Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-t7fkt Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-28T07:52:58.019Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Performance practice: music, medicine and natural philosophy in Interregnum Oxford

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 January 2009

Penelope Gouk
Penelope Gouk
Affiliation:
Wellcome Unit for the History of Medicine, Mathematics Tower, The University, Manchester M13 9PL.
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

A generation or so ago, scholarly discussion about the creation of new scientific knowledge in seventeenth-century England was often framed in terms of the respective contributions of scholars and practitioners, the effects of their training and background, the relative importance of the universities compared with London, and of the role of external and internal factors, and so forth. These discourses have now largely been put aside in favour of those emphasizing spatial metaphors and models, which are recognized as powerful conceptual tools for representing the dynamics of complex systems. The role that geographies play in the fostering of creativity and innovation in human systems at both the social and cognitive levels is a subject that is attracting widespread interest.

Type
Research Article
Information
The British Journal for the History of Science , Volume 29 , Issue 3 , September 1996 , pp. 257 - 288
Copyright
Copyright © British Society for the History of Science 1996

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 See, for example, Hannaway, O., ‘Laboratory design and the aim of science’, Isis (1986), 77, 585–610CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Shapin, S., ‘The house of experiment in seventeenth-century England’, Isis (1988), 79, 373–404CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Ophir, A. and Shapin, S., ‘The place of knowledge: a methodological survey’, Science in Context (1991), 4, 3–21CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Livingstone, D. N., ‘The spaces of knowledge: contributions towards a historical geography of science’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space (1995), 13, 5–34.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

2 Csikszentmihályi, M., ‘The domain of creativity’, in Theories of Creativity (ed. Runco, M. and Albert, R. S.), London, 1990, 190–212Google Scholar; Boden, M. A., ‘What is creativity?’, in Dimensions of Creativity (ed. Boden, M. A.), Cambridge, MA, and London, 1994, 75–118Google Scholar; Perkins, D., ‘Creativity: beyond the Darwinian paradigm’Google Scholar, ibid., 119–42.

3 Shapin, S. and Schaffer, S., Leviathan and the Air-Pump: Hobbes, Boyle and the Experimental Life, Princeton, NJ, 1985Google Scholar; Schaffer, S., ‘Glass works: Newton's prisms and the uses of experiment’, in The Uses of Experiment: Studies in the Natural Sciences (ed. Gooding, D., Pinch, T. and Schaffer, S.), Cambridge, 1989, 67–104.Google Scholar

4 Webster, C., The Great Instauration: Science, Medicine and Reform 1626–1660, London, 1975, especially 122–78Google Scholar; Frank, R. G., Harvey and the Oxford Physiologists: Scientific Ideas and Social Interaction, Berkeley, Los Angeles and London, 1980Google Scholar. In later footnotes I shall refer only to this book, but other pertinent articles by Frank, include his ‘Science, medicine and the universities of early modern England: background and sources’, History of Science (1973), 11, 194–216, 239–69CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed; ‘John Aubrey, F.R.S., John Lydall, and science at Commonwealth Oxford’, Notes and Records of the Royal Society of London (1973), 27, 193–217Google Scholar; ‘Thomas Willis and his circle: brain and mind in seventeenth-century medicine’, in The Languages of Psyche: Mind and Body in Enlightenment Thought (ed. Rousseau, G. S.), Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1990, 107–46.Google Scholar

5 Webster does at least point out ‘that the “sciences” which captured the imagination of Brian Twinne at the beginning of the seventeenth century had little in common with those pursued by the students of John Wilkins fifty years later’. Webster, , op. cit. (4), 116.Google Scholar

6 For example, the observation that ‘much of the subject matter of music was closely related to that of arithmetic and geometry’ is confined to a footnote on p. 28 of Feingold, M., The Mathematicians' Apprenticeship: Science, Universities and Society in England, 1560–1640, Cambridge, 1984Google Scholar. Likewise little attention is paid to music as a branch of mathematics in Bennett, J. A., The Mathematical Science of Christopher Wren, Cambridge, 1982Google Scholar, even though Wren himself addressed musical topics.

7 On Mersenne, Galileo and the laws of vibration, see especially Dostrovsky, S., ‘Early vibration theory: physics and music in the seventeenth century’, Archive for the History of Exact Sciences (1974–1975), 14, 169–218CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Drake, S., ‘Renaissance music and experimental science’, Journal of the History of Ideas (1970), 31, 483–500CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Cohen, H. F., Quantifying Music: The Science of Music at the First Stage of the Scientific Revolution, 1580–1650, Dordrecht, 1984CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Other studies addressing the relationship between music and science include Cohen, A., Music in the French Royal Academy of Sciences: A Study in the Evolution of Musical Thought, Princeton, 1981Google Scholar; Gouk, P. M., ‘Music in the Natural Philosophy of the Early Royal Society’, Ph.D. thesis, University of London, 1982Google Scholar; eadem, ‘Music in Francis Bacon's natural philosophy’, in Francis Bacon: terminologia e fortuna nel XVII secolo (ed. Fattori, M.), Rome, 1985, 139–54Google Scholar; eadem, ‘The role of acoustics and music theory in the scientific work of Robert Hooke’, Annals of Science (1980), 37, 573–605Google Scholar; eadem, ‘The harmonic roots of Newtonian science’, in Let Newton be! A New Perspective on his Life and Works (ed. Fauvel, John et al. ), Oxford, 1988, 101–25Google Scholar; Gozza, P. (ed.), La musica nella rivoluzione scientifica del seicento, Bologna, 1989Google Scholar; Kassler, J. C., ‘Man – a musical instrument: models of the brain and mental functioning before the computer’, History of Science (1984), 22, 59–92CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Kassler, J. C. and Oldroyd, D., ‘Robert Hooke's Trinity College “Musick Scripts”, his music theory and the role of music in his cosmology’, Annals of Science (1983), 40, 559–95CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Miller, L. and Cohen, A., Music in the Royal Society of London 1660–1806, Detroit, 1987.Google Scholar

8 Simon, J., Education and Society in Tudor England, Cambridge, 1979, 364.Google Scholar

9 Frank, , op. cit. (4), p. xi.Google Scholar

10 Frank, , op. cit. (4), p. xii (both quotations).Google Scholar

11 Participants at these early meetings included Charles Scarburgh (Merton), Thomas Willis (Christ Church), Walter Charleton (Magdalen Hall), Ralph Bathurst (Trinity) and Nathaniel Highmore (Trinity), all of whom were or became practising physicians, and John Greaves (Merton), who was Savilian Professor of Astronomy.

12 Wear, A., ‘William Harvey: the discovery of the circulation of the blood’, in Man Masters Nature (ed. Porter, R.), London, 1987, 65–76.Google Scholar

13 For details, see works cited in note 4 above.

14 The Diary of John Evelyn (ed. de Beer, E. S.), 6 vols., Oxford, 1955, iii, 110–11.Google Scholar

15 See, for example, Stone, L., ‘The educational revolution, 1560–1640’, Past & Present (1964), 28, 41–80CrossRefGoogle Scholar; idem, ‘The size and composition of the Oxford student body 1580–1910’, in The University in Society Vol. I: Oxford and Cambridge from the 14th to the early 19th Century (ed. Stone, L.), Princeton, NJ, 1974, 3–110Google Scholar; Simon, , op. cit. (8)Google Scholar; Webster, C., ‘The curriculum of the grammar schools and universities, 1500–1600: a critical view of the literature’, History of Education (1975), 4, 51–68.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

16 See especially Webster, , op. cit. (4), 122–9Google Scholar, and Feingold, , op. cit. (6).Google Scholar

17 Holder not only had a Masters degree from Cambridge and a Doctorate in Divinity from Oxford, but also possessed some skill in composition. See DNB and Stanley, J. M., ‘William Holder: His Position in Seventeenth-Century Music Theory’, Ph.D. thesis, University of Cincinnati, 1983.Google Scholar

18 These interests were also shared by Wren's father, Dean Christopher Wren, who was an unsuccessful contender for the Gresham Lectureship in Astronomy before taking his degree in divinity in 1620. Wren junior was appointed to this post in 1657, but gave it up to become Savilian Professor of Astronomy in 1661. On Dean Wren see DNB article; Colie, R. L., ‘Dean Wren's marginalia and early science at Oxford’, Bodleian Library Record (1960), 6, 541–51Google Scholar; and Gouk, P. M., ‘Acoustics in the early Royal Society 1660–1680’, Notes and Records of the Royal Society (1982), 36, 155–75, especially 159, 161, 163.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

19 The Harmonics of Claudius Ptolemy of Alexandria (second century AD) not only deals with the quantitative relationships of musical intervals but also shows that these musical structures have their analogues in the soul and the heavens. The work was intimately related to Ptolemy's astronomical and astrological writings Almagest and Tetrabiblos. The other Greek texts edited by Wallis were commentaries on the Harmonics by the Neoplatonist Porpyhry (third century AD) and the Byzantine scholar Manuel Bryennius (fourteenth century AD). For an English translation of Ptolemy and discussion of these and related texts, see Barker, A., Greek Musical Writings Volume II: Harmonic and Acoustical Theory, Cambridge, 1989, especially 270–391.Google Scholar

20 Wallis, J., Grammatica linguae anglicanae, London, 1652Google Scholar, and A Defence of the Royal Society… in Answer to the Cavils of Dr William Holder, London, 1698.Google Scholar

21 Wallis, J., ‘A question in musick lately proposed to Dr Wallis, concerning the division of the monochord, or section of the musical canon: with his answer to it. March 5 1697/8’Google Scholar; idem, ‘A letter of Dr Wallis to Samuel Pepys Esquire, relating to some supposed imperfections in an organ. June 27, 1698’; idem, ‘A letter of Dr John Wallis to Mr Andrew Fletcher: concerning the strange effects reported of musick in former times, beyond what is to be found in later ages. Aug. 18 1698’, Philosophical Transactions (1698), 20, 80–8, 249–56, 297–303Google Scholar. See also note 77 below.

22 Charleton, W., Physiologia Epicuro-Gassendo-Charitoniana: Or a Fabrick of Science Natural, Upon the Hypothesis of Atoms, London, 1654, 226Google Scholar. On Charleton and his friendship with Brouncker, see Sharp, L. G., ‘Walter Charleton's early life 1620–1651 and relationship to natural philosophy in mid-seventeenth-century England’, Annals of Science (1973), 50, 311–40, especially 317CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Brouncker's theory was mentioned in the context of Charleton's discussion of ‘the Nature of Sound’; see Gouk, , ‘Music in… the early Royal Society’, op. cit. (7), 39–44Google Scholar. On Brouncker's geometrical division of the scale, see Walker, D. P., ‘Seventeenth-century scientists' views on intonation’, in Studies in Musical Science in the Late Renaissance, London, 1978, 111–22Google Scholar; Lindley, M., Lutes, Viols and Temperaments, Cambridge, 1984, 33–6.Google Scholar

23 Ward, J., Lives of the Professors of Gresham College, London, 174, 217–27Google Scholar; Webster, , op. cit. (4), 81–5, 548–51Google Scholar; DNB.

24 Although they have never been found, ‘Several music lectures’ dating from 1650 are listed in The Petty Papers: Some Unpublished Writings of Sir William Petty edited from the Bowood Papers (ed. Marquis, of Lansdowne, ), 2 vols., London, 1927, ii, 260–1Google Scholar. The dating suggests that Petty may have written these for his Gresham post.

25 On Petty, 's ‘Memoria musicalis’Google Scholar, for example, see Papers, Hartlib, Sheffield University, bundle 71, no. 9, fol. 1, and ‘Ephemerides’, 1648, N 06, 07Google Scholar. This invention is described along with Petty's other musical writings in Gouk, , ‘Music in the… early Royal Society’, op. cit. (7), 126–9Google Scholar. See also Sharp, L. G., ‘Sir William Petty and some Aspects of Seventeenth-Century Natural Philosophy’, Ph.D. thesis, University of Oxford, 1976.Google Scholar

26 In his Advice to W.P. to Mr Samuel Hartlib for the Advancement of some particular Parts of Learning (1648)Google Scholar, Petty suggested that only the most gifted would learn languages and music. Yet in his Ergastula literaria (1649)Google Scholar, a scheme to meet the educational requirements of all children, music was included on the grounds that like drawing it improved manual dexterity: Hartlib, , ‘Ephemerides’, 1649, D-E4Google Scholar; Webster, , op. cit., (4), 214.Google Scholar

27 Hartlib Papers, Sheffield University, bundle 49, no. 9, fol. 12, transcribed in Webster, , op. cit. (4), 550.Google Scholar

28 Charleton, W., op. cit. (22), 208–32Google Scholar, ‘The nature of sound’, 333–7Google Scholar, ‘Flexility, tractility, ductility, etc.’; Hooke, R., Micrographia: Or Some Physiological Descriptions of Minute Bodies made by Magnifying Glasses, with Observations and Enquiries Thereupon, London, 1665, 12, 14–16Google Scholar; idem, ‘An hypothetic explication of memory; how the organs made use of by the mind in its operation may be mechanically understood’, in The Posthumous Works of Robert Hooke (ed. Waller, R.), London, 1705, 138–48Google Scholar; idem, ‘A curious dissertation concerning the causes of the power & effects of music’, Royal Society Library, London, Classified Papers, vol. 2, no. 31Google Scholar; idem, ‘Musick scripts’ and ‘Preaching lecture’, Trinity College, Cambridge, MS O.lla.1 11–12 O.lla.14F–H; Willis, T., De anima brutorum quae hominis vitalis ac sensitiva est, exercitationes duae, Oxford, Oxford 1672Google Scholar; idem, ‘The anatomy of the brain and nerves’ and ‘Two discourses concerning the soul of brutes’, in The Remaining Medical Works (ed. Pordage, S.), London, 1683.Google Scholar

29 Gouk, P. M., ‘Speculative and practical music in seventeenth-century England: Oxford University as a case study’, in Atti del XIV Congresso della Società Internationale di Musicologica: Trasmissione e recezione delle forme di cultura musicale in Bologna, Bologna, 1987, iii, 199–205.Google Scholar

30 Carpenter, N. C., Music in the Medieval and Renaissance Universities, Norman, OK, 1958Google Scholar, provides a valuable European perspective on this whole subject, but for the English universities see pp. 76–92 (up to 1450) and pp. 153–210 (to 1600). For a discussion of Oxford in the sixteenth century, see also Caldwell, J., ‘Music in the faculty of arts’, in The History of the University of Oxford Volume 111: The Collegiate University (ed. McConica, J.), Oxford, 1986, 201–12Google Scholar. On the seventeenth century, see Gouk, P. M., ‘Music’, in History of the University of Oxford Volume IV: Seventeenth-Century Oxford, An Expanding University (ed. Tyacke, N.), Oxford, forthcoming.Google Scholar

31 For examples of dispensations to omit the music lecture in the sixteenth century, see Carpenter, , op. cit. (30), 155–6.Google Scholar

32 Wagner, D. L. (ed.), The Seven Liberal Arts in the Middle Ages, Bloomington, 1983.Google Scholar

33 Barrow, I., The Usefulness of Mathematical Learning, Explained and Demonstrated, London, 1734, 17–18Google Scholar. This was the English translation of his mathematical lectures given in Latin during 1664–66 and first published in 1685.

34 Gouk, , op. cit. (30), 635.Google Scholar

35 Boethius, A. M. S., Fundamentals of Music, translated with introduction and notes by Bower, C. M., New Haven and London, 1989, 50–1Google Scholar (‘What a musician is’).

36 Heather's original gift included a collection of portraits of musicians, stools, a harpsichord, a chest of viols and two sets of part books: Crum, M., ‘Early lists of the Oxford music school collection’, Music & Letters (1967), 48, 23–34CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For developments in the Music School during the seventeenth century, see Gouk, , op. cit. (30), 623–6.Google Scholar

37 For the impact of this struggle on English music, see Le Huray, Peter G., Music and the Reformation in England, 2nd edn, Cambridge, 1978.Google Scholar

38 Temperley, N., The Music of the English Parish Church, Volume 1, Cambridge, 1979, 1.Google Scholar

39 Boyd, M. C., Elizabethan Music and Musical Criticism, 2nd edn, Philadelphia, 1974, 13–36Google Scholar; Simon, , op. cit. (8).Google Scholar

40 The best introduction to this subject still remains Woodfill, W. L., Musicians in English Society from Elizabeth to Charles I, Princeton, 1953Google Scholar. Although women played prominent roles as patrons, pupils and daughters of professional musicians (being of course excluded from this sphere themselves), relatively little attention has yet been paid to their role in the English musical market-place.

41 These included the cathedral schools of music (notably Westminster Abbey, Ely and Gloucester), the choral foundations at Cambridge (King's College, Pembroke College, Peterhouse and Trinity College), and above all the ‘royal peculiars’ of St George's Chapel, Windsor, and the Chapel Royal, Whitehall. For further details and bibliography on the Oxford foundations, see Gouk, , op. cit. (30), 626–9.Google Scholar

42 For an impression of a chorister's educational experience, see Brennecke, E., John Milton the Elder and his Music, New York, 1973, 3–24Google Scholar (A day at Christ Church’).

43 At Oxford a bachelor of music was to have spent seven years in the study of music and to be familiar with Boethius's De musica. The degree entitled him to lecture at the university on this work for those taking the arts degree. A D.Mus. ostensibly required a further five years’ study. In fact music degrees were essentially hallmarks of distinction for musicians who had already achieved fame in the field. Williams, C. F. A., A Short Historical Account of the Degrees in Music at Oxford and Cambridge with a Chronological List of Graduates in that Faculty from the year 1463, London and New York, 1893Google Scholar; Bray, R., ‘Music and the quadrivium in early Tudor England’, Music & Letters (1995), 76, 1–18.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

44 See Gouk, , op. cit. (30), 622Google Scholar; Williams, , op. cit. (43), 75–83.Google Scholar

45 This point is emphasized in Weber, W., The Rise of Musical Classics in Eighteenth-Century England: A Study in Canon, Ritual and Ideology, Oxford, 1992Google Scholar. On the King's Music, see Ashbee, A., Records of English Court Music 1558–1714, 6 vols., i–iv Snodland, 1986–1991, v–vi Aldershot, 1991–1992Google Scholar, and also Holman, P., Four and Twenty Fiddlers: The Violin at the English Court 1540–1690, Oxford, 1993.Google Scholar

46 Rimbault, E. F. (ed.), The Old Cheque-Book or Book or Remembrance of the Chapel Royal from 1561 to 1744, New York, 1966Google Scholar; Le Huray, , op. cit. (37), 57–89.Google Scholar

47 Crewdson, H. A. F., The Worshipful Company of Musicians, London, 1950Google Scholar; Woodhill, , op. cit. (40), 3–5 on London, 56–132Google Scholar on provincial waits; Harley, J., Music in Purcell's London: The Social Background, London, 1968, 13–22.Google Scholar

48 John Baldwin, a city wait in 1603, was licensed for The Bell in 1604; Richard Burren, a city wait in 1628, was a licensed alehouse keeper in 1631. John Gerard, a university musician, was similarly licensed in 1629/30, and also had a music shop (location unknown) where he sold books and instruments. For further details of the city and university musicians see Gouk, , op. cit. (30), 630–2.Google Scholar

49 For further details of this genre and its development by Prince Charles's musicians, see Holman, , op. cit. (45), 211–24.Google Scholar

50 The classic account of these events and assessment of their impact is Scholes, P. A., The Puritans and Music in England and New England. A Contribution to the Cultural History of Two Nations, Oxford, 1934, repr. 1969.Google Scholar

51 On Wilson and Jeffries see the relevant entries in The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians (ed. Sadie, S.), 20 vols., London, 1980.Google Scholar

52 Wood, A., Athenae Oxonienses (ed. Bliss, P.), 4 vols., London, 1813–1820, iii, cols. 350–1Google Scholar, and Wilson, J. (ed.), Roger North on Music. Being a Selection From His Essays Written During the Years c. 1695–1728, London, 1959, 302–5, 351–2.Google Scholar

53 Chilmead was a noted linguist, composer and an expert on Greek music theory. According to Hartlib, he was a rival candidate for the Gresham Music Professorship that Petty was awarded in 1650. On Chilmead's career and especially his natural philosophical interests, see Feingold, M. and Gouk, P. M., ‘An early critique of Bacon's Sylva sylvarum: Edmund Chilmead's “Treatise on Sound”’, Annals of Science (1983), 40, 139–57.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

54 According to Hawkins, J., A General History of the Science and Practice of Music, 3 vols., London, 1875, ii, 71Google Scholar, Chilmead lived in the house once occupied by Thomas East, the Elizabethan printer of music; see Krummel, D. W., English Music Printing, 1553–1700, London, 1975, 19–20Google Scholar and passim.

55 Chan, M., ‘A mid-seventeenth-century music meeting and Playford's publishing‘, in The Well Enchanting Skill: Music, Poetry and Drama in the Culture of the Renaissance. Essays in honour of F. W. Sternfeld (ed. Caldwell, J., Olleson, E. and Wollenberg, S.), Oxford, 1990, 231–44.Google Scholar

56 Bellingham, B., ‘The musical circle of Anthony à Wood in Oxford during the Commonwealth and Restoration’, Journal of the Viola da Gamba Society of America (1982), 19, 6–70, especially 36–8Google Scholar. Although Wood's account of these meetings dates only from the mid-1650s, it seems probable that Ellis started them several years earlier.

57 Price, D. C., Patrons and Musicians of the English Renaissance, Cambridge, 1981.Google Scholar

58 For further details, see Bellingham, , op. cit. (56).Google Scholar

59 The catch, or round at the unison for three or more male voices (for example ‘London's burning’), was popular in England between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries. The light-hearted words, generally sportive and often indecent, were appropriate for taverns where they were usually sung. See article in New Grove, op. cit. (51).

60 For example, Dean Henry Aldrich wrote several catches that were published in Playford, Henry's The Pleasant Musical Companion (London, 1685)Google Scholar including one intended to be ‘Sung by 4 Men while smoaking their pipes’ (‘Good, good indeed, the herb's good weed’). On Aldrich's musical interests, see below and note 65.

61 Quoted from Bellingham, , op. cit. (56), 45.Google Scholar

62 Bellingham, , op. cit. (56).Google Scholar

63 Wood, , op. cit. (52), iv, col. 498Google Scholar. This is confirmed by Marsh's own account given in his Diary; see Archbishop Marsh Library, Dublin, MS Z2. 2. 3. b, fol. 9.

64 Marsh, N., ‘Essay touching the sympathy between lute or viol strings’, in Plot, R., Natural History of Oxfordshire, Oxford, 1677, 288–99Google Scholar; idem, ‘An introductory essay to the doctrine of sounds, containing some proposals for the improval of acousticks; as it was presented to the Dublin Society Nov. 12 1683’, Philosophical Transactions (1684), 14, 472–88Google Scholar; see also Hoppen, K., The Common Scientist in the Seventeenth Century: A Study of the Dublin Philosophical Society 1683–1708, London, 1970, 33–5, 126–7.Google Scholar

65 For a summary of this material, see Hiscock, W. G., Henry Aldrich of Christ Church, Oxford, 1960, 32–41Google Scholar, and Gouk, , op. cit. (30), 637Google Scholar. For a detailed analysis of Mercator's treatise see Gouk, , ‘Music in the…Early Royal Society’, op. cit. (7), 268–83.Google Scholar

66 The vintner Thomas Wood had a dancing school at his High Street tavern in the early 1650s, while in 1652 his ex-apprentice John Newman set up a rival establishment in Ship Street. Gouk, , op. cit. (30), 631.Google Scholar

67 Holman, P., op. cit. (45), 268–1Google Scholar, and ‘Thomas Baltzar (?1631–1663), the “Incomparable Luciber” on the violin’, Chelys (1984), 13, 3–38.Google Scholar

68 These included four MAs from New College, two from All Souls (including Wood himself), and one from Magdalen College (Thomas Janes).

69 Clark, A. (ed.), The Life and Times of Anthony Wood, Antiquary, of Oxford, 1632–1695, 4 vols., Oxford, 1891–1900, i, 204Google Scholar; quoted in Bellingham, , op. cit. (56), 34.Google Scholar

70 Dewhurst, K., John Locke (1632–1704) Physician and Philosopher, London, 1963, 12.Google Scholar

71 More colleges are represented, with four men from All Souls, two from Wadham, Corpus, Queen's and Christ Church, and one each from Oriel, Lincoln, Brasenose and New College. In 1659 Silas Taylor had a commission as a troop captain in the City of Westminster. Despite his position in the Parliamentarian army, Taylor was friendly with a number of Royalists and musicians (DNB). An accomplished composer and performer himself, Taylor's involvement with the Oxford meeting was probably through his brother Sylvanus, a fellow of All Souls who sang and played viol.

72 Mace, T., Musick's Monument; or a Remembrancer of the Best Practical Musick, both Divine, and Civil, that has ever been Known, to have been in the World, London, 1676, 236Google Scholar. A singing man at Trinity College, Mace was known to Newton (who was one of the subscribers to his book) and was a friend of several Cambridge Platonists. See the article in New Grove, op. cit. (51)Google Scholar, and note 83 below.

73 Holman, , op. cit. (45), 267.Google Scholar

74 For an explanation of these systems, see Lindley, , op. cit. (22)Google Scholar, and also his article on ‘Temperaments’ in New Grove, op. cit. (51).Google Scholar

75 The problems of tuning and temperament were already being addressed by Italian music theorists in the sixteenth cenrury, notably Gioseffo Zarlino and Vincenzo Galilei, Galileo's father. See Palisca, C. V., Humanism in Italian Renaissance Musical Thought, New Haven and London, 1985, 226–79Google Scholar. In the seventeenth century the subject also became of considerable interest to mathematicians and natural philosophers, most notably Marin Mersenne in his Harmonie universelle (Paris, 1636)Google Scholar. See Cohen, , op. cit. (7)Google Scholar, and Walker, , op. cit. (22).Google Scholar

76 On Newton's recognition of this relationship, see Gouk, P. M., ‘Newton and music: from the microcosm to the macrocosm’, International Studies in the Philosophy of Science: The Dubrovnik Papers (1986), 1, 36–59CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and ‘Harmonic roots of Newtonian science’, op. cit. (7).

77 Wallis, J., ‘On the trembling of consonant strings, a new musical discovery’, Philosophical Transactions (1677), 12, 839–42CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Marsh, , ‘Essay on sympathy’, op. cit. (64).Google Scholar

78 According to Wood, , op. cit. (52), ii, col. 366–7Google Scholar, Pigott received his BA in 1675 and MA in 1678 before becoming vicar of Yarnton, Oxfordshire, in 1679; two years later he was admitted to the Royal Society. Apart from his musical interests Pigott was also involved with a group interested in universal language schemes; Salmon, V., The Writings of Francis Lodwick, London, 1972, 8, 19, 92.Google Scholar

79 For example in Mersenne, , op. cit. (75), vol. iii, bk 4, prop. ix. 208–11Google Scholar. See Dostrovsky, , op cit. (7).Google Scholar

80 Robartes, F., ‘A discourse concerning the musical notes of the trumpet, and trumpet marine, and of the defects of the same’, Philosophical Transactions (1692), 17, 559–63Google Scholar; Sauveur, J., ‘Système générale des intervalles des sons’, Memoires de mathématique et de physique, présentés à l'Académie Royal des Sciences (1701), Paris, 1704Google Scholar. For further details, see Dostrovsky, , op. cit. (7), 202–5Google Scholar, and Cannon, J. T. and Dostrovsky, S., The Evolution of Dynamics: Vibration Theory from 1687 to 1742, New York, 1981.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

81 On Rameau's role as the founder of tonal harmonic theory, and its relationship to eighteenth-century science, see the excellent study by Christensen, T., Rameau and Musical Thought in the Enlightenment, Cambridge, 1993.Google Scholar

82 Bennett, J. A., ‘The mechanic's philosophy and the mechanical philosophy’, Notes and Records of the Royal Society (1986), 35, 1–28.Google Scholar

83 After the Interregnum it is possible to demonstrate a similar kind of relationship between public music and public science in London. I have explored these parallels further in ‘A Golden Age of English Music? Augustan London as a Site of Musical Production and Consumption’, paper given at a conference on ‘Clusters of Achievement’: ‘Antwerp, Amsterdam and London in their Golden Ages’, Antwerp, 05 1995.Google Scholar

84 A celebrated instance is provided by Edward, Lord Herbert of Cherbury, who in his Autobiography claims to have learned music ‘that I might entertain myself at home and together refresh my mynde after my studyes to which I was exceedingly inclined’. For the musical education of the North family, see Wilson, , op. cit. (52)Google Scholar; Jessop, A. (ed.), The Lives of the Norths, 3 vols., London, 1890Google Scholar; and also Chan, M. and Kassler, J. C. (eds.), Roger North's Cursory Notes of Musicke (c. 1698-c. 1703), Kensington, NSW, 1986Google Scholar; and Chan, M. and Kassler, J. C. (eds.), Roger North's The Musical Grammarian 1728, Cambridge, 1990.Google Scholar

85 Crossley, J. (ed.), The Diary and Correspondence of John Worthington, Chetham Society Publications 13, Manchester, 1847, 27, 29, 30Google Scholar; Mace, , op. cit. (72), 236.Google Scholar