harmonizer

[Eng. harmoniz (e); -er.] 1. One who harmonizes or arranges sounds accord. ing to the rules of harmony. 2. One who arranges or adjusts things in sym metrical order. IMG:content-0992.png:[blocks in formation] "This harmony of mind Where purity and peace immingle charms." Thomson: Summer, 550. 2. In the same sense as II. 2. 3. The science which treats of the harmonizing of sounds. 4. A melodious or harmonious arrangement of sounds; music. "Heaven's harmony is universal love." Cowper: Progre of Error , 78. 5. Concord or agreement in views, feelings, senti ments, manners, .; peace; friendship; unity. "Attentive to universal harmony , [he] often forgets that he himself has a part to sustain in the concert."-Goldsmith: Citizen of the World , let. lxvi. 6. A book bringing together and showing the agreement between parallel or corresponding pa ages of different authors. Harmonies of the Old Testament aim at placing the several books, or portions of them, in chronological order, showing how they illustrate each other, as, for instance, what light the prophetic books shed on the historical ones, or vice vers a . Harmonies of the New Testament have it for one leading object to compare and show the mutual consistency of the four gospels. Another is to arrange the epistles in chronological order, and use the undesigned coincidence between portions of them and the Acts of the Apostles, to illustrate and confirm the authority of both. The earliest known harmony of the gospels is that of Tatian, a Syrian of the second century. Ammonious followed in the third, and Eusebius in the fourth. In 1537 Andreas Osiander published a similar work, as did Calvin in 1553, and other writers. Since then such harmonies have become numerous. II. Technically : 1. Anat .: [HARM ON I A, 1.] 2. Music : A just proportion of sound; musical concord; the accordance, concord, or consonance of different sounds which pleases the ear, or a succe ion of such sounds called chords. In its earliest sense among the Greeks this word seems to have been a general term for music, a sense in which our own poets often use it. But from its meaning of "fitting together," it came to be applied to the proper arrangement of sounds in a scale, or, as we should say, to "systems of tuning." "The delicacy of hearing, and taste of harmony has been formed upon those sounds which every country abounds with." - Add is on : Spectator , No. 29. For the difference between harmony and con cord, see CONCORD. (1) Artificial harmony: Music: A mixture of discords and concords. (2) Close harmony: Music: Said when the sounds composing each chord are placed so near to each other that no sound belonging to the chord could again be interposed between any of those already present. (3) Figured harmony : Music : Said when one or more of the parts move, during the continuance of a chord, through certain notes which do not form any of the constituent parts of that chord. (4) Harmony of the spheres: Ancient Phil .: The a umption of Pythagoras that everything in the great Kosmos must be harmoniously arranged, and that since the planets were at the same proportionate distances from each other as the divisions of the monochord, in pa ing through the ether they must make a sound varying according to the diversity of their magnitude, velocity, and relative distance. He thought that Saturn gave the deepest and the Moon the shrillest sound, as the one was farthest from, and the other nearest to the earth. (5) Natural harmony: Music: The harmonic triad or common chord. (6) Perfect harmony: Music: Harmony with untempered concords only (7) Pre -established harmony: Metaph.: In the philosophy of Leibnitz a har mony established by God at the creation among all monads, which, exce ively minute as they were, still represented the universe. Through their influence the body and soul act independently of each other, each obeying its own laws as freely as if the other did not exist, and yet with the same result as if they influenced each other. They are in the opinion of Leibnitz, like two clocks, one formed to strike, the other simply to indicate the hour. They move in harmony, but each is independent of the other. (8) Spread harmony : Music : When the sounds of a chord are placed at such a wide distance from each other, that some of them might be again interposed between the sounds already present. (9) Tempered harmony: Music: When the notes are varied by temperament (q. v.). har-most, s. [Gr. harmostēs, from harmozō = to fit together, to rule.] Gr. Antig .: The name given to those governors of the Greek Islands and towns in Asia Minor sent out into a subject or conquered town by the Lacedæmonians during their supremacy after the Peloponnesian war; the governor of a colony.