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Gary Tomlinson, Music in Renaissance Magic: Toward a Historiography of Others. Chicago, The University of Chicago Press, 1993. xvi + 291 pp. ISBN 0 226 80791 6.
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Gary Tomlinson, Music in Renaissance Magic: Toward a Historiography of Others. Chicago, The University of Chicago Press, 1993. xvi + 291 pp. ISBN 0 226 80791 6.
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 January 2020
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- Copyright © Royal Musical Association, 1995
References
1 Hans-Georg Gadamer, Wahrheit und Methode (Tübingen, 1960), trans, as Truth and Method, ed. Garrett Barden and John Cumming (New York, 1985); Paul Ricoeur, Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences, ed. and trans. John B. Thompson (Cambridge and Paris, 1981).Google Scholar
2 This system contains various inconsistencies, which Tomlinson does not mention; there were customarily nine muses, but only eight pitches in a diatonic octave, seven planets and four elements; also the Hypomixolydian mode here has no correspondence to ‘musica mundana’ and is deprived of its finalis, as the note d is taken up already by the Dorian mode. See pp. 80ff.Google Scholar
3 To elaborate the metaphor: when we are speaking of magical forces, the ingredients are not physical substances and the effect of a ‘meal’ thereby becomes, more difficult to ascertain. But one would nevertheless like to know from the authors in both fields whether they only write about meals or actually go to the market and into the kitchen to prepare a meal, and what effect the meal has on the host's guests.Google Scholar
4 Tomlinson, p. 94, quoted from Claude V. Palisca, Humanism in Italian Renaissance Musical Thought (New Haven, 1985), 177.Google Scholar
5 See Gafori, Franchino, De harmonia, trans. Clement A. Miller, Musicological Studies and Documents, 33 (n.p., 1977). 204.Google Scholar
6 Gafori, The Theory of Music, trans, with introduction and notes by Walter Kurt Kreyszig, ed. Claude V. Palisca (New Haven, 1993).Google Scholar
7 Daniel P. Walker, ‘Musical Humanism in the 16th and Early 17th Centuries’, The Music Review, 2 (1941), 1–13, 111–21, 220–7, 228–308, and 3 (1942), 55–71 (2, p. 9); repr. in Walker, Music, Spirit and Language in the Renaissance, ed. Penelope Gouk (London, 1985), i, 9.Google Scholar
8 Ficino, Marsilio, Three Books on Life, ed. Carol V. Kaske and John R. Clark (Binghamton, 1989), 357ff.; see also Tomlinson, pp. 88, 113.Google Scholar
9 In this context, Tomlinson's criticism of D. P. Walker's Spiritual and Demonic Magic (London, 1958) cannot withstand scrutiny. Tomlinson writes: ‘The crucial misstep in Walker's interpretation of [Ficino's] De Vita is his assumption of a functional difference between the words and the music of Ficino's song: in Walker's interpretation only words, not music, can convey rational significance’ (p. 101). To start with, it appears odd that in a topic where terms such as ‘spiritus’, ‘ratio’, ‘intellectus’, ‘mens’, etc. each have a complex meaning, Tomlinson should render as ‘rational significance’ what Walker consistently called ‘intellectual content’ (see Walker, pp. 6–7, 21, and also Tomlinson, pp. 101ff.). Later on Tomlinson blurs Walker's terminology further when he speaks of ‘Walker's distinction of meaningful words and nonmeaningful music’ (Tomlinson, p. 105) and ‘Walker's dichotomy of rational words and nonsignifying music’ (p. 113). A ‘functional difference between the words and the music’ does not arise in Walker's interpretation of Ficino, because he clearly says that in Ficino's theory ‘it [music] is not separated from text; it does therefore affect the whole man, mind as well as spirit and body’ (Walker, p. 21). Tomlinson also maintains that ‘Walker overlooked the fact that in Ficino's list not only songs but musical sounds in general and words are ascribed to Apollo’ (Tomlinson, p. 104). This is not the case, as can be seen in Walker's reproduction of Ficino's list (see Walker, p. 15). Similarly, Tomlinson's conclusion that Ficino ‘unequivocally affirms without mention of words music's rational, signifying nature’ is contradicted by the concomitant quotation from Ficino in which he refers to ‘songs’ (‘cantus‘), that is, music with words; see Tomlinson, pp. 114 and 260.Google Scholar
10 See Walker, , Spiritual and Demonic Magic, 19ff.Google Scholar
11 Concerning the similar problem of the reality of Ficino's ecstasies, Michael Allen presents a cautious view: ‘Whether Ficino experienced such mystical flights himself is difficult to ascertain, but he certainly believed in the absoluteness of their reality and in the possibility of a few men truly attaining them during this life for however brief a time. He customarily sought and, according to eyewitness accounts, effectively achieved trancelike, enraptured states during his Orphic lyre recitals, when he intoned Platonic hymns apparently to the sun.’ Michael J. B. Allen, The Platonism of Marsilio Ficino (Berkeley, 1984), 60. Tomlinson quotes this passage in the following forms: ‘He [Ficino] believed, as Michael Allen has said, in the absolute reality of such mystical flights and in the possibility that some people might attain them, however briefly, during their earthly lives; and he may well have experienced such states himself (The Platonism, p. 60)’ (Tomlinson, p. 171). ‘This is the form of poetic furor, we may suggest with Allen, that Ficino experienced in his singing to the Orphic lyre (see The Platonism, p. 60)’ (Tomlinson, p. 173).Google Scholar
12 Ginzburg, Carlo, The Night Battles: Witchcraft and Agrarian Cults in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (London, 1983), xiiiff.Google Scholar
13 Paul Richard Blum, ‘Probleme der Ficino Lektüre’, introduction to Marsilio Ficino, Über die Liebe oder Piatons Gastmahl (Hamburg, 1984), xiv.Google Scholar
14 Tomlinson, p. 12, quoting from Brian Vickers, ‘Analogy versus Identity: The Rejection of Occult Symbolism, 1580–1680’, Occult and Scientific Mentalities in the Renaissance, ed. Vickers (Cambridge, 1984), 95–163 (p. 95).Google Scholar
15 Vickers's text begins: ‘It is my contention that the occult and the experimental scientific traditions can be differentiated in several ways: in terms of goals, methods and assumptions. I do not maintain that they were exclusive opposites or that a Renaissance scientist's allegiance can be settled on an either/or, or yes/no, basis. Rather in many instances, especially in the late 16th and 17th centuries, a spectrum of beliefs and attitudes can be distinguished, a continuum from, say, absolutely magical to absolutely mechanistic poles, along which thinkers place themselves at various points depending on their attitudes to certain key topics. One of these topics, not much discussed so far, is the relationship between language and reality.’ (The passage quoted by Tomlinson follows immediately.) Vickers, ‘Analogy versus Identity’, 95.Google Scholar
16 A seventeenth-century sceptic with a sense of humour, unfortunately lacking in Ficino, called musical cures of tarantism ‘Carnevaletti delle Donne’, since working-class women seemed particularly affected by this illness. See Tomlinson, p. 160.Google Scholar