that what they had received was contrary to their expectations. For this reason, Aristotle gave introductory talks so that those intending to come to lectures would have foreknowledge and not be disappointed in what they heard. For that same reason, an introduction is given in this book in the hope that some foreknowledge of the topic will allow one to appreciate its study.

What is introduced here is the novel idea that Aristoxenus’s musical system of Elementa Harmonica unveils the privileged and secret knowledge of the mystery school tradition. The seven categories of Aristoxenus’s musical reality will be found to encompass far more than a structural basis for music theory, and the information gleaned from their investigation will explain and make comprehensible the underlying teachings of the mystery schools, both ancient and modern. From this unique perspective, the musical mathematics will serve to objectify the mystical flavor; at the same time, certain esoteric concepts provide correlative material for new musical discoveries.

Harmonics: The Science of the Soul

What the mystery schools taught was the science of the soul. This soul knowledge was not about the good; rather, it pertained to mathematics and reason, to ratio and proportion, to science, specifically to that Greek musical system of modes known as the harmonia (pl. harmoniae).

The word harmonics or harmonica, or harmonia, at its root, meant the soul principle. As the Greek philosopher Aristotle wrote in Politics: Hence many of the wise say, some of them, that the soul is a harmonia, others that it contains a harmonia. The soul, the third reconciling part, brought together two incommensurates, the two opposing forces of spirit and body.

Plato (Timaeus) called the two incommensurates fire and earth.

God in the beginning of creation made the body of the universe to consist of fire and earth. But two things cannot be rightly put together without a third; there must be some bond of union between them.

The teaching of the third force, the bond of union, was at the root of hermetic systems.

The word harmonia, according to extant texts, first appears in the writings of the secretive Pythagorean Brotherhood during the pure modal period of ancient Greece, c. 500 BC. The Pythagoreans held the underlying principle to be a numerical system bound together by interlocking ratios.¹ From those who studied under his tutelage, called Harmonists, the legendary Pythagoras taught that the soul knowledge required mathematics and reason and could best be comprehended by that musical system of interlocking octachordal scales called harmonia.

By all accounts, the harmonia was monumentally difficult to understand. Aristotle, in his philosophical treatise On the Soul, wrote that to attain any assured knowledge about the soul is one of the most difficult things in the world. This difficulty pertains not only to what the soul is, he said, but even to whether it exists at all. What his pupil Aristoxenus was actually writing about, in his theoretical treatise Elementa Harmonica, were the actual mathematical proofs, described in objective, scientific, theoretical terms, showing the component elements of the soul and how they are organized.

The Elements of the Soul

The word element comes from the Latin elementum, first principle.

Our argument is based upon what Aristotle called these first principles, or elements.

By first principles in each genus I mean those the truth of which it is not possible to prove. What is denoted by the first and those derived from them is assumed; but as regards their existence, this must be assumed for the principles but proved for the rest.²

The Pythagoreans (who were convinced that everything is number) held that numbers themselves were vital elements, or forces, the first principles that ruled by mathematical laws. The word numb, which quite literally means devoid of any sensation or movement, subtly suggests that numbers have no existence in the ever-moving world of sensation; rather, elements are the residents of the causal world; their domain is in the always-still, numinous realm where they are the underlying causes of events. The word causal has a certain affinity with caudal (tail) and Caucasian (the white race). The curious labyrinthine relationships between these words, however, become apparent only much later.

For the ancients, elementals were forces which effected not only the passions of men’s souls but also were the very causes of movement, the very reason for the sensation of constant physical changes taking place in the visible phenomenal world. By the magical invoking of the elements, or elementals, one could come in contact with the gods themselves, and even with the greatest god at the gravity-center of the universe.

An element is a rudiment, a basic simple principle not separable into something different than itself. In chemistry, an element is one of a limited number of substances, each composed of