8 - Music
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 October 2013
Summary
It is no longer a surprise that man, the ape of his Creator, should finally have discovered the art of singing polyphonically, which was unknown to the ancients, namely in order that he might play the everlastingness of all created time in some short part of an hour by means of an artistic concord of many voices and that he might to some extent taste the satisfaction of God the Workman.
Johannes Kepler (1618)The specific conditions of musical development in the Occident involve, first of all, the invention of modern notation. A notation of our kind is of more fundamental importance for the existence of such music as we possess than is orthography for our linguistic art formations.
Max Weber (c. 1911)Music is a physically measurable phenomenon moving through time. It is universal to humanity: the tendency to make music is right there in our nervous systems with our propensity for speech, so it provides material for the assessment of all societies and ages.
If we want to investigate medieval and Renaissance Europeans' sense of time as a part of their perception of reality, we can hardly do better than to examine their music. They, like the ancient Greeks, believed that it was an emanation of the basic structure of reality, even part of that structure. “Without music,” wrote St. Isidore of Seville, the Middle Ages' favorite encyclopedist, “there can be no perfect knowledge, for there is nothing without it. For even the universe is said to have been put together with a certain harmony of sounds, and the very heavens revolve under the guidance of harmony.”
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- The Measure of RealityQuantification in Western Europe, 1250–1600, pp. 139 - 164Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1996