Aristoxenus

[1] Aristoxenus was born at Tarentum (in modern-day Apulia, southern Italy) in Magna Graecia, and was the son of a learned musician named Spintharus (otherwise Mnesias).

[2] He learned music from his father, and having then been instructed by Lamprus of Erythrae and Xenophilus the Pythagorean, he finally became a pupil of Aristotle,[3] whom he appears to have rivaled in the variety of his studies.

Aristoxenus' theory had an empirical tendency; in music he held that the notes of the scale are to be judged, not as earlier Pythagoreans had believed, by mathematical ratio, but by the ear.

His ideas were responded to and developed by some later theorists such as Archestratus, and his place in the methodological debate between rationalists and empiricists was commented upon by such writers as Ptolemais of Cyrene.

The Pythagorean theory that the soul is a 'harmony' of the four elements composing the body, and therefore mortal ("nothing at all," in the words of Cicero[9]), was ascribed to Aristoxenus (fr.

The first book contains an explanation of the genera of Greek music, and also of their species; this is followed by some general definitions of terms, particularly those of sound, interval, and system.

[10] In the second book Aristoxenus divides music into seven parts, which he takes to be: the genera, intervals, sounds, systems, tones or modes, mutations, and melopoeia.

[10] While it is often held among modern scholars that Aristoxenus rejected the opinion of the Pythagoreans that arithmetic rules were the ultimate judge of intervals and that in every system there must be found a mathematical coincidence before such a system can be said to be harmonic,[10] Aristoxenus made extensive use of arithmetic terminology, notably to define varieties of semitones and dieses in his descriptions of the various genera.

That Aristoxenus used a model for creating scales based upon the notion of a topos, or range of pitch location,[13] is fact, but there is no reason to believe that he alone set this precedent as he himself does not make this claim.

Aristoxenus himself held that "... two things must not be overlooked: First, that many people have mistakenly supposed us to be saying that a tone can be divided into three equal parts in a melody.