April 2004
WORDS TO LIVE BY
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Pythagoras (570-500 B.C.) was of the opinion that music contributed greatly to
health, if it were used in an appropriate manner . . . That which deserves to be
mentioned above all these particulars is this: that he arranged and adapted for
his disciples what he called apparatus and contrectations, divinely contriving
mixtures of certain diatonic, chromatic and enharmonic melodies, through which
he easily transferred and circularly led the passions of the soul into a
contrary direction when they had recently and in an irrational and clandestine
manner been formed; such as sorrow, rage, pity, absurd emulation and fear,
all-various desires, angers and appetites, pride, supineness and vehemence. For
he corrected each of these by the rule of virtue, attempering them through
appropriate melodies, as though certain salutary medicines.
In the evening, likewise, when his disciples were retiring to sleep, he liberated them by certain odes and peculiar songs from diurnal perturbations and tumults, and purified their intellective power from the influxive and effluxive waves of corporeal nature, rendered their sleep quiet, and their dreams pleasing and prophetic. , , . IAMLICHUS d. 333A.D. [Today Mozart is gaining this place. But the current popular 'music' is helping to create the confusion, anger, hate and fear in the world today.]
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