The role of harmonics in the scientific revolution

doi:10.1017/CHOL9780521623711.010

8 - The role of harmonics in the scientific revolution

from PART II - SPECULATIVE TRADITIONS

Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 March 2008

Penelope Gouk

Edited by

Thomas Christensen

Show author details

Thomas Christensen: Affiliation:
University of Chicago

Book contents

Get access

Summary

This chapter aims to highlight the influential role that harmonics played in the “scientific revolution,” which historians of science see taking place in Western thinking between the sixteenth and early eighteenth centuries. Between the publication of Nicolaus Copernicus’s De revolutionibus in 1543 and Isaac Newton’s Principia mathematica in 1687, a profound transformation took place in understanding about the laws governing the universe and man’s place within it. Why harmonics should have been relevant to this process may require some explanation, especially since music itself is now classified among the arts rather than the sciences, and harmonics is no longer recognised as a viable scientific discipline.

In its narrowest sense, harmonics has been understood since the Greeks as the study of the mathematical relations (harmonia) underlying the structure of audible music. This branch of mathematics was also known as “canonics,” a term recalling Euclid’s Sectio canonis (fourth to third century BCE), in which the propositions of harmonics are demonstrated as mathematical theorems. Greek harmonic writings which focused on musical organization and structure characteristically fell into one of two categories, following respectively the “Pythagorean” and the “Aristoxenian” schools of thought. There was a traditional component of physical explanations for these mathematical relationships (e.g., the weights of Pythagoras’s hammers), but this was only put on a sound experimental footing in the seventeenth century, by which time the field had been redefined as acoustics.

Type: Chapter
Information: The Cambridge History of Western Music Theory , pp. 223 - 245

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CHOL9780521623711.010 [Opens in a new window]

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Print publication year: 2002

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

Agrippa, H. C.Three Books of Occult Philosophy, trans. French, J., London, G. Moule, 1651Google Scholar

Amman, P. J. “The Music Theory and Philosophy of Robert Fludd,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 30 (1967)Google Scholar

Barker, A.Greek Musical Writings, 2 vols., Cambridge University Press, 1984–89Google Scholar

Boccadoro, B. “Marsilio Ficino: The Soul and the Body of Counterpoint,” in Number to Sound, ed. Gozza, P., Dordrecht, Kluwer, 2000Google Scholar

Boethius, A. M. S.Fundamentals of Music, trans. Bower, C., ed. Palisca, C., New Haven, Yale University Press, 1989Google Scholar

Cannon, J. T. and Dostrovsky, S., The Evolution of Dynamics: Vibration Theory from 1687 to 1742, New York, Springer, 1981CrossRef Google Scholar

Carapetyan, A. “Music and Medicine in the Renaissance and in the 17th and 18th Centuries,” in Music and Medicine, ed. Schullian, D. M. and Schoen, M., New York, H. Schuman, 1948Google Scholar

Carpenter, N. C.Music in the Medieval and Renaissance Universities, Norman, University of Oklahoma Press, 1958Google Scholar

Christensen, T.Rameau and Musical Thought in the Enlightenment, Cambridge University Press, 1993Google Scholar

Cohen, A.Music in the French Royal Academy of Sciences: A Study in the Evolution of Musical Thought, Princeton University Press, 1981Google Scholar

Cohen, H. F.Quantifying Music: The Science of Music at the First Stage of the Scientific Revolution, 1580–1650, Dordrecht, D. Reidel, 1984CrossRef Google Scholar

Dear, P. R.Mersenne and the Language of the Schools, Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 1988Google Scholar

Ficino, M.Three Books on Life, ed. and trans. Kaske, C. and Clark, J., Binghamton, Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1989Google Scholar

Fludd, R., Utriusque cosmi majoris scilicet et minoris metaphysica, physica atque technica historia, 2 vols. Oppenheim, J. T. De Bry, 1617–21Google Scholar

Gaffurio, F.Theorica musice, Milan, P.Mantegatius, 1492; facs. New York, Broude, 1967 and Bologna, Forni, 1969Google Scholar

Gingerich, O. “Kepler, Galilei, and the Harmony of the World,” in Music and Science in the Age of Galileo, ed. Coelho, V., Dordrecht, Kluwer, 1992Google Scholar

Godwin, J.Athanasius Kircher: A Renaissance Man and the Quest for Lost Knowledge, London, Thames and Hudson, 1979Google Scholar

Godwin, J.Harmonies of Heaven and Earth: The Spiritual Dimension of Music from Antiquity to the Avantgarde, London, Thames and Hudson, 1987Google Scholar

Godwin, J.Music and the Occult: French Musical Philosophies, 1750–1950, New York, University of Rochester Press, 1995Google Scholar

Godwin, J.Robert Fludd: Hermetic Philosopher and Surveyor of Two Worlds, London, Thames and Hudson, 1979Google Scholar

Gouk, P. M. “Music, Melancholy and Medical Spirits in Early Modern Thought,” In Music as Medicine, ed. Horden, P., Aldershot, Ashgate, 2000Google Scholar

Gouk, P. M.Music, Science and Natural Magic in Seventeenth-Century England, New Haven, Yale University Press, 1999Google Scholar

Gozza, P., ed., Number to Sound: the Musical Way to the Scientific Revolution, Dordrecht, Kluwer, 2000CrossRef Google Scholar

Henry, J. “Newton, Matter and Magic,” in Let Newton Be! A New Perspective on His Life and Works, ed. Fauvel, J. et al., Oxford University Press, 1988Google Scholar

Henry, J.The Scientific Revolution and the Origins of Modern Science, Houndsmills and London, Macmillan Press, 1997CrossRef Google Scholar

Hollander, J.The Untuning of the Sky: Ideas of Music in English Poetry 1500–1700, Princeton University Press, 1961Google Scholar

Isherwood, R. M.Music in the Service of the King: France in the Seventeenth Century, Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 1973Google Scholar

Kassler, J. C. “Music as a Model in Early Science,” History of Science 20 (1982)CrossRef Google Scholar

Kassler, J. C.Inner Music: Hobbes, Hooke and North on Internal Character, London, Athlone Press, 1995Google Scholar

Kepler, J.Harmonices mundi libri V, Linz, G.Tampachius, 1619; facs. Bologna, Forni, 1969CrossRef Google Scholar

Kircher, A.Musurgia universalis, sive ars magna consoni et dissoni, 2 vols., Rome, F. Corbelletti, 1650Google Scholar

Mersenne, M.Harmonie universelle, Paris, S. Cramoisy, 1636–37; facs. Paris, Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, 1963 and 1986Google Scholar

Moran, B. T.The Alchemical World of the German Court: Occult Philosophy and Chemical Medicine in the Circle of Moritz of Hessen, 1572–1632, Stuttgart, H. Steiner, 1991Google Scholar PubMed

Newton, I.Isaac Newton’s “Philosophiae naturalis principia mathematica”: The Third Edition (1726) With Variant Readings, ed. Koyré, A. and Cohen, I. B., 2 vols., Cambridge University Press, 1972Google Scholar

Newton, I.Opticks, London, n.p., 1704Google Scholar

Palisca, C. V. “Moving the Affections through Music: Pre-Cartesian Psycho-Physiological Theories,” in Number to Sound, ed. Gozza, P., Dordrecht, Kluwer, 2000Google Scholar

Palisca, C. V. “Scientific Empiricism in Musical Thought,” in Seventeenth-Century Science and the Arts, ed. Rhys, H. H., Princeton University Press, 1961Google Scholar

Palisca, C. V.Humanism in Italian Renaissance Musical Thought, New Haven, Yale University Press, 1985Google Scholar

Stephenson, B.The Music of the Heavens: Kepler’s Harmonic Astronomy, Princeton University Press, 1994CrossRef Google Scholar

Tomlinson, G.Music in Renaissance Magic: Toward a Historiography of Others, University of Chicago Press, 1993Google Scholar

Vickers, B., ed., Occult and Scientific Mentalities in the Renaissance, Cambridge University Press, 1984CrossRef Google Scholar

Voss, A. “Marsilio Ficino, the Second Orpheus,” in Music as Medicine, ed. Horden, P., Aldershot, Ashgate, 2000Google Scholar

trans. Kreyzig, W., ed. Palisca, C. as The Theory of Music, New Haven, Yale University Press, 1993Google Scholar

Walker, D. P. “Kepler’s Celestial Music,” in Studies in Musical Science in the Late Renaissance, ed. Walker, D. P., London, Brill, , 1978Google Scholar

Walker, D. P. “Medical Spirits in Philosophy and Theology from Ficino to Newton,” in Arts du spectacle et histoire des ideés, Tours, Centre d’Etudes Supérieures de la Renaissance, 1984Google Scholar

Walker, D. P.Music, Spirit and Language in the Renaissance, London, Variorum, 1985Google Scholar

Walker, D. P.Spiritual and Demonic Magic from Ficino to Campanella, London, Warburg Institute, 1958Google Scholar

Walker, D. P.The Ancient Theology: Studies in Christian Platonism from the Fifteenth to the Eighteenth Century, London, Duckworth, 1972Google Scholar

Westman, R. S. “Nature, Art, and Psyche: Jung, Pauli, and the Kepler-Fludd Polemic,” in Occult and Scientific Mentalities in the Renaissance, ed. Vickers, B., Cambridge University Press, 1984Google Scholar

Yates, F. A.The French Academies of the Sixteenth Century, London, Warburg Institute, 1947Google Scholar

Zarlino, G.Le istitutioni harmonicheVenice, Franceschi, 1558; facs. New York, Broude, 1965Google Scholar

Book contents

8 - The role of harmonics in the scientific revolution

Summary

Access options

References

Save book to Kindle

Save book to Dropbox

Save book to Google Drive