The Seba library treats Five Notes in 9 passages, across 5 authors (including Watson, Burton, Campbell, Joseph, McGilchrist, Iain).
when the five notes confuse the ear and cause the hearing to be unclear. Three: when the five odors stimulate the nose and produce weariness and congestion
Zhuangzi identifies the five notes as the second of five conditions that corrupt the inborn nature, framing musical elaboration as a form of sensory pollution that destroys perceptual clarity.
, The Complete Works of Zhuangzi, 2013thesis
under the effect of music, the five social duties are without admixture, the eyes and the ears are clear, the blood and the vital spirits are balanced, habits are reformed, customs are improved
Campbell presents the Confucian view of the pentatonic scale as a cosmological tuning instrument that harmonizes the five social duties and restores psychophysical order to the body politic.
, Primitive Mythology (The Masks of God, Volume I), 1959thesis
The notes mean nothing in themselves: the tensions between the notes, and between notes and the silence with which they live in reciprocal indebtedness, are everything.
McGilchrist argues that musical meaning resides not in individual notes but in relational ‘betweenness,’ providing a right-hemisphere neuroscientific analogue to the Taoist concern that discrete tonal categories falsify acoustic wholeness.
, The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World, 2009supporting
in the development of the fine art as we know it today, we lost two-thirds of its scope as it was practiced and theorized in the medieval and early Renaissance period
Moore contends that modern reduction of music to instrumental sound (musica instrumentalis) has severed it from its cosmological and soul-therapeutic dimensions, echoing the depth-psychological concern about the impoverishment of tonal experience.
, The Planets Within: The Astrological Psychology of Marsilio Ficino, 1982supporting
we lost two-thirds of its scope as it was practiced and theorized in the medieval and early Renaissance period. We have already had occasion to note the threefold paradigm offered by Boethius
The 1990 edition repeats Moore’s argument that the hierarchical triad of musica mundana, musica humana, and musica instrumentalis was collapsed into sound alone, losing music’s function as a mediator between cosmos and soul.
, The Planets Within: The Astrological Psychology of Marsilio Ficino, 1990supporting
the therapist as musicus, musician of the soul, has to know the gods extremely well—their characters, the effects they have on people, their rhythms and patterns
Moore’s Ficinian therapist-as-musicus framework situates specific tonal correspondences within a therapeutic cosmology where notes function as planetary signatures capable of producing sympathetic psychic effects.
, The Planets Within: The Astrological Psychology of Marsilio Ficino, 1982supporting
These links gave rise to intervals of t and t and l within the original intervals… if we now fill in the corresponding notes, the result is as follows
Cornford’s commentary on Plato’s Timaeus demonstrates how harmonic ratios generate musical intervals and corresponding notes, grounding the cosmological significance of tonal structure in mathematical proportion.
, Plato’s cosmology the Timaeus of Plato, 1997supporting
All musical sounds are motions started by a blow, and these motions follow one another at shorter or longer intervals, making the sound heard correspondin
The Archytan acoustic doctrine cited in the Timaeus commentary locates musical notes within a physical theory of percussive motion, contextualizing the materialist substrate of tonal phenomena relevant to the five-note system.
, Plato’s cosmology the Timaeus of Plato, 1997aside
The Perfect Man uses his mind like a mirror—going after nothing, welcoming nothing, responding but not storing.
The mirror-mind passage from the Inner Chapters supplies the philosophical baseline — undivided, unpatterned consciousness — against which the five notes appear as a corrupting imposition of sensory categories.
, The Complete Works of Zhuangzi, 2013aside