From ancient Greek myths to paintings by Degas. How people searched for harmony and are still searching
What is Harmony? "Consistency, mutual conformity", but what should correspond to each other, and between whom or what should reciprocity appear? Spoiler: the correct answer does not exist, despite the fact that humanity has been looking for a formula of harmony for several thousand years.
For starters, Harmony is a goddess with a difficult fate.
Harmony is a Greek word. In addition, the name of the goddess, who personified this concept. According to the most common myth, Harmony was the daughter of the god of war Ares and the goddess of love and beauty Aphrodite, that is, the inhabitants of Olympus, who were responsible for the most distant phenomena from each other. By Harmony (the concept), the ancient Greeks just meant the agreement of opposites. The goddess Harmony married a character named Cadmus, and for the first time all Greek deities were present at their wedding, even those who did not like each other. Then Cadmus, who was motivated by remorse for killing the dragon, voluntarily turned into a serpent. Harmony was upset and decided to become a snake herself. History can be interpreted as a precept on the need for consent in marriage, even in adverse circumstances, and more broadly in society.
Evelyn de Morgan. Cadmus and Harmony. 1877
At the same time in ancient Greece there was a close concept - Homonoya (and there was such a goddess too). Homonoya is agreement, unity of hearts. It is known primarily thanks to Alexander the Great. Having conquered most of the world’s famous Greeks, Alexander proposed Homonoya as a kind of state idea: it does not matter who we are - Greeks or barbarians (those who do not dilute wine with water thought barbarians), the main thing is to think and feel the same. British researcher Robert Beck wrote that the difference between Harmony and Homonoya is that the first appears organically, and unlike Homonoya, it cannot be imposed on another.
Some philosophers tried to calculate harmony.
Of course, the concept of harmony was also of concern to ancient Greek philosophers. Thinking of it, the Hellenic thinkers turned to nature and its structure. In the work "On the World", attributed to Aristotle (the real author is unknown, most likely one of his students), it is said that nature harmonized opposites, such as man and woman, and in the same way we mix white and black colors to portray nature itself.
Mathematicians and architects of antiquity, examining the veins of leaves, snail shells and skeletons of various creatures, discovered a harmonious division; it is also the golden section. In the original sense, this is the division of a segment into two unequal parts so that the smaller one relates to the larger one, as the larger one - to the segment itself. This principle and its derivatives can be seen in the structure of the pyramids of Giza and the Parthenon in Athens.
Treatise "On the World", unknown author, I century BC. e. | The shell of the Nautilus | Acoustic experiments of Pythagoras. Frankino Gafurio. Music theory. 1492
Pythagoras was one of the first to try to calculate the harmony in music. According to legend, once he passed by the forge, and he was fascinated by the sound of hammer blows on the anvil. He asked the blacksmith to experiment with his instruments and soon described the notion of tone and semitone in the form of mathematical proportions. Pythagoras realized that the harmony of sounds does not depend on the strength of the blow, but on the weight of the hammer. A consonance form instruments with a weight ratio of 3/2 and 4/3. It is believed that music was born in the familiar order. Pythagoras considered music to be a medicine for the soul and a way to achieve inner harmony. According to Pythagoras, harmony is needed, for example, for a peaceful sleep, so he and his students practiced playing musical instruments in the evenings.
Others - find in yourself
Harmony was actively sought in another part of the Ancient World - in the East. Probably Confucius most clearly spoke of her. He also looked at nature as a kind of ideal of harmony, but projected its principles on society a little differently. For Confucius, harmony is the natural peace of mind. The approach of the Greek goddess, who had turned into a snake for the sake of a spouse, he would hardly have approved, because for Confucius the opposite of harmony was consensus - a design that holds on mutual concessions. For him, the agreement between people through the rejection of mental balance was unacceptable. Simply put, for the sake of harmony there is no need to play the game to bring the situation to a common denominator. Harmony is the transparency of your position plus the most sincere attempt to understand and take into account the interests of others.
Confucius, illustration from the encyclopedia "Britannica"
The philosopher Zhang Zai, a representative of the neo-Confucian school, developed the idea. He believed that people create events of heavenly and earthly entities, and our bodies - something like vessels containing vital energy. In his poetic construction, harmony is the power that allows people to grow and change, and it is fueled by moral principles, "as the sea feeds on a thousand rivers."
In general, harmony is about music
Remember Pythagoras in the smithy? Since its discovery, harmony in the Western world has become associated primarily with music. Sometimes we say that harmonious music is the one that sounds nice. Acceptable simplification, but in fact everything is a bit more complicated. In Western music, harmony is a relationship that forms several notes. Without harmony, music would be a one-dimensional melody. Harmony forms the accompaniment of the main line, making the song or symphony voluminous.
Harmonic intervals in music
At the same time, it is impossible to say that music without harmony is noise, cacophony and in general something bad. The principles of harmony are characteristic only for Western music (however, dominant in the modern world) and began to be actively used relatively recently, in the Middle Ages. The traditional music of Africa, India or, say, Southeast Asia is devoid of harmony in the encyclopedic sense, but this does not prevent it from being beautiful and sometimes very difficult to arrange. And even, paradoxically, to broadcast to the listener a sense of spiritual harmony (only to musicologists do not say that).
And harmony is the symmetry of forces
Another harmony can be visual. If in music it is a rather strict term, then in classical painting it is more vague. It is often characterized as a symmetry of forces. Here is how Johann Wolfgang von Goethe described the mechanism of color harmony work: "Each individual color, thanks to the specific perception, makes the eye strive for universality. Then, in order to achieve this, the eye, for the purpose of self-satisfaction, searches beside each color for some colorlessly empty space, into which he could produce the missing color". In other words, harmony in painting is a set of regular connections that creates a sense of order.
Raphael. Sistine Madonna. 1513 year
In the visual arts, and even in painting, colors are just one of the blocks that make up the whole. Another component of harmony (or disharmony) may be proportions, and here it is appropriate to recall the golden section, as the artists of the Renaissance remembered about it. One of the first harmonic division for different figurative elements began to apply Leonardo da Vinci, and to perfection, using also confident but soft lines, brought Rafael. Pablo Picasso once succinctly summarized: "Leonardo da Vinci promised us paradise, and Rafael gave it to us."
Edgar Degas. Race horses in front of the stands. Orsay Museum
The works of Rafael are probably the perfect example of harmony in painting, if understood as perfection. However, perfection can also get bored over time. At the end of the 19th century, the French artist Edgar Degas created a series of paintings depicting jockeys before the race, completely spitting on the principles of harmony. On one of them, a column obstructs the viewer altogether. In the artistic world, this caused a scandal, but, on the other hand, the paintings of Degas anticipated the 20th century, in which it finally became clear that there could not be any uniform rules of harmony.
Nevertheless, in the end, each has its own harmony
The search for harmony has not ended, but it has led us to a situation where everyone has it. Yes, this is still the unity of opposites, but we now interpret opposites much more widely, so we can fully enjoy atonal music, go to exhibitions of conceptual art and take eclectic philosophical models seriously. Even the deliberate struggle with harmony - no matter in what area - can be perceived as an attempt to find a new balance point.
