HARMONY. In its earliest English sense the term harmony, in music, is applied to any pleasing arrangement of musical sounds ; but technically it is confined to the science of the simultaneous combination of sounds of different pitch, without regard to their quality of tone or timbre, a matter which belongs to the province of instrumentation (q.v.). The sense of the word harmony is further restricted to the study of combinations rather as blocks of sound than as textures. The fundamental aesthetic texture of harmony is counterpoint (q.v.).
But while the abstraction of harmony from instrumentation is as legitimate and necessary as the abstraction of draughtmanship from colour, the abstraction of harmony from counterpoint cuts music adrift from its foundations and leads to no better results than the abstraction of sound from sense. Harmony is to classical music what perspective is to pictorial art. But visual perspective is a science, whereas this musical perspective is wholly an art. The present article aims at showing that its laws are true to the nature of art and are no mere rules of a game. But we must not impute the meaning of its laws to any music earlier than the 14th century, and even in the spacious days of Elizabeth and Pales trina there are many things in harmony which do not mean what we would mean by them to-day.