The Fifth Hammer: Pythagoras and the Disharmony of the World
by Daniel Heller-Roazen
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How the ordering of the sensible world continues to suggest a reality that no notes or letters can fully transcribe. An ancient tradition holds that Pythagoras discovered the secrets of harmony within a forge when he came across five men hammering with five hammers, producing a wondrous sound. Four of the five hammers stood in a marvelous set of proportions, harmonizing; but there was also a fifth hammer. Pythagoras saw and heard it, but he could not measure it; nor could he understand its show more discordant sound. Pythagoras therefore discarded it. What was this hammer, such that Pythagoras chose so decidedly to reject it? Since antiquity, "harmony" has been a name for more than a theory of musical sounds; it has offered a paradigm for the scientific understanding of the natural world. Nature, through harmony, has been transcribed in the ideal signs of mathematics. But, time and again, the transcription has run up against one fundamental limit: something in nature resists being written down, transcribed in a stable set of ideal elements. A fifth hammer, obstinately, continues to sound. In eight chapters, linked together as are the tones of a single scale, The Fifth Hammer explores the sounds and echoes of that troubling percussion as they make themselves felt on the most varied of attempts to understand and represent the natural world. From music to metaphysics, aesthetics to astronomy, and from Plato and Boethius to Kepler, Leibniz, and Kant, this book explores the ways in which the ordering of the sensible world has continued to suggest a reality that no notes or letters can fully transcribe. show lessTags
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Like all of Daniel Heller-Roazen's books, this traces an obscure theme through pre-modern cultural history, finding implications wildly divergent from the initial thesis. In this case, it is the discovery by Pythagoras that musical harmony has its basis in simple integer ratios. The beauty of this system is incomplete and attempts to make it so run into problems of the irrational and disharmonious. Heller-Roazen traces this theme through Boethius and medieval musicologists up to the aesthetics of Kant and the cosmology of Kepler, showing how time and again the sounding of the "fifth hammer" undermines the perfect harmony of their systems. The book ends somewhat abruptly, without a conclusion, and that last few chapters feel like show more separate essays rather than integrated parts of a whole. I'm not sure if this is a benefit or a liability, but certainly requires the reader to make connections that the author only implies. show less
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Daniel Heller-Roazen is an assistant professor of comparative literature at Princeton University.
Classifications
- Genres
- Nonfiction, Music, Philosophy, History, Science & Nature, Literature Studies and Criticism
- DDC/MDS
- 781.2 — Arts & recreation Music General principles and musical forms Elements of music
- LCC
- ML3800 .H333 — Music Literature on music Literature on music Philosophical and societal aspects of music. Physics General works
- BISAC
Statistics
- Members
- 30
- Popularity
- 923,780
- Reviews
- 1
- Rating
- (5.00)
- Languages
- English
- Media
- Paper, Ebook
- ISBNs
- 3
- ASINs
- 1
