Table Of ContentMUSIC AND SCIENCE IN THE AGE OF GALILEO
THE UNIVERSITY OF WESTERN ONTA RIO SERIES
IN PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE
ASERIES OF BOOKS
IN PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE, METHODOLOGY, EPISTEMOLOGY,
LOGIC, HISTORY OF SCIENCE, AND RELATED FJELDS
Managing Editor
ROBERT E. BUTTS
Dept. 0/ Philosophy, University o/Western Ontario, Canada
Editorial Board
JEFFREY BUB, University 0/ Maryland
L. JONATHAN COHEN, Queen' s College, Oxford
WILLIAM DEMOPOULOS, University o/Western Ontario
WILLIAM HARPER, University o/Western Ontario
JAAKKO HINTIKKA, Boston University
CLIFFORDA. HOOKER, University o/Newcastle
HENRY E. KYBURG, JR., University 0/ Rochester
AUSONIO MARRAS, University o/Western Ontario
JÜRGEN MITTELSTRASS, Universität Konstanz
JOHN M. NICHOLAS, University o/Western Ontario
GLENN A. PEARCE, University o/Western Ontario
BAS C. VAN FRAASSEN, Princeton University
VOLUME51
MUSIC AND SCIENCE
IN THE AGE OF GALILEO
Edited by
VICTOR COELHO
Department 01 Music,
The University olCalgary, Alberta, Canada
SPRINGER-SCIENCE+BUSINESS MEDIA. B.V.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Music and sc1ence 1n the age of Gal11eo / ed1ted by V1ctor Coelho.
p. cm. -- (UniVers1ty of Western Ontario ser1es 1n ph11osophy
of science; v. 51)
Includes b1b11ograph1cal references and 1ndex.
ISBN 978-90-481-4218-7 ISBN 978-94-015-8004-5 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-94-015-8004-5
1. Mus1c and sC1ence--Congresses. 2. Music--Phl1osophy and
aesthetics--Congresses. 3. Galilei, Galtleo, 1564-1642--Congresses.
I. Coelho, Vlctor. II. Series.
ML3800.M87 1992
780' .9'032--dc20 92-33288
Printed on acid-free paper
All Rights Reserved
© 1992 by Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht
Originally published by Kluwer Academic Publishers in 1992
Softcover reprint ofthe hardcover Ist edition 1992
No part of the material protected by this copyright notice may be reproduced or
utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical,
including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and
retrieval system, without wrilten permission from the copyright owner.
For Brita
CONTENTS
Preface ix
PART I
Historical, Contemporary, and Celestial Models for the Musical
and Scientific Revolution in the Age of Galileo
Music and Philosophy in Early Modem Seienee
Stillman Drake 3
Beats and the Origins of Early Modem Seienee
H. Floris Cohen 17
Musie and the Crisis of Seventeenth-Century Europe
Alexander Silbiger 35
Kepler, Galilei, and the Harrnony of the World
Owen Gingerich 45
PART 11
Symbolical and Philosophical Perspectives
on Galileo and Music
The Artistie Patronage of the Barberini and the Galileo Affair
Frederick Hammond 67
Musical Myth and Galilean Seienee in Giovanni Serodine's
Allegoria della scienza
Victor Coelho 91
Tiekles, Titillations, and the WondeIful Aeeidents of Sounds:
Galileo and the Consonanees
Robert E. Butts 115
Galileo and the Demise of Pythagoreanism
William Jordan 129
viii MUSIC AND SCIENCE IN TIIE AGE OF GALILEO
PARTIII
The Musical Background of Seventeenth-Century
Science: Theory, Practice, and Craftsmanship
Was Galileo's Father an Experimental Scientist?
Claude V. Palisca 143
Vincenzo Galilei in Rome: His First Book of Lute Music (1563)
and its Cultural Context
Howard Mayer Brown 153
Six Seventeenth-Century Dutch Scientists and their Knowledge of Music
Rudolf A. Rasch 185
In Tune with the Universe: The Physics and Metaphysics of Galileo's Lute
Robert Lundberg 211
Contributors 241
Index 243
PREFACE
Chiamavi 'I cielo e 'ntomo vi si gira,
mostrandovi le sue bellezze etterne,
e l' occhio vostro pur a terra mim;
Dante, PurgaJorio (Canto XIV, 148-50)
ONE
OF THE MOST PROMISING TRENDS of recent years has been the seri
ous attention paid to the relationship between music and science during the
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. At that time, of course, these two
branches of study grew from the same trunk of leaming, and investigations
into musical science confronted not only speculative questions about the
composition of the heavens and their affinities with the soul, but practical
issues such as tuning and temperament, musical composition, and instru
ment building. Since musical sound is a quality of both measurable and
qualitative dimensions, speculations about the nature and beauty of sound
brewed in unusually diverse sectors of intellectual thought of early modem
Europe, from alchemy and neo-Platonism, to astronomy and empirical
science. As Paolo Gozza has written recently, the relationship between
science and music represents a classic paradox: music, "the most spon
taneous expression of the active psyche, admits and even requires, at the
same time, the most rigorous mathematical analysis."1
To probe the relationship between music and science is also, however,
to nurture the often-unpredictable collaboration between the fields of science
and music. It was with that goal in mind that the present volume of essays
was conceived. The bulk of the articles that appear in this collection were
presented in April, 1989, at an international conference entitled "Music and
Science in the Age of Galileo," organized by the departments of Music and
of Mechanical Engineering at the U niversity of Calgary in Calgary, Alberta,
Canada.2 This symposium brought together, perhaps for the first time in
recent history, many of the world's specialists in music and science from
the areas of astronomy, his tory of science, musicology, composition,
1 Paolo Gozza, ed., La musica nella rivoluzione scientifica dei seicento (Bologna, 1989), edi
tor's introduction, p. 9.
2 Four papers from the original conference do not appear in this volume. These are: Paolo
Gozza, "Pietro Mengoli's Speculative Music (1670): A 'Mental Ear' in the Galilean School";
Maria Rika Maniates, "The Brickbats of Ercole Bottrigari"; Clifford Truesdell, "Musical
Acoustics from the Beginnings through the Achievements of Galileo"; Anthony Rooley, "11
Cantar Novo: Experimental Music in ltaly, 1560-1630." The article by Victor Coelho was not
presented at the conference and is an addition to this volume.
ix
x MUSIC AND SCIENCE IN THE AGE OF GALllEO
instrument building, and philosophy. In short, the essential components of
Galileo's intellectual character were represented. The tide Music and Science
(rather than Musical Science) was chosen to accommodate perspectives on
the topic and period that had not yet been considered, as weH as to entertain
autonomous work and methods that may not have foHowed in the tracks of
previous work in the field.
This last consideration is an important one to keep in mind, given the
different methodologies used by historians of science and historians of
music. Musicologists have for the most part constructed their histories of
this period through source studies. The primary documents are musical
compositions, which require analysis within the stylistic parameters
established by the theoretical writings of the period. The musical culture and
historical context surrounding the composition can then be fleshed out
through documentary evidence, archival material and printed documents, as
weH as by tracing manuscript transmission, concordances, and printing
histories. In tracing a musical style, in other words, emphasis is placed on
what the culture says about itself, derived as much as possible from primary
source material. In addition, musicologists have generaHy heeded
KristeHer's words to historians that the "claim that only certain aspects of
our civilization and its history are basic and worthy of investigation is
wrong and must be rejected." Musicologists have given extensive treatment
to anonymous works, so-called "minor" composers, and local traditions. It
is necessary to point out, however, that such studies must proceed without
much information provided by the composers themselves. Composers said
virtually nothing about how they wrote, what their compositional process
entailed, and what the subtexts are, if any, of their music. Compounding the
matter is thedifficulty of dating, and it is not unusual for musicologists to
devote an entire lifetime towards establishing a reliable chronology of a
composer's works-a task that must be considered a necessary precondition
for any serious work on matters of style and evolution. Consequently, it has
been difficult to find a consensus among musicologists as to exacdy where
stylistic revolutions occured, what composers themselves perceived about
these changes, and where their exact roots are to be found. In recent years,
due almost singlehandedly to Claude Palisca's work on Vincenzo Galilei,3
the field of music history has taken major steps forward towards
understanding how the Scientific Revolution can also be traced within the
context of music history.
3 See for example, Palisca's "Three Scientific Essays by Vincenzo Galilei," in The Florentine
Camerata: Documentary Studies and Translations (New Havcn & London, 1989), pp. 152-207.
PREFACE xi
The idea of a Scientific Revolution in the history of science is, on the
other hand, fairly weH established. The tradition derived from Butterfieid
and, more recently, Kuhn and Westfali, has given the field adefinite shape,
as well as a momentum.4 Based on the voluminous preserved writings of
ancient and modern natural philosophers, mathematicians, astronomers, and
a1chemists, the theory of the scientific revolution has received numerous
formulations, reformulations, and reappraisals in the history of science.
Such formulations were bound to leave "lesser figures" unstudied, how
ever, and archival work, particularly as it could relate to the important field
of scientific patronage, was conspicuously absent. On the other hand,
historians of science clearly acknowledged the contribution of the unwritten
craft tradition, and many historians of science have dug up the roots of the
scientific revolution in the craftsman' s field. (The contribution of instrument
makers--certainly, the "craftsmen" of music-is a history that cries out to
be recognized in musicology.)
Although the real growth in the area of musical science has been quite
recent, some fertile seeds were planted years ago by the late D. P. Walker,
the mechanicist Clifford Truesdell, as well as by members of the slightly
older generation of musical scientists.5 Both Stillman Drake and Alistair
Crombie found important connections between Galileo's methods and
music, and they argued in several essays for a deeper exploration of these
relationships.6 (Crombie's articles on Mersenne as an experimentalist and
on music and medical science are also important studies, though they are
relatively unknown to musicologists.)7 But it has only been in the last
decade or so that research in musical science has occupied a distinct area in
the field of history of science; nevertheless, the work produced so far by
Cohen, Gouk, Gozza, and Kassler is of an impressively high standard. 8
4 Many of the views presented here are indebted to the introduction by Robert S. Westman and
David C. Lindberg in Reappraisals o[ the Scientific Revolution, ed. R. S. Westman & D. C.
Lindberg (Cambridge, 1990), pp. xvii-xxvii.
5 D. P. Walker's articles are contained in Studies in Musical Science in the Late Renaissance
(London & Leiden, 1978). The main work on vibration theory by Truesdell is in The Rational
Mechanics o[ Flexible or Elastic Bodies, 1638-1788, in Leonhardi Euleri Opera Omnia, vol. 11
(Zurich, 1960).
6 See Stilhnan Drake, "Renaissance Music and Experimental Science," Journal o[the History o[
1deas 31 (1970), pp. 483-500 and "The Role of Music in Galileo's Experiments," Scienti[ic
American 232 (January-June, 1975), pp. 98-104.
7 Crombie's articles on music have been anthologized in his Science, Optics and Music in Me
dieval and Early Modern Thought (London, 1990).
8 See, for example, H. F. Cohen, Quantifying Music: The Science o[ Music at the First Stage o[
the Scientific Revolution (Dordrecht, 1984); Paolo Gozza, "La musica nella filosofia naturale
dei seicento in Italia," Nuncius 1 (1986), pp. 13-47; Penelope Gouk, "Music in the Natural
Philosophy of the Early Royal Society (Ph. D diss., London, The Warburg Institute, 1982);
