A. His failure to gain the Lyceum’s headship after his master’s death is promin-
ent in the biographical sources because of the harsh resentment it seems to have aroused in
him. The Souda ascribes 453 writings to Aristoxenos on many different topics: music, history,
philosophy and education. However this exceptional number is more likely the total number
of book-rolls comprising different works than as independent titles. Among his writings
were biographies, including lives of P, A, So ̄crate ̄s, and P; a
large number of musicological works (On Music, On Musical Listening, On Melodic Composition,
On Tonoi, On Instruments, On Auloi, On the Boring of Auloi, On Aulos Players, On Tragic Dancing); and
ethical and political writings (Educational Nomoi, Political Nomoi, Pythagorean Sentences, Customs of
Mantineans). Of all this material only titles or fragments survive, the plurality of which
belong to the Elementa Harmonica, a treatise which was very influential and became para-
digmatic for musical theory in antiquity (not only for the “Aristoxenian” tradition), and to
the Elementa Rhythmica.
The conventional division of the Elementa Harmonica into three books (the third
incomplete) has nowadays become almost unanimously rejected thanks to the correct read-
ing, in the earliest MSS, of the title as “Before the (pro to ̄n) Harmonic Elements,” corrupted
throughout the manuscript tradition to “The First Book (pro ̄ton) of the Harmonic Elements.” In
fact, P ascribes to Aristoxenos a preliminary treatment of the subject entitled On
principles (Peri arkho ̄n), which proposed his criteria for a theoretical enquiry on music, percep-
tion and reason: that suggests that Book 1 of the Harmonica – as its generic content also
seems to show – belongs to this separate and more introductory work, while the traditional
second book is probably the original beginning of the Elements.
According to Aristoxenos, harmonics is a theoretical science (theo ̄re ̄tike ̄ episte ̄me ̄) concerning
audible melos, an element which exists in nature as a continuous becoming. Thus, in accord-
ance with the Aristotelian grounds of his methodology, harmonics is a “physics” concerned
with melody, but it is only a part of a wider and multifaceted science, as are the sciences of
rhythm, meter and instruments. Harmonics, in particular, has the purpose of picking out
musical facts – like notes, intervals and scales – grasped by perception (aisthe ̄sis), and then of
discovering – by means of reason (dianoia) – the principles governing the ways in which these
elements are combined to form melodic or unmelodic sequences. For the comprehension of
music, Aristoxenos states that the harmonic scientist should also use the memory (mne ̄me ̄) to
perceive the melos as a process of coming to be, remarking the distance between the
Pythagorean theory (whose mathematical representation of intervals conceived them only
as relations between immovable pitches) and his dynamic approach. The conception of
melodic movement of the voice with respect to “place” (kine ̄sis kata topon) is actually one of
his most original and lasting concepts, and the description of musical structures as combin-
ations of conjoined and disjoined tetrachords to form bigger arrangements (as the “Great
Perfect System,” shown in the diagram) is the first full account of an extensive scalar
system in antiquity. His scientific approach to the subject, overemphasized by himself as
absolutely new and innovative, was also directed against earlier empiricists, faulted for hav-
ing merely sought to catalogue different forms of scales without investigating the principles
on which they were constructed. Aristoxenos lists seven subjects of study in harmonics:
genera (gene ̄, i.e. different arrangements of tetrachords, depending on the tuning of movable
notes); notes (phthongoi, conceived as dimensionless points lying on a spatial continuum);
intervals (diaste ̄mata, lit. “distances” between two points in the continuum); scales (suste ̄mata,
lit. “combinations of intervals”); tonoi (somewhat like “keys” in which scales are placed when
they occur in melody); modulations (metabolai, variations between systems, genera, keys and
ARISTOXENOS OF TARAS