Harmonía

Harmonía, or harmony, is a multidisciplinary concept that describes the ordering, coordination, or fitting together of parts to create a coherent whole. The term derives from the Greek harmonia, from harmos meaning “fit together” or “joint,” with the suffix -ia indicating a state or condition. In Western thought, harmonía has been used to describe phenomena as diverse as musical pitch relations, mathematical proportion, and the social or aesthetic unity of a work.

In ancient Greece, harmonía signified an overarching principle of order and proportion. Pythagoreans linked musical intervals to numerical ratios and spoke of the harmony of the spheres, a supposed alignment of celestial motions with musical ratios. For Plato and later philosophers, harmonía expressed the unity of the cosmos and the moral and intellectual order of society.

In music, harmony denotes the vertical aspect of sound—the simultaneous combination of pitches and the system of chords and their progression. It encompasses chord structure, voice leading, tonal functions, and harmonic rhythm. Western practice moved from medieval modal harmony toward tonal harmony in the Baroque and Classical periods, and later diversified into chromatic, atonal, and contemporary approaches. The harmonic series, or natural overtones, underpins perceptions of consonance and informs tuning, chordal function, and voice-leading conventions.

Beyond music, harmonía is used in aesthetics, design, and architecture to describe balance and proportional relationships among elements. In philosophy and rhetoric, it can denote agreement or concord among ideas. The term has cognates in several languages, such as armonía in Spanish and harmonie in French.