Man’s relationship with music is rooted in nature. The ancient Greeks first started arranging notes into scales to create a pattern, and it was the mathematician Pythagoras (c580-500 B.C.) who created the first real scale. His invention had a profound effect on early western music. He was passing a blacksmith’s forge one day when he noticed the sounds of the metal being hammered and realised that the hammering made different regular notes. When he weighed the hammers, he discovered that they were all ratios of each other. The first was half the size of the next and another was two-thirds the size of the first, and so on. This demonstrated natural harmonics. One note played on, for example, a metal bar can produce many harmonics (higher notes). A bar half the size will produce a note an octave higher. A bar two-thirds the size will produce a note a fifth higher (the dominant note).
The ratio of two-thirds is a naturally harmonious relationship in mathematics and it was this that caught Pythagoras’ attention. He was also a mystic who believed that the universe made its own music by the movement of the planets. He felt music would be more powerful and mystical if it obeyed the natural laws of physics, so he set about making a scale of notes by dividing metal into simple ratios, thus creating a spiral of notes. However, when he came to the thirteenth note of the scale, he realised that it was slightly different to the first one and when the two were played together, the result sounded awful. This problem was later to be called ‘the Pythagorean comma’. The notes were not equally apart all the way up the spiral. Pythagoras’ solution was simply to christian mysticism churches abandon the thirteenth note and he was left with a twelve-note scale. To play safe, musicians kept to the first seven notes of the scale and along with the original note they had an octave. The average instrument could only cope with six notes anyway, and even up until the late thirteenth century music was kept as simple as possible.
Church music, however, required more sophistication, so composers introduced other lines to create more interesting sounds.”
Note that in the text, above, it mentions “natural harmonics,” a “naturally harmonious relationship in mathematics,” and the “natural laws of physics.” The twelve-note system seems to be inspired by nature. Also, it mentions the “first seven notes of the scale.” If you look at the list of notes above the quote, you will see that there are seven natural notes, being A, B, C, D, E, F, and G. We will come back to this later. Keep the number seven in mind.
What does all this have to do with Christianity? Pythagoras lived a half-century before Christ. This is true. But this is just the beginning. If we go to the calendar, we see twelve months. This is due to Julius Caesar’s calendar devised in 45 B.C., chosen after consultation with the astronomer Sosigenes of Alexandria and was probably designed to approximate the tropical year. Again, the number twelve appears in the scheme of natural occurrences. Pope Gregory XIII, a church figure, later modified this calendar in 1582. The European calendar has twelve months in it, as decreed by the Roman Catholic Church, even though the original twelve-month calendar was devised before Christ. Keep the number twelve in mind, also.
The most common group of notes in European music is the major triad. This triad is the three notes containing the Root, 3rd and 5th notes of the diatonic (or seven note) scale. This is also the most pleasing and naturally harmonious grouping of notes in European music. It can be said that all other chords are either variations of the major chord, additions to the major chord, or additions to its variations. In this context, the major chord is the source chord of all other chords, the basis of all chordal harmony. The importance cannot be understated.