Spring and autumn are both inspiring seasons. Their poetic essence is equally beautiful and captivating, but nuanced differently to create the final harmony in nature.
The autumnal magnificence is in a way nostalgic and containing a post summer melancholy, and although there is an explosion of colour in nature, the fading sun light and warmth eventually lead to fading colours around us as well.
In the spring time, it is quite the opposite – the light gets brighter daily and the colours get more vibrant and playful. Just go for a walk in the park on your lunch break and let yourself be blown away by the striking beauty of the grassy carpet studded with cute daisies and dandelions – doesn’t it make you want to throw yourself on the grass, soak up the sun, listen to the birds chirping and become one with nature?!
That simple act can really help restore the balance and bring harmony in one’s life. Harmony – the arrangement of elements that form a consistent and orderly whole, stems etymologically from the Greek mythology.
In the ancient Greek religion, Harmonia was the immortal goddess of peace, harmony and concord. And naturally, the word harmony is of Greek origin from the stem – harmos, that literally means ‘joint’, and from there the noun harmonia ‘agreement, concord of sounds’.
In Ancient Greece the term defined the harmonious combination of contrasted elements and was often applied to the whole field of music as a simultaneous concord of higher and lower notes.
Harmony in music
In the Middle Ages the term was used to describe two pitches sounding in combination and the word leaped into the Latin language from where in the 12th century it entered the French language to name a musical instrument and by the 14th century, the old French word harmonie /armonie to denote the meaning of a ‘combination of tones pleasing to the ear.’
With that meaning, the word entered the English vocabulary with the first written record coming from 1384, from the Middle English poem by Geoffrey Chaucer, The House of Fame: “Songs full of Armonye.”
In the sense of a musical art or science which deals with the structure of a Piece of music and the formation and the relation of the chords of which it consists, the term harmony is firstly distinguished from melody in the first half of the 16th century (1526) in William Bonde’s Pilgrimage of Perfection: “They exceed or pass all joys, as much as harmony passed melody.”
In its general meaning, outside of the field of music, as a balanced combination of often contrasting elements, the word harmony was firstly recorded in print in 1533, when Giles Du Wes who had served as the music and French language instructor to Henry VII’s children and as a royal librarian, dedicated his Introduction for to Learn and Read, to Pronounce and to Speak French to his student, princess Mary Stuart: “Others haue said that it [the operation of God] is a manner of harmony.”
The anatomical meaning of the term harmonia, as a suture in which the two bones are apposed to each other by plane or nearly plane surfaces, was firstly recorded in late 17th century, in Steven Blankaart’s Physical dictionary: “Harmonia, is the juncture of a bone by a line.” (EVS Translations has the 1679 Blankaart’s Physical dictionary in its antique reference work collection, which can be seen on display at Bulmedica/Buldental exhibition, from May 17-19 at the Inter Expo Center, in Sofia, Bulgaria
