Pythagoras History knows not how Pythagoras came across the blacksmiths. The cacophonous ring of striking hammers must have exerted an irresistible pull on the man famous for his adherence to reason. The thunder and lightning of the tools intensified with each step closer, culminating in an undulating, painful symphony at the heart of the workshop. It must have been a moment of intense clarity. For Pythagoras, this is the instant that crystallised years of thought and would forever change the way we look at the order of the world. What struck Pythagoras’ imagination that evening over two millennia ago was how the discordant roar of hammers and anvils obscured a fundamental truth about the relationship between musical pitch and physical volume. Hammers in ancient Greece were produced simply. For purely practical reasons, they would share an identical shape and come in sizes that followed a basic ratio of either a third, half or twice their respective sizes. As Pythagoras would come to discover, these dimensions produced a distinctively different sound when clashing with the anvil. It was this sound that would send Pythagoras and his devotees on a quest to bring reason to the universe. This challenge would prove testing in many ways. Even though music and musical instruments existed very early on in history, nobody really questioned the nature of music itself. Music was deeply rooted in ancient Greek culture and had a universally captivating power that neither humans nor the gods could withstand. Even the Greek origin of the word ‘music’ was synonymous with the word ‘muse’, the deities that inspired the creation of all arts. As a building block of music, a single note is perfect in itself but almost meaningless without context. When confronted with another note, it turns into an aesthetic dilemma. Pythagoras was convinced that the solution to this problem was a governing set of rules, rooted in mathematical proportion. The Pythagoreans began testing early on how certain proportions would produce the most aesthetically appealing sounds. It was quickly established that the most agreeable harmonies were the product of simple mathematical relationships, much like the weights of the hammers in the blacksmiths. Pythagoras tested this concept by working with a prototype version of the sevenstring lyre. He was the first person to introduce rationality to musical tuning by setting each string an octave apart – a concept that would become the focus of debate for hundreds of years. Politicians, craftsmen and philosophers were eternally divided over the definitive rules of the musical scale. The Pythagoreans experimented similarly with different instruments and discovered that whatever their construct, they were governed by the same basic principles. Surprisingly, these rules found application far beyond music. Pythagoras and his disciples discovered that there was a geometry underpinning all things in motion from the strings of the harp to the celestial bodies themselves. This became the well-known founding principle of the Pythagorean school of thought: all things have number. And while their quest for rationality travelled far, it wasn’t without its challenges. Pythagoras’ work in music confronted him with the concept of limitless numbers – a chaos he struggled to contain and a fact he could not afford to disclose because of his powerful role in ancient Greek society. This contradiction enshrouded the Pythagoreans in cult-like secrecy, which became the source of speculation for his contemporaries and historians alike. As with every story, the most testing of times only make it all the more endearing, and Pythagoras’ story is no exception. Even though his most famous piece of work, the Pythagorean theorem, is best known as an indelible part of geometry studies, his original source of inspiration lives on in a far more appealing form. Pythagoras’ cerebral approach to music lives on even today in musicians such as Brian Eno, Autechre and John Cage, who themselves have perfected the art of algorithmic composition, and have made it a veritable genre in its own right. K text: asen tsvyatkov K illustration: rebecca wright K explore more @ relentlessenergy.com /pythagoras
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