[Healing of harmony: music therapy as a historical cultural phenomenon]

The interaction of music and psyche constitutes a phenomenon, which is known to man since antiquity, and, for this reason, was ever since used for healing purposes. The pythagoreans developed a system of musical theory that declared consonance to be a musical interval with the frequencies in a ratio of integer numbers. The cosmical music of the spheres, the played instrumental music and the inner music of man, these all they conceived as a unity. Varied in a manyfold way, this great theme was handed down over the centuries to the present day, being a source of inspiration to music and the sciences. Modern musical therapy is, in the last analysis, based on these intuitive findings.