Musical Modes: A Neglected Solution to Mental Balance
Musical Modes: A Neglected Solution to Mental Balance
In this modern world ,many are looking for ways to aid mental balance! There are many solutions on the market today: Yoga, Meditation, Tai chi, Pilates, NLP etc
These can be very effective, but tend to require a lot of patient practice. They need an investment of time to learn, and you certainly need to find time in your hectic routine to engage with them.
If only there was a mental defragmenter you could run for mental balance and inner harmony!
Well, as it happens, there is! You can solve the problem simply by listening to, or playing music: not any old music, but something very specific.
We are all familiar with the idea that music affects moods. But there is a power encapsulated within the maths of the musical scale that has lain unused since pre-biblical times. I mean modal music. You will hear what I'm talking about if you listen to Elizabethan folk songs. Greensleeves is a modal song (mainly, anyway). You can also hear the old modes in Jazz. Jazz modes are actually medieval - most of them, at least!
Modal music actually goes back a lot further than medieval times. It persisted into medieval times, and even appeared as the Jazz modes. But the ancient therapeutic wisdom has disappeared and the way modal music is composed has changed from the ancient rules. So it is not as therapeutically significant as it was in the ancient cultures.
The Pythagorean School of Ancient Greece, taught a system for using modal music to stimulate mental balance. They used the same modes as the composers of the (then) future. But they used them in a special way, so we shall call them by the correct term: Pythagorean Modes.
An important part of Pythagoras' philosophy was The Four Temperaments (or Humours):
* Phlegmatic
* Choleric
* Sanguine
* Melancholic
Other fruits of his thinking have also been perpetuated e.g. Pythagoras' Theorem. But his system of healing music has sadly been consigned to the historical waste-bin.
Pythagoras' technique of healing music works as follows:
He distinguished eight modes:
1. Dorian
2. Hypodorian
3. Phrygian
4. Hypophrygian
5. Lydian
6. Hypolydian
7. Mixolydian
8. Hypomixolydian
Each mode exacerbates or ameliorates the qualities of a Temperament.
If you went to your doctor complaining of lack of resolve in the face of some ordeal, he would tell you that your choleric humour needed strengthening and suggest that you listen to music in the phrygian mode.
Or, by the same token,, if you went to him reporting feelings of irritability, he would most likely suggest that it was to do with an overactive choleric humour, and advocate the hypophrygian mode to pacify it.
Each one of the Four Temperaments has two modes attached to it, one of which increases the humour and one which decreases it.
In the following article I will reveal a little more about the Four Temperaments and the modes which balance them.
Musical Modes: A Neglected Solution to Mental Balance
By: Cepheus
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