Aristoxenus was the son of a musician.

He was born in Tarentum, probably a little

before the middle of the fourth century, while the great Tarentine philosopher,
statesman, mathematician and musicologist Archytas was still alive. Aristoxenus will
have heard much about him, though he can hardly have known him personally. We are
told that he studied music and philosophy with his father, and later with distinguished
Pythagoreans and others in mainland Greece. Some time after 330 he came to Athens
and joined the school of Aristotle. To judge by the evident Aristotelian influence in his
writings, this was an important turning-point in his career. By the time of Aristotle's
death in 322 B.C. Aristoxenus was a figure of some distinction in the Lyceum and hoped
to follow him as its head. The rudeness of his remarks about Aristotle when he learned
that the school had been bequeathed to Theophrastus was startling enough to be
remembered, and passed into the biographical tradition.
It seems unlikely that Aristoxenus stayed in the Lyceum under Theophrastus'
presidency, but he may not have left Athens. We do not know where he went or how
long he lived. The bulk of the
El. Harm., however, was certainly written later, and any
pique he had felt against Aristotle must have passed. His only explicit remarks about
his teacher in that work compare him favourably with Plato, and the treatise is
thoroughly Aristotelian in conception. But the tale of his peevish insults is perfectly
believable. He was notoriously humourless, acerbic and opinionated, outspoken and
unscrupulous in speech as in writing. In his biographies of earlier philosophers he was
not content with intellectual criticisms of those whose views he disliked, but spiced them
with scandalous stories of dubious authenticity: Socrates and Plato especially were
maliciously pilloried. In the El. Harm, we find nothing of quite that sort, but in
criticising his predecessors he certainly pulls no punches. To judge by what he says, all
previous writers on harmonics were incompetents or charlatans. He and he alone has
understood how the subject should be pursued, and has grasped the truths it contains.

Aristoxenus was a tireless writer on a wide variety of philosophical and historical

subjects (according to the Suda his works totalled 453 'books'). We hear, for instance,
of at least three works on Pythagoras and the Pythagoreans, biographies of Socrates and
Archytas, and writings on the soul, on principles of education and on political laws. In
the field of music he wrote technical and historical studies of great scope and erudition,
on which later musicologists drew extensively. For scholars of the Roman era he was
simply 'the musician'. Of these works none has survived intact, though substantial
quotations and paraphrases can be found in other people's writings. Among them were
a very substantial treatise on the practice of music and its history, biographies of poets
and composers, essays on instruments, on composition, on dancing, on choruses, and
various collections of miscellaneous notes and discussions. Only two pieces have come
down to us independently in the MSS traditions. One is a modest number of pages from
his treatise on rhythmics. The other is the set of writings known as the Elementa
Harmonica.

I shall nothing here about the Rhythmics: the surviving parts of the second book are
translated in the Appendix to this chapter, and some comments will be found in the
notes to 12 Arist. Quint. De Mus. Book 1 chs. i3ff. In harmonics his work was trulyrevolutionary, as he would have
been the first to agree. It sets aside the researches of the
Pythagoreans as irrelevant and misdirected, and seeks in effect to establish a wholly new
science that will study music on the basis of principles intrinsic to itself, not borrowed
from physics or mathematics. So powerful was his novel conception of the subject, and
so sophisticated and detailed were his studies, that his authority on matters of melodic
analysis was accepted for centuries almost without criticism. Even later adherents to the
' Pythagorean' school tended to look to Aristoxenus (or to the simplified summaries of
his views in the ' Aristoxenian handbooks' of the early Christian era) for accounts of the
musical phenomena, though they sought to explain them differently and to develop
them for different purposes. The one notable exception is Ptolemy, and even he accepts
a good many Aristoxenian conceptions without question.
The El. Harm, as we have it is not a complete treatise. In the opinion of most scholars
it is not even the remains of a single work, but incorporates parts of at least two,
possibly more, and the question of the relationship between its parts has provoked much
learned controversy. The most recent study (Belis 1986) offers a detailed defence of the
Unitarian position, but though it is powerful, ingenious and erudite, I do not think it
succeeds. The minutiae of the problem cannot be pursued here, but it may be helpful
to set out a schematic summary of the work as it stands, and to add a few comments
about the issues in dispute.

Book 1 begins with a brief description of the scope of harmonic science. Harmonics
constitutes only a part of the multifaceted science of melody, and in particular it does
not include the study of composition (1-2). After some reflections on the limitations of
his predecessors' work (2-3), Aristoxenus devotes several pages to the presentation of
his programme for harmonics, listing the subjects that the science should study, with
comments about their importance and their previous neglect (3-7). The list includes
some repetitions, probably because, as he indicates elsewhere, the topics were first to be
sketched in outline and later considered in depth. The topics promised are the following.
(i) The movement of the voice in * space', that is, in the dimension of pitch. He adds that
an understanding of this form of movement is essential if we are to grasp what it is to
be a note, and that it presupposes understanding of five other subjects, tension,
relaxation, height, depth and pitch, (ii) The greatest and smallest extensions (intervallic
distances) that are melodically usable, (iii) Intervals and their differentiae, (iv) Systemata
(roughly, scales, concatenations of intervals) and their differentiae, (v) Musical melody:
how it differs from other types of melody, and its division into genera, (vi) The nature
of continuity and succession in systemata. (vii) The genera, and the ranges within which
the moveable notes alter in changes of genus, (viii) Intervals, and how they can properly
be combined to form larger units. Here Aristoxenus emphasises that such combination
is thoroughly orderly and subject to rules (ignored by his predecessors). The underlying
principles must be found, (ix) From this emerges the study of systemata, including the
Complete or Perfect Systema. They are to be enumerated and classified in detail, (x)
Mixtures of genera, and the systemata thereby formed, (xi) Notes, (xii) Regions of the
voice, tonoi, and modulation, to be studied just as far as this bears on the nature of
systemata.

The list seems to be in three main parts: (i) - (ii) are preliminary studies of basic
entities and concepts, (iii) - (vi) indicate topics of which an outline must be given before
detailed work can begin, (vii) - (xii) are subjects to be pursued in depth, many of them
having already been cursorily sketched.
Aristoxenus now sets off on his project, after reminding us of the place of harmonics
in the wider study of music. In 8-10 he discusses the movement of the voice, and in
10-13 gives a careful study of the other five topics listed in (i). The subject proposed
under (ii) is considered in 13-15. Next (still in 15) we find a preliminary definition of nterval, corresponding to (iii); in
16 a similar account of systema, corresponding to (iv);
and in 16-18 a discussion of the differentiae of both intervals and systemata, as
proposed in (iii) - (iv). Preliminary remarks on musical melody and on succession,
(v) - (vi), are offered in 18-19; and in 19 we find a list of the different melodic genera,
presented in a manner that echoes the proposal of (v).
So far Aristoxenus has followed his programme faithfully enough. At first sight 19-21
diverges from the sequence. It returns to one of the differentiae of intervals and gives an
enumeration of the concords. This is followed by a definition of the tone in terms of
concords, and a sketch of the ways in which the tone can be divided. In 22-7 we have
a detailed study of the genera and the ranges of the moveable notes, plainly
corresponding to (vii). In 27-9 (where the Book breaks off) there is an avowedly
preliminary discussion of continuity and succession, emphasising again the orderliness
underlying them, and finally a list of principles that govern the succession of intervals
in systemata. One might locate 27-9 under the heading of either (vi) or (viii). It seems
fair to treat 19-21 as having been placed where it is (possibly after a gap in the surviving
text) as a necessary preface to the quantitative investigation of the genera in 22-7. In
that case, though the order of the discussion does not exactly reflect that of the
programme set out, it comes very close. It is of course plain that it has not at this stage
been completed.
Book 11 does not pick up where Book 1 left off. It starts with an introduction of its
own, once again referring (though from a different angle) to the limited role of
harmonics in the study of music (30-2). Introductory discussions continue in 32-4. The
science is described as studying the way in which intervals can properly be placed in
relation to one another in melody, a manner which is not random, but reveals the
determinate orderliness of melody's nature. Then follow reflections on the methods
appropriate to the science, on the roles in it of reason and of perception, and on the need
for the rigorous demonstration (apodeixis) of subordinate propositions from principles.
The procedures of Aristoxenus' predecessors are sharply criticised. These opening pages
of Book 11 give the impression of being a new introduction to an independent work, and
this impression is strengthened in the next passage, which sets out afresh the programme
that a treatise on harmonics should follow (35-8).
The programme is not identical with that proposed in Book 1. It lists as subjects for
study (i) genera, (ii) intervals, (iii) notes, (iv) systemata, (v) tonoi, (vi) modulation, (vii)
melodic composition. In most cases Aristoxenus adds caustic remarks about the
inadequacy of previous treatments. The list is a good deal more straightforward than
that of the first book: it omits the two preliminary studies; it reorders the material
somewhat; it avoids the repetitions of the earlier list; and very importantly, it adds
melodic composition as a part of harmonics, whereas in Book 1 this had been explicitly
excluded.

The next passage, 38-44, is again devoted to methodology. It involves a long polemic
against some earlier approaches, and contains some of the most interesting of
Aristoxenus' conceptual reflections.
The programme outlined in 35-8 begins to be tackled in earnest in 44, with a list of
the genera. As in Book 1, this is followed by a study of the concords and their relations
to smaller intervals (44-6), after which the divisions of tetrachords in each genus are
investigated in detail (46-52). All this seems to correspond to stage (i) of the programme.
In 53-4 Aristoxenus discusses the notion of melodic continuity, and states a set of
principles that govern the way in which intervals may succeed one another. The passage
is closely comparable to 27-9 in Book 1. It is followed by a study of the ways in which
discordant intervals can be constructed by movements through concords, and of a
related method of confirming that the concord of a fourth comprises two and a half tones. These sections can plausibly
be assigned to stage (ii) of the programme, and with
them Book n ends.
I shall not attempt a detailed summary of Book m. It opens with further reflections
on the notions of continuity and succession, and a discussion of the ways tetrachords
can be linked either in conjunction or in disjunction by a tone. After some additional
preliminaries it proceeds to a set of theorems, or 'demonstrations', occupying the rest
of the book, and based mainly on the principles stated in 54, at the end of Book 11. Their
task is to show which intervals can follow which in succession and which cannot, and
how these rules are implied by the principles previously adopted. Towards the end of
the book the rules are converted into statements about intervallic progressions that are
possible (and those that are impossible) from a starting point in various specified notes.
Finally, after the derivation of a few further, subordinate propositions, Aristoxenus
announces the study of the different arrangements of small, incomposite intervals that
go together to form greater intervallic magnitudes. Only some opening remarks about
the arrangements of the fourth survive before the MSS break off.
The substance of Book m concerns the ways in which intervals can be combined. Such
a study might be conceived as part of topic (ii) in the list in Book 11, or alternatively as
part of (iv), since the investigations of interval-combination and of the formation of
systemata cannot be sharply distinguished. The subject matter of (iii), notes, is missing,
or at least is not given a full discussion of its own. Parts of Book 111 suffer from this
omission, which may be due to the fragmentary state of the text. But there is a good deal
to encourage the belief that Books 11 and HI belong to the same treatise, and that only
a few pages in the space between them have been lost. Evidently a great deal is missing
at the end, and to make good the loss we must rely on the harmonic writings of later
Aristoxenians, represented in this volume by 12 Arist. Quint. De Mus. Book 1 chs. 5-12.
(Other summaries are found in the 'Aristoxenian handbooks' of Cleonides, Bacchius,
Gaudentius and the unidentified author or authors known as Bellerman's Anonymous.
The best of them is that of Cleonides.)

If we now compare Book 1 with Book 11 it seems obvious, in the first place, that there
is a good deal of repetition and overlap, far more than would be expected in two
segments of the same work. They have independent introductions, and distinct
summaries of the programme that harmonic science should follow. There are also
inconsistencies, of which that concerning melodic composition, mentioned above, is the
most striking (but see n. 36 to Book 11). Book 11, furthermore, uses as a key concept the
notion of melodic 'function' (dynamis), implying in particular that notes are to be
understood as dynameis, not simply as pitches, and that the character of melodic
relations in general is to be understood 'dynamically', by reference to the melodic role
or character in which they are perceptually grasped, not just through representations
of the sizes of intervals they involve. Book 1 says nothing of dynamis, and pursues its
quantitative analyses without any hint that they will need reinterpretation. It explicitly
defines a note as a pitch. The books also differ markedly in style, the second being much
more leisurely, reflective and methodologically self-conscious. It seems to me that there
are strong grounds for supposing that Books 1 and 11 are from different treatises, the first
having belonged, perhaps, to an earlier and rather less sophisticated attempt at the
project. Either book could have had a continuation of roughly the sort we find in Book
Hi, but our Book in must in fact go with Book 11, if only in view of its liberal use of the
concept of dynamis.
These conclusions are strengthened a little by a couple of references in Porphyry. He
quotes a good deal from Aristoxenus, and in citing passages from our El. Harm, he
twice names the work he is drawing on. Quoting a paragraph from our Book 1, he states
that it comes in the first book of a treatise On Principles. Quoting a passage of our Book 11, he identifies its source as
the first book of the Harmonic Elements. This sounds as if
he thought of them as separate works. But this evidence must be used with caution.
Aristoxenus himself sometimes uses the word arche,' origin',' beginning' or ' principle',
in reference to a part of the work he is engaged in, or to a phase of its procedure. Thus,
for example, at 16.11-12 (in Book 1) he speaks of his initial conceptual sketches as en
archei, 'at the outset', 'among the preliminaries', and at 44.6-7 (in Book 11) he discusses
the importance of first establishing archai, 'principles', then demonstrating what
follows from the archai, and of carefully distinguishing these phases. Further, he twice
refers to the stoicheia, 'elements', as a second phase of an exposition of harmonics. At
28.34-29.1 (at the end of Book 1), we are told that the ways in which intervals can be
placed after one another will be demonstrated 'in the stoicheia'; and at 43.27-30
(towards the end of the introduction to Book 11) he speaks of himself as ' on the point
of setting out on the study concerning the stoicheia'. It is possible, in view of parallels
elsewhere, that Aristoxenus gave the name 'elements' to that part of his project which
derived theorems axiomatically from premises previously adopted, and described all the
earlier material as 'on principles'. The reference to 'elements' in Book 1 certainly seems
to look forward to a treatment of intervallic succession like that of the theorems in Book
in. The reference in Book 11, on the other hand, might suggest that 'the study of the
elements' includes all detailed investigations of both sorts. In either case, Porphyry
might have taken Aristoxenus' own words to imply that Book 1 dealt with principles
while the bulk of Book 11 and its sequel were concerned with 'elements', without
meaning to suggest that On Principles and Harmonic Elements were two different
works. Nevertheless it seems clear to me, as I have said, that the two books must in fact
come from treatises written at different times, and perhaps for slightly different
purposes.

In the introduction to chapter 3 I said a little about Aristoxenus' debt to Aristotle's

conception of science and its methods. Four points are of special importance. First, the
data are not scientifically understood just by being observed and recorded. They must
be explained. Secondly, such explanation takes the form of ' demonstration', the logical
derivation of propositions from principles. Thirdly, the principles must themselves be
established by a method that begins in perception, and proceeds by abstracting the
essential features that constitute perceived cases as instances of the melodic categories
under which our hearing grasps them. We are thus able to formulate rules which state,
at the most general level, what features a sequence of sounds must present to perception
in order to be melodic at all, and more specifically what characters it must display in
order to be grasped as, for example, a tetrachord, a pyknon, a phrase in the enharmonic
genus, and so on. The identification and coordination of the principles to which all
melodic sequences must, as such, conform, amounts to a definition of the nature or
essence of melody. Further specifications of the forms that things with this essence can
take reveal its genera and species. Finally, by what I have called the 'same domain'
rule, the terms in which the melodic phenomena are analysed and the principles by
which they are explained must be ones that describe 'the melodic' and its features as
such, and do not redescribe them as entities of other sorts. There is melody where there
is a set of sounds that strike the ear in a certain way, and nowhere else. Its melodiousness
lies wholly in its perceptible features, and if from another point of view the same set of
sounds is a sequence of physical movements whose velocities stand in certain ratios, that
is quite irrelevant. It is not by exemplifying these ratios that it is melodic: a sequence
with the relevant perceptible properties would be a melody whether or not its sounds,
or their causes, fell under that mathematical description. Aristoxenus has no interest in
explaining why a certain combination of sounds strikes us as concordant, for example,
in terms of descriptions drawn from physics and mathematics in the Pythagorean manner. His task in this case is rather
to explain the role of things heard as concords
in systems that are perceived as melodically legitimate, and to identify the relations in
which they stand to other elements, as these are grasped through a strictly musical mode
of perception. Given that some sequences strike us as melodic while others do not, his
project is not to explain this fact physiologically or psychologically. It is to state what
must be true of the phenomena themselves as they appear to us, no matter what their
causes or the biological conditions of our sensory apparatus, if they are to count for the
musical ear as genuinely melodic. Having done so, he will show that these truths form
a coherent pattern describing a single nature, that of melody. Agreed kinds of instance
of the melodic or the unmelodic are then proved to be so precisely in virtue of their
conformity to that nature or their inconsistency with it.
Two crucial points follow. One is that his science is rigorously phenomenalistic,
concerned with the analysis and synthesis of what is heard as melodic, simply in its
character as an object of perception. The physical basis of sounds and their production
are issues quite foreign to harmonics - all that is to be studied is the form of the percepts
themselves. Secondly, in order to undertake this investigation, it is necessary to develop
a system of concepts and a corresponding terminology that belongs wholly to the
domain of harmonics. The elements of melodic sequences and the various ways in which
they can be organised and combined must be classified, named and related to one
another. Little of this conceptual and terminological equipment had been needed by
Pythagorean scientists. No doubt a good deal of the Aristoxenian repertoire was drawn
from the language of practising musicians. Some of it he may have invented himself.
Certainly he was responsible for the formal articulation of the character of such things
as melodic genera, 'shades' of the genera, tonoi, systemata, the pyknon, and so on, as
well as for the theoretical deployment and analysis of many broader conceptions like
'movement of voice', 'melodic succession', and dynamis or 'melodic function'. Later Later
harmonic theorists made remarkably few revisions to the system of concepts and
classifications within which his analyses are framed.
Despite his great originality, Aristoxenus owed a debt - only grudgingly acknowledged
-
to
a
number
of
earlier
writers
(and
presumably
also
to
the
practical
musicians
among
whom
he
was
brought
up).
These
were
not
Pythagoreans,
whose
work
he
knew
but
considered
irrelevant,
and
we
have
little
information
about
them
apart
from
the
scathing
references
in
the
El.
Harm,
itself.
Aristoxenus
describes
them
generically
as
harmonikoi.
Though
he
mentions
several
names,
only
Eratocles
emerges
as
a
theorist
of
any
substance,
and
about
him
we
know
only
what
Aristoxenus
tells
us.
He
seems
to
be
treated
as
a
representative
example
of
harmonikoi
in
general,
just
a
little
more
acute
than
most.

What Aristoxenus tells us explicitly about them is mainly negative - their neglect of
whole topics, their carelessness in observation, their recording of alleged facts without
any attempt at demonstration or coordination under principles, and so on. Reading
between the lines, it appears that these writers were 'empiricists', in the sense that they
sought ways of describing what was presented to the ear, rather than arguing towards
harmonic truths on mathematical grounds. To this extent they were primitive
'Aristoxenians'. They also shared with Aristoxenus a conception of pitch as a linear
dimension on which notes appeared as points, rejecting the Pythagorean treatment of
notes as quantities, and intervals as ratios between them.
Their main objective seems to have been the quantitative description of scalar
structures as sequences of intervals measured by reference to a unit-interval, this unit
being identified by perception, not defined by mathematics. (Compare 2.1 Plato
Republic 53ia-b, 3.4, 3.8 Aristotle Post. An. 84b, Metaph. 1016b.) Aristoxenus
complains of their inaccuracies, but the difficulty of the project should not be underestimated. Eratocles, if no one else,
also tried to work out some of the relations
between the structures he described. We hear in particular of his attempt to give an
account of the alternative sequences formed by conjunction and disjunction (5.9ff.),
and of his representation of the seven species of the octave through the cyclic reordering
of intervals (6.i^ff.). (These species are probably the 'octachords called harmoniai' of
36.30-1.) The harmonikoi attempted to illustrate their findings in diagrams, to which
Aristoxenus refers several times, some of them constructed through a procedure called
katapyknosis, 'compression'. It seems likely that the diagrams showed the pitch of each
note in a system as a point marked on a line, intervals being represented by the sizes of
the intervening distances. Diagrams involving katapyknosis were probably designed to
facilitate comparisons between scalar structures, by displaying them all within the same
theoretical stretch of pitch. This involved abstracting the structures from the pitchrelations
in
which
they
stood
to
one
another
in
real
musical
compositions,
and
'compressing'
them
all
into
the
smallest
possible
overall
range.
There
are
clear
suggestions
that
they
also
attempted
to
develop
a
system
of
notation,
quantitative
in
form.
Aristoxenus
chides
them
for
supposing
that
by
notating
a
harmonic
structure
they
had
thereby
understood
it
(39^.).
Other aspects of their work are also mentioned, but these are the most significant.
There are clear affinities between their aims and those of Aristoxenus, as he himself
recognised. Most importantly, both sought to describe the melodic phenomena as they
are perceived, not by reference to their unobserved character as physical movements or
from principles proper to mathematics. Their faults, according to Aristoxenus, were
those of inaccuracy and incompleteness, together with a crucial failure to grasp what
sort of thing a science should be. At best they were just recording data. They made no
serious attempt to explain, or to show how the melodic phenomena come together as
interlocking expressions of a single, coordinated nature. The very idea of that' nature',
and of its expression in principles to which everything that is a melody conforms, is
Aristoxenus' own, and his writings in harmonics are its articulation.

The only book in English wholly devoted to Aristoxenus is Macran (1902), containing
a long introduction, text, translation and notes. The most recent edition of the text, with
Latin introduction, Italian translation and notes, a selection of reports about
Aristoxenus in Greek sources and an annotated index of Greek terms, is da Rios (1954).
The classic work on him is Laloy (1904). The German edition of Westphal (1883, 1893)
has an important commentary (this work is fairly described by Macran as 'exhaustive
but diffuse and garrulous'). There are stimulating but often incautious discussions of
many passages in Schlesinger (1939). A valuable recent contribution is Belis (1986). All
the books that offer surveys of Greek music and musical theory have something to say
of him, of course, and other substantial studies appear in articles in scholarly journals;
a selection of them will be found in the Bibliography.