harmony
Pluralharmonies (some meanings)
- 1A state of agreement, accord, or peaceful coexistence between people or things.
The treaty restored harmony between the rival nations.
Working in harmony, the volunteers finished the project ahead of schedule.
Similarpeace, accord, concord, agreement, unity
Oppositediscord, conflict, disharmony, strife
Note
Long before it meant agreement, Greek harmonía meant a joint or union. It came from a verb for fitting things together, and the image of parts that fit still sits under the social sense. Its natural companions are social harmony, where a whole society is the thing held together, and the phrase in harmony with, which links two parties who get along.
- 2A pleasing combination of varied elements or an agreeable arrangement of sounds.
The garden's design achieved a harmony of color, texture, and form.
Critics praised the film for the harmony between its score and its imagery.
Similarbalance, unity, coherence, consonance, symmetry
Oppositediscord, dissonance, disharmony, clash
- 3Two or more notes sounded at the same time to produce a chord.
The arranger wrote close harmony for the backing vocalists.
A simple melody gains depth when harmony is added beneath it.
Note
Musicians treat this as the vertical side of music: the notes stacked at a single moment, as opposed to the melody that moves across time. It is often used without an article, as in to sing harmony or to add harmony. Close harmony names voices kept within a narrow span of pitch, so that they blend tightly.
- 4The relationship between two distinct musical pitches played at the same time.
The harmony between the two violins shifted from tense to sweet.
Composers exploit the harmony of widely spaced pitches for dramatic effect.
Note
The narrowest of the musical senses concerns just two pitches and how they sit against each other, while the chord sense covers whatever is stacked together. That relationship is what theory measures and argues over. Hermann Hesse's Gertrude has its narrator recall "contradictions in the theory of harmony" alongside finger exercises and tedious piano lessons.
- 5The academic study of chords and their construction.
He spent two semesters on harmony and counterpoint.
The textbook introduces harmony through Bach's chorales.
Note
Here the word names a subject on a syllabus rather than a sound. Students take harmony the way they take counterpoint, and in that use it rarely needs an article. Keep it apart from the chords themselves: one studies harmony to learn how chords are built and how they move, while the harmony a choir sings is the sound that results.
- 6A written work that systematically arranges parallel passages from different historians of the same events to show their agreement.
The editor's harmony aligned the rival histories column by column.
Their harmony of the Gospels reconciled the four narratives into one sequence.
Note
A scholar's genre, and a countable one: a harmony is a book. The classic case is a harmony of the Gospels, which sets parallel accounts of the same events side by side. The name fits because the aim is to show that the accounts are consistent. It is the "agreement" meaning turned into a method of arranging texts.
Practice
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Origin
First attested in 1602, it came through Middle English 'armonye' and Old French 'harmonie' from Latin 'harmonia,' from Ancient Greek 'harmonía' ('joint, union, agreement, concord of sounds'). This is linked to Greek 'harmózō' ('I fit together'), from the Proto-Indo-European root *h₂er- ('to join, fit together').