Perfect Harmony and Melting Strains

Transformations of Music in Early Modern Culture between Sensibility and Abstraction

Cornelia Wilde, Wolfram R. Keller, Cornelia Wilde, Wolfram R. Keller

• Publisher: De Gruyter
• Year: 2021
• eBook ISBN: 9783110422139
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Ancient History

Perfect Harmony and Melting Strains assembles interdisciplinary essays investigating concepts of harmony during a transitional period, in which the Pythagorean notion of a harmoniously ordered cosmos competed with and was transformed by new theories about sound - and new ways of conceptualizing the world. From the perspectives of philosophy, literary scholarship, and musicology, the contributions consider music's ambivalent position between mathematical abstraction and sensibility, between the metaphysics of harmony and the physics of sound. Essays examine the late medieval and early modern history of ideas concerning the nature of music and cosmic harmony, and trace their transformations in early modern musico-literary discourses. Within this framework, essays further offer original readings of important philosophical, literary, and musicological works. This interdisciplinary volume brings into focus the transformation of a predominant Renaissance worldview and of music's scientific, theological, literary, as well as cultural conceptions and functions in the early modern period, and will be of interest to scholars of the classics, philosophy, musicology, as well as literary and cultural studies.

Index of Names

• Abbott, George, 1
• Addison, Joseph, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5
• Aeneas, 1, 2
• Agrippa, Heinrich Cornelius, 1
• Anglicus, Bartholomaeus, 1, 2
• Apollo, 1
• Argent, John, 1
• Aristeides Quintilianus, 1
• Aristotle, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7
• Aristoxenus, 1
• Atalanta, 1
• Augustine, Saint, 1, 2, 3, 4
• Bacchus, 1
• Bacon, Francis, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5
• Bancroft, Richard, 1, 2
• Bird, Thomas, 1
• Blow, John, 1
• Boccaccio, Giovanni, 1, 2
• Boethius, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11
• Borja, Francisco de, 1
• Boyle, Robert, 1
• Brady, Nicolas, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6
• Bright, Timothy, 1, 2, 3
• Brocklesby, Richard, 1, 2
• Brossier, Marthe, 1
• Browne, Richard, 1, 2, 3
• Burton, Richard, 1, 2
• Butler, Charles, 1, 2
• Byrd, William, 1
• Cadace, 1
• Callisto, 1
• Calvin, John, 1
• Campion, Edmund, 1
• Carissimi, Giacomo, 1
• Case, John, 1, 2
• Castiglione, Baldassare, 1
• Cavalieri, Emilio de, 1
• Cecilia, Saint, 1, 2, 3, 4
• Ceres, 1
• Charleton, Walter, 1, 2
• Chaucer, Geoffrey, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5
• Christopherson, John, 1
• Cicero, Marcus Tullius, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6
• Cort, Cornelis, 1
• Crooke, Helkiah, 1
• Cupid, 1, 2
• Dares, 1
• Darrell, John, 1, 2
• David, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9
• Deacon, John, 1
• Descartes, René, 1, 2, 3, 4
• Dictys, 1
• Dido, 1, 2
• Dodwell, Henry, 1
• Douglas, Gavin, 1
• Draghi, Giovanni Battista, 1
• Dryden, John, 1, 2, 3
• Eolus, 1
• Estwick, Sampson, 1, 2
• Evelyn, John, 1
• Ficino, Marsilio, 1, 2, 3, 4
• Fludd, Robert, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5
• Galilei, Vincenzo, 1, 2
• Galileo Galilei, 1
• Garnet, James Henry, 1
• Gerard, John, 1
• Glaucon, 1
• Glover, Mary, 1
• Grimaldi, Nicola Francesco Leonardo, 1
• Guidetti, Giovanni, 1, 2, 3
• Guido d'Arezzo, 1
• Gyraldus, 1
• Handel, Georg Friedrich, 1, 2
• Harsnett, Samuel, 1
• Hercules, 1
• Hickman, Charles, 1
• Homer, 1
• Hooke, Robert, 1, 2, 3
• Hugh of Saint Victor, 1, 2
• Hutcheson, Frances, 1, 2
• Iamblichus, 1
• Irvine, Christopher, 1
• Jones, John, 1
• Jorden, Edward, 1
• Josephus, 1
• Jubal, 1
• Jupiter, 1, 2
• Kepler, Johannes, 1
• Kircher, Athanasius, 1, 2
• Lister, Martin, 1
• Locke, John, 1, 2
• Lodge, Thomas, 1
• Loe, William, 1
• Lollius, 1
• Lydgate, John, 1
• Mace, Thomas, 1
• Macrobius, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8
• Marescot, Michel, 1
• Merbecke, John, 1, 2, 3
• Mersenne, Marin, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5
• Morley, Thomas, 1, 2
• Newte, John, 1, 2
• Newton, Isaac, 1
• Nicolini, 1
• Orosius, 1
• Orpheus, 1, 2
• Ovid, 1, 2
• Patrick, Simon, 1
• Patrizi, Francesco, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5
• Pico della Mirandola, Giovanni, 1, 2, 3
• Plato, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14
• Playford, John, 1
• Plotinus, 1, 2, 3
• Powell, Thomas, 1
• Proclus, 1, 2
• Purcell, Daniel, 1, 2
• Purcell, Henry, 1, 2
• Pyramus, 1
• Pythagoras, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5
• Rembrandt, 1
• Reuchlin, Johannes, 1, 2, 3
• Reynolds, Edward, 1
• Robinson, Nicholas, 1
• Robinson, Thomas, 1
• Salmon, Thomas, 1
• Saul, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5
• Scaliger, Julius Caesar, 1
• Scipio, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6
• Shadwell, Thomas, 1
• Sherlock, William, 1, 2, 3
• Sixtus V, 1
• Socrates, 1
• Sommers, William, 1
• South, Robert, 1
• Southwell, Robert, 1
• Syrianus, 1
• Tate, Nahum, 1, 2
• Thisbe, 1
• Timotheus, 1
• Topsell, Edward, 1
• Trevisa, John, 1
• Troilus, 1
• Valerianus, 1
• Venus, 1, 2, 3, 4
• Victoria, Tomás Luis de, 1
• Virgil, 1, 2
• Walker, John, 1
• Wilhelm V of Bavaria, 1, 2
• William III, 1, 2
• Willis, Thomas, 1, 2, 3
• Wright, Thomas, 1, 2, 3, 4
• Zarlino, Gioseffo, 1

Endnotes

1 See Bayreuther (2009). With regard to the mathematical notion of music see Vendrix (2008) and Fauvel/Flood/Wilson (2003). See also the essays collected in Prins/Vanhaelen (2018) which focus on the reception of the Pythagorean-Platonic idea of cosmic harmony.

2 Austern, for example, highlights the use of an »aquatic analogy« in Richard Brathwaite’s study Essays Upon the Five Senses, published in 1625, Austern (2006), 59. Austern (2020) provides a seminal study about how music permeated intellectual endeavours in the early modern period.

3 See Palisca (1985), chap. 2., »The Rediscovery of Ancient Sources«. The central texts are Plato’s Politeia, Timaios, and Nomoi, Aristotle’s Politics and Poetics, Aristeides Quintilianus’ De musica, as well as Pseudo-Plutarch’s De musica.

4 Lippman (1963) and West (1992) prese...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction: Perfect Harmony and Melting Strains: Transformations of Music in Early Modern Culture Between Sensibility and Abstraction
• Disharmonic Spheres: Metapoetic Noise in Geoffrey Chaucer’s Parliament of Fowls
• In Search of the Word: Speech-like Chants and Confessional Identity in Counter-Reformation Mission to England
• Patrizi’s and Mersenne’s Critiques of Ficino’s Interpretation of the Harmony of the Spheres
• Divine Harmony, Demonic Affections, and Bodily Humours: Two Tales of Musical Healing in Early Modern England
• The Powers and Effects of Music: English Theories from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment
• »Cecilia’s Name does all our Numbers grace«: Musico-poetics in Joseph Addison’s St Cecilia’s Day Odes
• Index of Names