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THE WESTERN ONTARIO SERIES
IN PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE
ASERIES OF BOOKS
IN PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE, METHODOLOGY, EPISTEMOLOGY,
LOGIC, HISTORY OF SCIENCE, AND RELATED FJELDS
Managing Editor
WILLIAM DEMOPOULOS
Department of Philosophy, University ofWestern Ontario, Canada
Managing Editor 1980-1997
ROBERT E. BUTTS
Late, Department of Philosophy, University ofWestern Ontario, Canada
Editorial Board
JOHN L. BELL, University ofWestern Ontario
JEFFREY BUB, University of Maryland
ROBERT CLIFTON, University of Pittsburgh
ROBERT DiSALLE, University ofWestern Ontario
MICHAEL FRIEDMAN, Indiana University
WILLIAM HARPER, University ofWestern Ontario
CLIFFORD A. HOOKER, University of Newcastle
KEITH HUMPHREY, University ofWestern Ontario
AUSONIO MARRAS, University ofWestern Ontario
JÜRGEN MITTELSTRASS, Universität Konstanz
JOHN M. NICHOLAS, University ofWestern Ontario
ITAMAR PITOWSKY, llebrew University
GRAHAM SOLOMON, Wilfrid Laurier University
VOLUME64
NUMBER TO SOUND The Musical Way to the Scientific Revolution
Edited by
PAOLOGOZZA Department of Philosophy and
Department of Music. University of Bologna. Italy
SPRINGER-SCIENCE+BUSINESS MEDIA, B.V.
A C.I.P. Catalogue record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.
ISBN 978-90-481-5358-9 ISBN 978-94-015-9578-0 (eBook) DOI 10.1007/978-94-015-9578-0
Printed on acid-free paper
All Rights Reserved © 2000 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht
Originally published by Kluwer Academic Publishers in 2000 Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1 st edition 2000
No part of the material protected by this copyright notice may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical,
inc\uding photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the copyright owner
Contents
Illustrations Notes on Contributors Preface & Acknowledgements
Introduction Paolo Gozza
TRADITION
1 Sounding Numbers
The Harmony ofthe Spheres
Vll
Vlll
Xl
1
Daniel P. Walker 67
"Desiderio da Pavia" and Renaissance Musical Theory Paolo Gozza 79
2 Music & Spirit
Marsilio Ficino: The Soul and the Body of Counterpoint Brenno Boccadoro 99
Music in Francis Bacon's Natural Philosophy Penelope M. Gouk 135
TRANSITION
3 Geometry vs Arithmetic
A Renaissance Mathematics: the Music ofDescartes Paolo Gozza
The Structure ofHarmony in Johannes Kepler's Harmonice mundi (1619) Michael Dickreiter
155
173
VI
4 The Uses of Experience
Was Galileo's Father an Experimental Scientist? Claude V Palisca
The Expressive Value ofIntervals and the Problem ofthe Fourth Daniel P. Walker
REASSESSMENT
5 Sound, Matter & Motion
Galileo Galilei H. Floris Cohen
Isaac Beeckman H. Floris Cohen
6 Mechanics & Affections
Marin Mersenne: Mechanics, Music and Harmony
191
201
219
233
Peter Dear 267
Moving the Affections Through Music: Pre-Cartesian Psycho-Physiological Theories Claude Victor Palisca 289
INDEX 309
Illustrations
The invention of the consonances, from Franchino Gaffurio, Theorica musice (1492) 3
The universe as a monochord, from Robert Fludd, Utriusque cosmi ... historia (1617) 5
The division of music, from Gioseffo Zarlino, Le Istitutioni harmoniche (1558) 12
Apollo and wordly music, from Franchino Gaffurio, Practica musice (1496) 16
The musician, from Franchino Gaffurio, De harmonia musicorum instrumentorum (1518) 18
Zarlino's emblem, from Giovanni Maria Artusi, Impresa dei molto R.M. GiosejJo Zarlino (1604) 39
Title page of Johannes Kepler's Harmonices mundi !ibri V(1619) 46
Title page ofRene Descartes's Compendium musicae (1683) 52
Representation of two sounds a fifth apart, from Galileo Galilei, Discourses (1638) 224
Geometrical proof of the vibrations of two sounds an eight apart, from Isaac Beeckman, Journae! (edited by De Waard) 238
The middle ear, from J. R. Pierce and E. E. David, Jr., Man's World ofSound (1958) 257
Title page ofFranz Lang's Theatrum ajJectuum humanort:m (1717) 308
Notes on Contributors
Brenno Boccadoro is 'MaHre assistant' in Musicology at the University of Geneva. He collaborates with the Institute Louis Jeantet of the History of Medicine in Geneva and Lausanne. His publications concern the theory of music in Ancient Greece ("Fonne et matiere dans la theorie musicale de l' Antiquite Grecque," in Le temps et la forme. Pour une epistemologie de la connaissance musicale, Geneva 1998), in the Renaissance and in the 18th century (see Dictionnaire de Jean-Jacques Rousseu, Paris/Geneva 1996, and Dictionnaire europeen des Lumieres, Paris 1997.)
H. Floris Cohen is Professor in the History of Science at the University of Twente, Netherlands. On the history of musical science he published Quantifying Music. The Science of Music at the first Stage of the Scientific Revolution (Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 1984). He has since published The Scientific Revolution. A Historiographical Inquiry (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1994), and is currently completing a book under the working title "How Modem Science Came into the W orld. Its Conditioned Emergence; Its Threefold Dynamics."
Peter Dear is a Professor in the Departments of History and of Science & Technology Studies at Cornell University. He is the author of Discipline and Experience: The Mathematical Way in the Scientific Revolution (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1995).
Michael Dickreiter works in the field of professional specialization as Author and Teacher in Audition. After his book on Kepler's musical theory, his more recent publications concern the fields of technology of sound and recording, besides the science of instruments and scores.
ix
Penelope Gouk is a Wellcome Researcher in the History of Medicine at the University of Manchester and lectures on science, technology and medicine before 1800. Her most recent work "Music, Science and Natural Magic in Seventeenth-Century England" is in publication at the Yale University Press. She is currently editing a comparative and interdisciplinary volume on "Musical Healing in Cultural Contexts" (Ashgate, forthcoming 1999).
Paolo Gozza teaches Philosophy of Music in the Department of Music at the University of Bologna. He has edited La musica nella Rivoluzione Scientifica dei Seicento (Bologna: il Mulino, 1989). He is the author of the chapter on music in Vol. IV of the History 0/ Science, section on 'Renaissance Science,' for the Istituto dell'Enciclopedia Italiana Giovanni Treccani (forthcoming).
Claude V. Palisca is Henry L. and Lucy G. Moses Professor Emeritus ofMusic, Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut, U.S.A. His Humanism in Italian Renaissance Musical Thought (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1985) won the prize of the International Musicological Society in 1987. His book "Music and Ideas in the Sixteenth and Eighteenth Centuries" is in publication at the Yale University Press.
Daniel P. Walker (30 June 1914 - 10 March 1985) published two collections of essays on music: Studies in Musical Science in the Late Renaissance (1978), and Music, Spirit and Language in the Renaissance (1985) edited by Penelope Gouk. His "Musical Humanism in the 16th and early 17th Centuries" (The Music Review, 1941-42) is alandmark in the field of Renaissance musical theory.
Preface
Number 10 Sound: The Musical Way 10 the Scientific Revolution is a collection of twelve essays by writers from the fields of musicology and the history of science. The essays show the idea of music held by European intellectuals who lived from the second half of the 15th century to the early 17th: physicians (e.g. Marsilio Ficino), scholars of musical theory (e.g. Gioseffo Zarlino, Vincenzo Galilei), natural philosophers (e.g. Francis Bacon, Isaac Beeckman, Marin Mersenne), astronomers and mathematicians (e.g. Johannes Kepler, Galileo Galilei ). Together with other people of the time, whom the Reader will meet in the course of the book, these intellectuals share an idea of music that is far removed from the way it is commonly conceived nowadays: it is the idea of music as a science whose object-musical sound--can be quantified and demonstrated, or enquired into experimentally with the methods and instruments of modem scientific enquiry. In this conception, music to be heard is a complex, variable structure based on few simple elements--e.g. musical intervals-, combined according to rules and criteria which vary along with the different ages. However, the varieties of music created by men would not exist if they were not based on certain musical models--e.g. the consonances-, which exist in the mind of God or are hidden in the womb of Nature, which man discovers and demonstrates, and finally translates into the language of sounds.
The discourses on music of the 16th and early 17th century European intellectuals bear witness to the change in their shared conception of music. The title of the book paraphrases this change: it is the shift from a conception in which the object of music, i.e. sound, is thought of in terms of number to the conception in which sound is thought of in terms of movement. "Number does not produce sound," Marin Mersenne states; it has no separate, autonomous reality from the periodical oscillations of those sounding bodies that in some mysterious way engender the sensation of sound in man. In short, it is the transition from the 'sonorous number' to
XIl
the 'sonorous body,' from number to sound. This is a subtle but substantial change in the nature of 'music as a science,' which integrates and transforms the musical tradition of ancient and medieval origin.
The structure of the book makes the epistemological phases in this change clear. The metamorphosis from number (Tradition) to sound (Reassessment) is complicated by a phase of gestation (Transition), the cognition of which gave rise to the planned symmetries of the text. The outcome is a tripartite structure (the three main sections of the book.) Each section is twofold: ontological-the object of music (sound) in terms of number (Tradition: section 1), measure (Transition: section 3) and matter and motion (Reassessment: section 5)-, and psychological-music as a case of the mind-body relationship in Renaissance and late-Renaissance Magic (Tradition: section 2) and in the Age of Mechanicism (Reassessment: section 6), tempered by an experimental attitude (Transition: section 4). Every heading introduces two narrative voices: those of the Authors, past and present, who take turns in telling the story. The Editor apologizes for having made use of them in this experiment. His main concern here has been to compensate for this instrumental use with the clarity of the premise and the proper design of the book. Finally, the Introduction offers the Reader the coordinates of a tradition that from ancient times reaches its fulfilment in the 18th century. In order to cover such a vast period of time, each section of the Introduction is concerned with a self-sufficient theme-each paragraph may be read on its own-, and it repeats the same time-spans: from the Renaissance to the Age of the Enlightenment, when music moves house, it abandons the Department of Exact Science and enters the Department ofFine Arts.
'The musical way to the scientific revolution' -the subtitle of the book-states an historical phenomenon that has not been awarded attention on the part of historians: in the 16th and 17th centuries music is a model for many intellectuals in their reconsideration of the structure of knowledge and reality. The crisis of number leads to the reappraisal of music in relationship to other, emergent disciplines-first geometry and astronomy, then mechanics and psychophysiology-, and the mobility of music in the encyclopedia of the sciences is a clue to its epistemological changes. In virtually the same years, music leads Descartes to mathematique universelle and method, Kepler to reformed astronomy, Mersenne to mechanics and Galileo to the science of motion, to mention the most obvious cases. Music contaminates culture, it modifies knowledge and is in its turn modified by it. The contribution of Number to Sound to 'the musical way to the scientific revolution' makes two points: first, the transition from number to sound (weight) is historically tempered by measure, and, second, the new conception of sound changed the way of considering man as the enjoyer of music-two inescapable points in a tradition that alongside
xiii
David and Orpheus, the archetyp al music-physicians of the soul, places 'God, the geometer and musician,' who cuncta in numero, pondere et mensura disposuit (who arranged the whole by number, weight and measure.)
Acknowledgements
I should like here to thank those people who have helped me in my work. Prof. H. Floris Cohen was very generous with suggestions and advice on all the-only too frequent-occasions I pressed hirn, which was the same fate of Dr. Penelope Gouk, who was equally helpful. I am very grateful to Prof. Claude Palisca for his uncommon availability and extraordinary professionalism. My thanks go to all the Authors, in particular the late Prof. Daniel P. Walker, whose study on the second or third floor of the Warburg Institute in London I had the chance to frequent at times way back in 1984. I also thank Dr. Carrnel Ace, Dr. Steve Jewkes and Dr. Pascal Ernst (University of Bielefeld) for their work on the translation. Finally, I thank the Warburg Institute and E. J. Brill, Edizioni dell'Ateneo, Francke Verlag and Cornell University Press for their permission to reprint the articles by D. P. Walker, P. Gouk, M. Dickreiter and P. Dear.
This book was conceived in a difficult time at horne, which prolongued its period of ge station, but is born in circumstances that look promising. I, therefore, dedicate it to litde Vincent Boccadoro, whose birth on April 6th, 1998, at 9.15 a.rn., is a token of good luck to all those who collaborated in the birth of the book and to those who will read it.
P.G.