Sublime

Pythagoras concluded that ratios govern not only music but also all other types of beauty. To the Pythagoreans, ratios and proportions controlled musical beauty, physical beauty, and mathematical beauty.

The goal is to internalize the various rhythmic strategies to such a degree that they come out naturally and instinctively during performance. Phrases move effortlessly from one type of subdivision of the beat into another. In my own musical education, the moment of success came when I found I could play rhythmic patterns in the music that I could

These legends point to the connection between the ability to create harmony in sound and the more general and abstract harmony that underlies the kind of social order we call a civilization. Mindful of that connection, Plato believed that children should be taught music before anything else; in learning to pay attention to graceful rhythms and harm