Music and the realm of the intellect in Ancient Greece
Not everyone agrees on the fact that music represents something more than itself, be it a conscious mind or a religious reality. However, a lot of music was always written to celebrate higher realities: music itself, mathematics, the intellect, God, the souls of the departed, love, nature, the universe, etc. Concepts were developed and theories were written to accompany these practices. For example, the ‘music of the spheres', also called ‘musica universalis’ or harmony of the spheres, is a concept coming from Ancient Greece, where, for instance, the philosopher Pythagoras studied the relationships between pitch, musical notes and a string, mathematical ratios between them providing a pattern of proportion.
Another philosopher living in Ancient Greece, Plotinus, thought, like Plato, that materiality and all things visible, the phenomena, were poor imitations of higher realities. He attached great importance to beauty and also to music. He thought that, along with the philosopher and the lover, the musician was the only one that could precisely reach the higher levels of existence, starting with the apparent things and then progressing to the realm of the intellect. Let us notice that in Ancient Greece, music was performed by slaves. For Plotinus, loving harmony, beauty, pleasing sounds, consonance and nice rhythms, the musician has a natural disposition to be moved by everything. When a person is moved by consonances, harmonies and sounds, that person is a musician that must be helped by a more experienced musician in order to compose music. How does Plotinus define a good musician? For him it is a person that has the technical abilities to translate realities perceived in the higher realm of forms into concrete sounds. And the audible harmony of music is a material witness of a higher truth.
Music, mathematics and ethics in the thought of Plotinus
For Plotinus, there are different types of music that express specific aspects of harmony: musica mundana, musica humana and musica instrumentalis. Musica mundana refers to the harmony of the human macrocosm: the universe itself. Musica humana is in relationship with the harmony in the human microcosm, formed by the body and the soul: music is an essential element in creating harmony between the body and the soul. For Plotinus, the soul is made of consonant numbers and can be influenced by music at the ethical level, because music is also based on numbers and because things that are based on ideal mathematical ratios are harmonious. Musica instrumentalis is linked to the harmony of concrete music, melodies and notes.
Also, for Plotinus, music affects the lower, the irrational part of the human soul, that irrational part being the place where one can find the political virtues or cardinal virtues: justice, wisdom, courage and moderation. A beautiful piece of music contains these virtues and listening to it helps to clean the soul of all kinds of disorders, connecting the soul to the higher realms, that is a world of pure intellectual beauty.