“Concerning the straunge opinions of the world of
Musicke,” wrote Stephen Batman, in addition to his
famous translation of Bartholomaeus Anglicus in 1582,
“I have thought good... somewhat to speake thereof:
... wheras many cannot away at all with Musick, as
if it were some odious skill ranged from hell,... some
are indifferent,... and some do so far dote in musicke,
without the which they think ther is no religion, that
betweene these unindifferent judgmentes, I am in doubt
... to frame a speech that might qualifie so foule a
discord.” There were, indeed, those who believed, with
the reformer Philip Stubbes, that “sweet Musick, at
the first delighteth the eares, but afterward corrupteth
and depraveth the minde”; others who considered it
“neyther Good nor Evyll” except as it was used for
virtuous or wicked purposes, or who ignored it alto-
gether as beneath the regard of “manly spirits.” But
not a few looked upon music as a reflection of the
divine, a ladder by which man could mount to God,
the Creator of all music: “Even that vulgar and Tavern-
Musicke,” wrote Sir Thomas Browne, in his Religio
medici ([1635], Part II, sec. 9), “which makes one man
merry, another mad, strikes in me a deep fit of devotion
and a profound contemplation of the First Composer.”
Music, to Browne and many another, had in it some-
thing beyond sensuous sound to please the ear—an
essential harmony that appealed even to reason and
that could lead the mind to contemplation or knowl-
edge of other things. Audible music was an image of
higher kinds of harmony, that of the soul and body
of man or of cosmic order, “an Hieroglyphical and
shadowed lesson of the whole World, and creatures of
God.” If the basic principles of music were discovered,
it was said, all things in the universe might be under-
stood. Here was a key to the unchanging laws that
determine the ideal concordance and unity of all that
exists. And here, too, was a “gift of God” to which
man might respond instinctively as well as intellec-
tually with joy and profit.
The immutable properties of music were often said
to derive from mathematical proportions that were to
be found in all creation. They depended, according to
another reasoning, on the inevitable progression of
notes of the scale from low to high, a law to be ob-
served also in the “ordre of astates and degrees” in
the well-ordered commonwealth, where, it was be-
lieved, each class had its destined place: “Take but
degree away, untune that string,/ And, hark! what
discord follows” (Shakespeare, Troilus and Cressida, I.
iii. 109-10). Harmoniousness was frequently defined as
a reconciliation of opposites, a fitting together of
disparate elements, whether in music, universe, the
body politic, or the body of man. A thoughtful person
might learn many practical lessons from music and
from the instruments that make it sound.
From another less analytical viewpoint, music was
thought, also, to possess an inspired virtue, not easily
defined, but revealed in its power to alter man's very
being: there is “nought so stockish, hard, and full of
rage,/ But music for the time doth change his nature”
(Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice, V. i. 81-82).
“Yea, the inarticulate sounds have, in themselves, I
know not what secret power, to move the very affec-
tions of mens soules,” wrote George Wither, in A
Preparation to the Psalter (1619, p. 81). “Some raise
the spirits to that excessive height, as the soule is almost
ravished, and in an extasie.” Through the senses the
soul could be moved or transported.
Conjectures about the universal qualities in music,
their uses and effects, were most widely expressed in
England during the last quarter of the sixteenth century
and early decades of the seventeenth, later than on
the Continent, and at a time when counterforces of
Puritanism and scientific empiricism were already in
play. This period saw a flowering, too, of English
music. It was then that the madrigal reached its peak
(later than in Italy). Instrumental music was develop-
ing; the Anglican church achieved a music of its own
to replace abolished Catholic ritual. Then, too, signifi-
cant changes in musical style were taking place
through the influence of humanist poets and musicians
in France and Italy, who, on the basis of fragmentary
evidence, attempted to restore the music of the early
Greeks.
Speculative writing, however, reveals little interest
in technical aspects of composition or performance that
were the concern of practical musicians. Indeed, in the
process of evolving analogies between perceived music
and that which could only be glimpsed by the
mind—or reading musical qualities into the universe
and universal qualities into music—music made by man
was often all but forgotten, or dismissed as similar but
far inferior to divine harmony. Composers, on the other
hand, while they defended their art as a representation
of world symmetry and proportion or as a symbol of
the divine, made no application, as far as has been
noted, of metaphysical ideas to the music they com-
posed. As had been true in the past, speculative and
practical ideas about music remained two distinct
spheres of thought (Hollander, pp. 22-24, 43, 53).
Speculative ideas of music were more a part of
philosophy and literature than of music as we think
of it today, and in these areas their influence was
profound. They afforded a vast storehouse of poetic
imagery, but even more significantly, they provided
a broad and seemingly indispensable philosophical
hypothesis that was inextricably woven into the fabric
of contemporary belief. Even when not accepted liter-
ally, these ideas about music were found to image
uniquely and aptly Renaissance concepts of harmony
in the universe and of man's relation to it. In an age
when all things, from lowest stone to highest angel,
were believed to be united in a “great chain of being,”
in which motion or defection of one part moved the
whole; when (to change the figure) all levels of exist-
ence—man, his society and government, geocosm and
macrocosm—were thought to function in similar ways,
each level influenced by the others and all, ideally,
operating as a perfect whole, parallels could easily be
found in music. The inevitable order of notes of the
musical scale, the similarity of intervals within consec-
utive octaves, the concordant sounding of different
parts as they were played together, the discord that
followed “when time is broke and no proportion kept,”
all these made music a fitting image of world harmony.
The origins of these ideas are in the remote past, in
classical philosophy, especially Pythagoreanism, in
Egyptian thought, and in early myth and religious
rite—sources different from those used by practical
musicians who were searching for hints of ancient
musical style. Early ideas were adapted by Church
Fathers to Christian theology, restated by medieval
Arabian writers, and synthesized by Neo-Platonists of
the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, chiefly
by Marsilio Ficino (1433-99), to become a significant
part of the Renaissance world view. Of these concepts,
three will be considered here: music as a mathematical
key to universal order, whether in the spheres or on
earth; music as an image of the soul's harmony and
as a bridge between the soul and heaven; and finally,
music as a vehicle of World Spirit.
