7 - Musical elaborations

Summary

One begins to see that by the early years of the sixteenth century Hans Keller's modern - contemporary - dictum that ‘music is more a mode of thought than an art’ was for many people literally true.Lying as it did across spheres of knowledge, across theory and practice, and over the world and the human, some even saw in it something like access to a total mode of being; or at least, a vision of its ideal possibility. These elements - rhythm and metrics, pitch and consonance, relation between words and music, effects on the passions, purposes of such effects, matters of creativity and reception, historicization and of rational order - now remained central to discussion about music and poetry and their place among human activities in general and among the disciplines more particularly.

But issues concerning the effects of music and poetry on the affections and how such effects might operate or be achieved tended towards a repetitive impasse absent the aid of mathematics - an aid, as we will soon see again, that was, in the event, further urged by its primary use in another area of art, that of painting. Despite evident possibilities, such as Bembo and del Lago did not seem to get anything very exact from Gaffurio, no doubt because Gaffurio's own use of proportionality in discussing affectus animi and indeed the soul itself betrayed too much its origins in ‘Pythagorean’ mysticism and speculative numerology.