MUSIC AND SCIENCE IN THE AGE OF GALILEO

THE UNIVERSITY OF WESTERN ONTARIO 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);
xii Musrc AND SCIENCE IN THE AOE OF GALll.EO

As the 350th anniversary of the death of Galileo approaches, we may

pause to ask where, then, does one go from here? Clearly, more channels
must open up between the fields of music history, philosophy of science,
and history of science. Just as clearly, it is important that these channels
stimulate further work in this field on a broad historical level. One would
hope for a greater musicological, organological, and philosophical
orientation to complement the already strong base the subject holds in the
history of science. Moreover, if recent trends in the history of science are
any indication, we can look forward to a reconsideration of the role of
emblematics and herrnetics in music and science. In a review published in
1980, Jamie Kassler observed that "the grasp of musical science is made
difficult by the absence of any definitive history of the subject."9 The
present volume, far from answering that specific need, does, however,
entertain a varied dialogue that can help move towards that end, and it
reaches out in many of the directions I have outlined above.

The seemingly interminable process of transforming a large conference

report into a thematically-unified book incurs many debts of gratitude. Of
those friends and associates who contributed to this project, I am most
grateful to Marcelo Epstein, my co-organizer, friend, musical partner, and
secular guru, whose humanistic vision of the arts and sciences has offered
me an advantageous sight-line to mathematics and science. He has also
patiently explained many scientific concepts to me without laughing (too
much) at my ignorance of them. I am also grateful to Brita for her occhio
d' aquila in the course of reading and re-reading many parts of the text.
Support for the conference was generously provided by The Social
Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, The Special Projects
Fund of the Board of Governors, The University of Calgary Conference
Grants, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, and the departments of
Music and of Mechanical Engineering at The University of Calgary.
Finally, I wish to thank Robert Butts for recommending this volume
for publication in The University o/Western Ontario Philosophy 0/ Science
series, and Annie Kuipers for her patience and support throughout.
VC
Banff,l992

Jamie Kassler, The Science o[ Music in Britain, 1714-1830: A Catalogue o[ Writings, Lectures
& Inventions, 2 vols (New York, 1979).
9 Review of D. P. Walker, Studies in Musical Science in the Late Renaissance, in Archives
Internationales d' histoire des sciences 29-30 (1979-80), p. 219.
 PART I:
Historieal, Contemporary, and
Celestial Models for the Musical and
Scientific Revolution in the Age
ofGalileo
 STILLMAN DRAKE

MUS1C AND PHILOSOPHY IN EARLY MODERN SCIENCE

T HOSE ACQUAINTED WITH MY WRITINGS MAY BE SURPRISED that I have

included philosophy in the title of this article, since I have neglected it in the
past. That was because I preferred to leave philosophical analyses of the
work of Galileo, and of the science of his time, to colleagues who regard
philosophy as the very basis of the Scientific Revolution of the seventeenth
century. 1t is widely held that all roots of that event are to be found in the
writings of ancient and of medieval natural philosophers.
The present volume makes it advisable for me to say why I dissent.
From antiquity until the Scientific Revolution, science remained only one
branch of philosophy, defined by Aristotle as the understanding of natural
phenomena in terms of causes hidden from our senses. Greek philosophers
had be gun that enterprise earlier, in ways examined critically by Aristotle
before he coined the word "physics" to designate the science of nature. He
later investigated its principles in a book he called "first philosophy," but
which was renamed "metaphysics" by his later editors. Aristotle's books on
physics, on the heavens, and on meteorology constituted the essential basis
of all natural philosophy throughout the Middle Ages, and until nearly the
end of the Renaissance.
From the very beginnings of universities, mainly in the twelfth and
thirteenth centuries, Aristotelian natural philosophy dominated all education
in science. Astronomy was usually taught by professors of mathematics,
rather than by natural philosophers, probably because Aristotle's book on
the heavens, De caelo, dealt not with astronomy but only with cosmology.
Whether astronomy was a science under Aristotle's definition is question-
able, for about 150 B.e. the Greek astronomer Hipparchus showed that the
earth cannot be at the exact center of the sun' s apparent motion, as required
by all cosmologists, Aristotelians and Platonists alike. A compromise, at-
tributed to Geminus, was soon reached by which astronomers would refrain
from considering causes of celestial motions, contenting themselves with
framing mathematical hypotheses in accord with the measurements and
leaving causal explanations to philosophers. The compromise went unchal-
lenged until the Copernican revolution. 1

1 Details are given in my "Hipparchus-Geminus-Galileo," Sludies in lhe Hislory and Phi-

losophy of Science 20 (1989), pp. 47-56.
3
V. Coelho (ed.), Music and Science in the Age ofGalileo, 3-16.
© 1992 Kluwer Academic Publishers.
4 STll1.MAN DRAKE

Astronomy without causal explanations was philosophically a merely

practical discipline; it was not, strictly speaking, a science at al1. While rec-
ognizing the existence of knowledge gained through practice, Aristotle
explicitly exc1uded it from truly scientific understanding, or hpisteme. For
practical knowledge he reserved the distinguishing name, tekne. Astro-
nomical knowledge among the Greeks at the time of Aristotle was pitifully
meager. But by the time of Hipparchus it had been enlarged by records of
Babylonian observations extending back some four centuries or more.
Greek astronomers systematized those records, putting themselves in a po-
sition to challenge old cosmological speculations, on the solid ground of
careful measurements. That tbreat to philosophers was nipped in the bud by
the compromise of Geminus; and thus the first of sciences in the modern
sense was expelled from the domain of true science as defmed by Aristotle.
But beginning from the time of Kepler and Galileo, physics and as-
tronomy soon became a single unified science in the modem sense of the
word, while the ancient philosophical separation of physics from useful
knowledge vanished from the scientific scene. Hence, to look for roots of
modem science in natural philosophy before the Copemican period is
semantically an idle enterprise, the meaning of the word "science" being dif-
ferent before and after the seventeenth century. Yet roots of Galileo's
physics did exist; those are to be found not in past philosophy but in the
practices of musicians of his own time, just as roots of Kepler's cosmology
are to be found in music theory. The exploration of musical roots of the
Scientific Revolution, hitherto relatively neglected, falls naturally within the
province of the present collection of essays.
Of course, natural philosophy by no means ceased to dominate science
in the universities, which were conservative institutions from the very be-
ginning. Even outside the universities, where most of the action took pi ace
in the Scientific Revolution, a kind of counter-revolution was led by Rene
Descartes. He offered a new natural philosophy to replace that of Aristotle,
and at the same time to remedy a serious defect in Galileo's physics, as
Descartes saw it, because it neglected causal explanations. Writing about
Galileo's new science of motion, Descartes held that to be built without
foundations, because it did not start from the cause ofmotion. 2 That opin-
ion would have been endorsed by every previous philosopher, but it hardly
reflects the spirit of science in the age of Galileo, which immediately pre-
ceded that of Descartes.

2 Letter from Descartes to Marin Mersenne, 11 October 1638. Translated in Stillman Drake,
GaJileo at Work (Chicago, 1978), pp. 387-88.
 MUSIC AND PHILosoPHY IN EARLY MODERN SCIENCE 5

Music, in sharp contrast with philosophy, not only reflected the spirit
of Galileo's science, but it had made possible the rise of his new physics.
Later I shall explain how, in some detail, because the story is still not
widely known. But during the age of Galileo there was not a single aca-
demic professor of philosophy who published in support of his new
science, whereas a dozen or more of them published books against it.
Because of that fact, it is curlous that historians of science now debate
whether Galileo was inspired by the philosophy of Aristotle or by that of
Plato, and argue as if he had owed little or nothing to music, or to any other
activity than the reading of books by previous philosophers. The historical
fact requiring explanation is not which philosophy anticipated Galileo's
sciences, if any did, butwhy philosophers of his time opposed the rise of
modem science. The answer lies in knowing how Galileo discovered some
laws of physics, and who if any, did not oppose the rise of modem science
but welcomed it.
Like Galileo, Johannes Kepler, who founded modem astronomy, re-
ceived no support from any recognized philosopher of his time, which
coincided very nearly with the age ofGalileo. And though (unlike Galileo)
Kepler was not born into a family of musicians, he was unusually weH in-
formed in the classieal theories of musie as those bore on pure mathematics.
Kepler became an enthusiast for possible applications of harmonie theory to
the Copemiean astronomy. His very first book embodied a scheme of the
celestial spheres circumscribed around the five Platonic solids, nested in a
certain order around the central Sun.3 His later revolutionary discovery that
planetary orbits are not circular, but elliptical, marking the veritable begin-
ning of modem astronomy, failed to dim Kepler's earlier enthusiasm. He
saw elliptical orbits as relieving the music of the spheres from dull mono-
tony. Ellipses produced scale passages and chords to replace the sustained
tones that would inevitably result from perfectly circular motions.
That Kepler's debt to music in science was different in kind from that
of Galileo resulted from the fact that it stemmed from theories of music, and
Galileo's came from musical practice. That best shows why, in my opinion,
the birth of modem science cannot be fully explained without considering
the role of music in it. One conspieuous difference between natural philoso-
phy and modem science is that modem science embraces both theory and
practice. Pre-modem science had been definitively separated from practiee,
as from any utilitarian aspirations, by Aristotle hirnself. The origin of mod-
em science can therefore not be adequately explained without taking into

3 Johannes Kepler, Mysterium Cosmographicum (Tübingen, 1596), Irans. A. M. Dunean as

Mysterium Cosmographicum: Secret o[ the Universe (New York, 1981), esp. pp. 85-105.
6 STILLMAN DRAKE

account disciplines like music, in which both theory and practice existed
side by side, as was also the case in medicine and in architecture. All three
fields contributed to the rise of modern science, welcomed by musicians,
doctors, and engineers.
Although Kepler was indebted to music for his cosmological schemes,
he was hardly less deeply influenced by philosophy, and particularly by the
Platonism which conferred on mathematics the highest rank of all among the
sciences. Galileo differed. That is hardly surprising when we recall that
Galileo's contributions to astronomy were chiefly observational, whereas
Kepler's were entirely theoretical. Observation does not require a philoso-
phy, as theorizing does. Theoreticians c1assified music as one branch of
mathematics, rooted in arithmetic. In c1assical Greek mathematics there ex-
ists an unbridgeable gulf between arithmetic, wh ich involves only the
discrete, and geometry, which involves also continuous magnitudes.
Astronomy being the branch of pure mathematics that in c1assical times be-
longed with geometry, Kepler's linkage of it through music with arithmetic
contradicted the ancient separation between that and geometry.
Like musical practice, observation al astronomy was hampered by an
ancient tradition-that the heavens, being perfect, could have no motions
that were not perfecdy circular motions, and that celestial bodies must like-
wise be perfect1y spherical in shape. In 1609 Kepler published his
discovery that planetary orbits are elliptical, and the next year Galileo
announced his new telescopic discoveries. Discovery of mountains and
craters on the moon met with more open hostility from philosophers than
even the finding of new planets, as Galileo called Jupiter's satellites. After
the two-pronged attack of 1609-10 by Kepler and Galileo, the ancient
worldview was doomed to collapse, though not without a struggle.
While Galileo was completing his final book, a monumental treatise on
music which incorporated critical discussions of the newly emerging
physics was just being published at Paris-Marin Mersenne's Harmonie
Universelle. In that treatise, and in his later works, Mersenne did more to
propagate emerging new sciences of acoustics, pneumatics, and ballistics
than anyone else of his time, though he is remembered mainly as a musical
theorist. Indeed, Mersenne's own original contributions to science were
modest. It was chiefly as spokesman and translator of Galileo in France,
and as friend and loyal supporter of Descartes, that Mersenne furthered the
spread of modern sciences, not only through books, but through his volu-
minous correspondence with savants all over Europe. Lacking the flair for
mathematics shared by Stevin, Kepler, Galileo, Descartes and Huygens,
Mersenne instead brought to the advancement of physical sciences a flair of
 Musrc AND PHrLOSOPHY IN EARLY MODERN SCIENCE 7

his own. He was, above all, a tireless and resourceful experimentalist, at

first in the field of musical acoustics and subsequently in physics, aleader
in the early days of modem experimental measurements. Skill in the design
and conduct of experiments was replacing speculative philosophy as a guar-
antee of correct analyses of nature. The Dutch engineer Simon Stevin was
first to test G. B. Benedetti's proposition that speeds in fall are not gov-
emed by the weights of the falling bodies.4 Stevin's tests, from a height of
thirty feet, were conducted in 1585-86 and published in Dutch four years
before equal speeds in fall were exhibited by Galileo from the Leaning
Tower of Pisa.
It is an illuminating fact about the state of physics in the latter half of
the sixteenth century that neither Benedetti, who first published his demon-
stration of equal speeds in fall in 1553, nor any of his supporters or
adversaries in this matter over the next three decades, appears to have put
his innovative conclusion to actual test, wh ich was an easy and seemingly
obvious thing to do. The question was put to nature not by the challenged
Aristotelian natural philosophers, but by the mathematical physicist Stevin.
Galileo, then a young man who had just completed his years as a student at
the University of Pisa, was probably still unaware of Benedetti's proposi-
tion. He had reached the same conclusion from the same book that had
inspired Benedetti long before, a work on raising sunken ships by the
mathematician Niccolo Tartaglia, first printed at Venice in 1551. Tartaglia
had published in 1537 a book titled Nova scientia, though innovation in
science had always been reprehensible in the view of orthodox natural
philosophers.
Mersenne took up experiments described by Galileo and added obser-
vations and measurements of his own. Actual measurements of motion had
no place in Aristotelian natural philosophy, since they could not reveal hid-
den causes behind the phenomena. Stilliess could careful measurement
have had any place in the philosophy of Plato, who forbade careful attention
to sensible phenomena as a potentially misleading distraction from the
archetyp al world that he believed superior to the changing world of sensible
experience. Archetypes became the favored study of Kepler, while Galileo
used that word only once, in a letter written in 1633, to reject them. 5 Like
Kepler, Mersenne had a lifelong interest in philosophy, hoping by that to
explain the source of truth in science. Unlike Kepler, however, Mersenne

4 Benedetti's proposition is translated in 1. E. Drabkin and Stillman Drake, Mechanics in

Sixteenth-Century ltaly (Madison, 1960), pp_ 147-53, as it first appeared in Venice in 1533.
5 Translated in Stillman Drake, "A Neg1ected Galilean Letter," Journal o/the History 0/ Astro-
nomy 17 (1987), pp. 93-105.
8 STILLMAN DRAKE

was less impressed by speculations of ancient philosophers than he was by

some novel ideas of his own contemporaries, especially those of Descartes,
with whom he often corresponded on matters conceming science and phi-
losophy.
Stevin's manuscript treatise on music was the first European work to
venture the bold conclusion, against tradition as old as the ancient
Pythagoreans, that exactly equalized tuning is possible but requires use of
the 12th root of 2. 6 1t is said that Stevin had been anticipated in this by a
Chinese, though it is left unexplained why an equal division of the twelve-
note scale should have been of interest to any sixteenth-century Oriental
musician. Certainly the sixteenth-century algebraic concept of roots higher
than the cube, and actual techniques for determining 12th roots to any
needed degree of approximation, were Stevin's own contributions to math-
ematics, along with the decimal fractions required for their expression.7 Of
even greater fundamental importance was Stevin's title for the fIrst chapter
of his L' Arithmetique, published in 1585. There he stated that one is a
number, contradicting the defInition of number by Euclid as "multitude of
units." The unit itself could not be a number under that definition, though
Stevin did not offer a new defInition of number to replace it.
The supposed irreconcilability of any discrete and countable quantities
with an continuous and infinitely divisible magnitudes and their ratios was,
of course, theoretical, and of no practical concern. That is why this tradition
holds the key to the musical dispute between Vincenzo Galilei and Gioseffo
Zarlino, a quarrel anticipated in Greek antiquity by the position of
Aristoxenus in opposition to classical arithmetical musical theory. No matter
what the mathematicians said, the ear of a musician can accurately divide
musical intervals in ratios that cannot be expressed in terms only of the
numbers by which things are in fact counted. The practical inadequacy of
arithmetic alone was also the key to the new science of motion created by
Galileo. For that reason I have stressed this close relation between the dead
hand of theory that held back certain developments in music until the age of
Galileo's father and that which delayed the birth ofmodem physical science
until the age of Galileo.
Stevin, along with Nicolo Tartaglia, Benedetti, and Galileo, was a
principal founder of modem hydrostatics and of theoretical as wen as

6 "On the Theory of the Art of Singing," trans. A. D. Fokker in The Principal Works 0/ Simon
Stevin, ed. E.J. Dijksterhuis, vol. 5 (Amsterdam, 1966), pp. 422-64.
7 Stevin's original contributions to mathematics, both pure and applied, are less known but no
less important 10 science than the analytical geometry of Descartes. It was Stevin who in 1585
fIrst narrowed the c1assical gulf between the discrete and the continuous in mathematics by his
invention of decimal fractions.
 MUSIC AND PHILoSOPHY IN EARLY MODERN SCIENCE 9

practical mechanics. Had it not been for his publishing chiefly in Dutch,
Stevin would doubtless have become much more widely known as a pi-
oneer modern scientist than is presently the case. Curiously enough, Stevin
took the position that Dutch was the only language fully suited to the science
of nature, 8 because it allowed the coining of new words whose precise
meanings would be clear at once to others. In his treatise on music, it was to
lack of the Dutch language that Stevin ascribed the failure of all ancient
Greek writers to arrive at a fully correct musical theory. But Stevin hirnself
had also a preconception-that all mathematics must in principle be
ultimately reducible to the numbers that are used in counting, assumed by
Arabs who garbled in translation the Euclidean general theory of proportion
for continuous magnitudes.
Whether mathematics is in fact so reducible is completely irrelevant to
the practice of music, and to useful science, though until the age of Galileo
that was not perceived. Even today this preconception tends to cloak the
refutation of medieval impetus theory that was brought about by Galileo's
mathematical physics. His new physics owed its origin to two Euclidean
definitions, those of "having a ratio to one another," and of "same ratio" as
applied mathematically-continuous magnitudes. The first of these had been
omitted, and the second became hopelessly garbled, in the standard me-
dieval Latin translation of Euclid's Elements taken from Arabic (and not
authentic Greek) texts. Neither definition was entirely reestablished until
1543, and at first was limited to the Italian translation of Euclid's Elements
by Tartaglia.9 As a result, the Italians enjoyed a half-century head start over
the rest of Europe in the creation of recognizably modern mathematical
physics, most especially Italians who could not read Greek or Latin; for in
the universities no attention whatever was paid to Tartaglia because he had
not published in an academically respectable language.
It is clearly as a result of overlooking the rnid-sixteenth-century revival
of EUclidean proportion theory that historians of science still imagine that
recognizably modern science must have come from speculative philosophy.
As to that, Galileo sarcastically asked, "What has philosophy got to do with
measuring anything?"l0 His use of precise measurements as the main basis
of his new science required such measurements to be subjected to a mathe-
matically rigorous theory of ratios and proportionality, and that had been

8 The Principal Works o[ Simon Stevin, val. 1(Amsterdam, 1955), pp. 58-65.
9 Niccalo Tartaglia, Euclide ... diligentemente rassettato, et aUa integrita ridotto ... tala-mente
ehiara, ehe ogni mediocre ingegno, senza la notitia over suffragio di aleuna altra seienza eon
[aeilita sara eapaee a poterlo intendere (Venice, 1543).
10 Stillman Drake, Galileo Against the Philosophers (Los Angeles, 1976), p. 38.
10 STll-lMAN DRAKE

nonexistent in Europe from the fall of Rome until 1543. As Tartaglia said on
the title-page of his translation, it was made in order to put into the hands of
any person of average intelligence the whole body of mathematical knowl-
edge. Nothing like that was ever the intention of ancient or medieval natural
philosophers, whose monopoly on science ended with the invention of
printing from movable type and its early sixteenth-century sequel, the first
appearance of inexpensive books in living languages.
Astronomy aiready had a two-millenium history of accurate measure-
ments of actually observed motions before the first known measurements of
pendulums, falling bodies, descents on inclined planes, and projectile mo-
tions were made by Galileo in 1604-08. Now, by that time, a profound
revolution in musical practice and theory was already well under way, one
that seems to have originated mainly in resentment of restraints put upon the
practice of music by long accepted theories of musical consonance. Ancient
tradition decreed consonance to depend only on ratios of the smallest
numbers, a metaphysical conception unduly limiting practice that was utterly
rejected by Vincenzo Galilei. A closely parallel conception still delayed the
rise of modern science, but was soon to be thoroughly refuted by his son
Galileo.
The revolution in music found voice in the books of Vincenzo against
Zarlino. It is to the writings of Claude Palisca that I owe my interest in the
musical theories of the late Renaissance and I apologize to hirn for invading
the same territory briefly, in order to exhibit the direct role of music in
Galileo's main discoveries in physics. By doing so, I hope to add some-
thing to what Palisca alluded to when he wrote, in 1961: "By creating a
favorable climate for experiment and the acceptance of new ideas, the scien-
tific revolution greatly encouraged and accelerated a direction that musical
an had already taken."l1
It is the other side of that coin of which I am about to speak. Vincenzo
Galilei appears to me to have been the first person ever to have discovered a
law of physics by experimental measurements involving motion. Late in his
long controversy with Zarlino he found that the ratio 3:2 does not hold for
the perfect fifth when sounds are produced by tensions in strings, rather
than by their lengths. He published an account of his experiments in 1589
and various circumstances support my belief that those were carried out in
1588.1 2 In that year Vincenzo's son Galileo, then teaching mathematics

11 Claude Palis ca, "Scientific Empiricism in Musical Thought," in Seventeenth-Century

Science and the Arts, ed. H. H. Rhys (Princeton, 1961), p. 137.
12 Discorso intorno aU' opera di messer Gioseffo Zarlino da Chioggia (Florence, 1589/rpt.
Milan, 1933).
 MUSIC AND PmLoSOPHY IN EARLY MODERN SCIENCE 11

privately at Florence, was probably residing with his parents. In his notes
for a treatise on motion written in 1588, Galileo alluded in passing to the
motion of a pendulum, a form of "natural motion," as spontaneous descent
was called at that time, that had generally escaped attention by natural
philosophers. Vincenzo's study of tensions in strings required weights to be
attached to them, whether hanging freely or suspended over the bed of a
monochord, and in either case a pendular motion would be observably im-
parted to them. It is thus probable that the young Galileo was present at
Vincenzo's experimental measurements.
In those years, though Galileo was already in disagreement with some
fundamental propositions about motion that were then taught as being Aris-
totle's-whether or not they were, in fact-he did not yet doubt that physics
must concern itself mainly with causal inquiry. Years later, in 1602,
Galileo's working papers show hirn to have been making careful experi-
ments with very long pendulums, which led hirn to a correct and important
theorem about motions along inclined planes, and an incorrect conjecture
about their relation to motions of pendulums. Within two years he was to
discover first, the law of the pendulum; from that, the law of falling bodies;
and next, that this same law applied to descents along inclined planes.
Galileo's physics from then on concerned only laws of nature, not causal
inquiries of the kind dominating physics for the past 2,000 years. No such
revolutionary change in the very nature of science itself would have oc-
curred to Galileo had the musical measurements of his father not first inter-
ested hirn in the motions of pendulums.
Galileo's working papers on motion from 1602 to 1637 still survive
nearly complete at the Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale in Florence, though
now chaotically bound together in Volume 72 of the Galilean manuscripts.
Those that bear theorems, solutions of problems, or enough other words to
form one complete sentence or more, were transcribed and published in the
definitive Edizione Nazionale ofGalileo's works around 1900. It happened,
however, that Galileo's experimental measurements, being recorded on
pages with few or no words, had gone unnoticed by historians of science
until very recently. Without taking them into account, it was not possible to
reconstruct the experiments underlying these papers, and it remained mere
speculation to debate how Galileo discovered the law of falling bodies,
opening the road to modern physics.
The first page of those notes to be identified and dated was associated
with Galileo's discovery of the parabolic trajectory of a horizontally-
launched projectile, in 1608. That left still unknown the manner of his dis-
covering the law of fall, achieved no later than 1604. It did, however, give
12 STILlMAN DRAKE

the name that Galileo used for his unit of length in making measurements,
the punto. A note on another page, written probably in 1605 or 1606, made
it possible to convert the punto into metric units. It was, to my surprise, less
than one millimeter; to be exact, it was 0.94 mm.
Knowing this unit of length made it possible to reconstruct the uses
made of it. In 1975 I published my analysis and reconstruction of a page
numbered folio 107v,13 and for a decade or so I regarded that page as the
discovery document for Galileo's law of fall (see Plate 1). A set of
calculations in the middle of folio 107v shows how Galileo had arrived at
the eight distances he tabulated there. In every case he had first multiplied a
number by sixty and then had added a number less than sixty to it, showing
that Galileo owned a ruler divided accurately into sixty equal parts, which
he called punti. His measurements were made along an inclined plane,
grooved to guide a rolling ball, and they represented the places of the ball at
the end of each of eight equal intervals of time. It was not difficult then to
reconstruct the experimental setup behind the measurements. The plane was
tilted by raising one end sixty punti above the horizontal. Because it was
about 2,000 punti long, its slope was 1.T. At that slope, a ball rolling the
fulliength of the plane will take four seconds, permitting eight half-second
marks. Calculation shows Galileo's accuracy to have been within lI64th of
a second for every mark except the last, when the ball was moving about a
thousand punti per second. Interestingly, that was the only measurement
that he subsequently altered. His final entry for it was almost exactly
correct, as calculated from modern physical equations.
I think that musicians will be less reluctant than historians of science
have been in granting Galileo's ability to have timed half-second intervals
accurately to I/64th of a second. As I reconstruct his procedure, he tied frets
around the plane, so that the ball would make audible bumping sounds as it
passed over the frets, which were then adjusted patiently until every bump
coincided with a note of some song of rhythmic regularity. When Galileo
readjusted the lowest fret, he also placed a plus or a minus sign on four
other measurements. It is a great nuisance to adjust any fret but the last, be-
cause that requires moving all the frets below it; and in this case, the differ-
ences were not worth the bother. Galileo being a good amateur musician,
my reconstruction plausibly accounted for everything on the page.
Nevertheless, as I eventually found out, it was not folio 107v that was
the discovery document for the law of falling bodies. Into the narrow left-
hand margin, Galileo had squeezed the first eight square numbers, in a

13 Stillman Drake, "The Role of Music in Galileo's Experiments," Scientific American 232
(Jan-lune, 1975), pp. 98-104.
 MUSIC AND PHaoSOPHY IN EARLY MODERN SCIENCE 13

1.. "
'1. . ':1- ,.... '~,
I J . '\ .,..
f. . ,r .. i ~
j ' 1. 1
..J' ~
/6

t ,.
r,. /'
'l..
-r-;.~
.,.
f ...
I ," "'" ID ; ~ r
,I t .,.
1'. '1-' • f

. ., - 1

.
)
7 J' t> .:
~ .,., _ ... , ::';:.t:'-v~
''/
"
,~,
~
... .
."
~
-... ~..
~

, .,
"'",

-
l'
~. I

01 t:

I 1 I·

'-
PLA TE 1. Fol. 107v (Reproduced by pennission of the Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale,
Florence)
14 STILLMAN DRAKE

slightly smeared bluish ink. That was odd, as everything else on the page is
in black ink and in small, neat writing. If Galileo already knew the times-
squared law of fall from his work on folio 107v, as I supposed, then it was
a puzzle why the square numbers had not been entered at once.
In fact, all that Galileo found from his fIrst experimental measurements
was the rule that speeds grow from rest, in equal times, as do the odd num-
bers 1, 3, 5, 7, and so on. Since it had been only a rule for speeds that he
was looking for, he laid folio 107v aside before he came to discover the
times-squared law of fall. But at that time he recognized that if a precise rule
could be found by equalizing eight times musically, much more might be
learned by accurately measuring brief times, and not just equalizing them.
At the end of the page he drew a preliminary sketch for a timing device that
he described years later, in Two New Sciences of 1638. A bucket of water
with a tube through its bottom was hung up. The water flowing during a fall
or pendulum swing was collected; that water was weighed, and these
weights became his measures of times. His first recorded weighing was
1,337 grains during fall of 4,000 punti, about twelve feet. That was
Galileo's poorest timing, high by 1/30 of a second. Next he timed half this
fall, at 903 grains weight of flow, correctly within 1/100 second. He then
adjusted the length of a fIve-foot pendulum until its swing to the vertical
accompanied the flow of water to the previous mark on his collection
vessel. His measured length for this pendulum, 1,590 punti, was exactly
correct, as shown by modern calculation. Galileo next concentrated his
attention on pendulums, and found the rule that doubling the length
quadruples the time. Choosing sixteen grains of flow for a new unit, to fIt
with proportion theory, he named this the tempo (= 1/92 second). He then
calculated length and time for a very long pendulum, about ten meters, and
verified his result by hanging and timing such a pendulum, implying the
general pendulum law that the times are always as the square roots of the
lengths. From that, he found the law of fall, as was seen on the discovery
document when that was finally identified as folio 189v. 14 Using his fall
law, Galileo corrected his one poor timing and turned back to his data on
folio 107v to test whether the law of fall held true also for descents on
inclined planes. Writing the square numbers on it, he multiplied each one by
the distance to his first mark, and saw that those products were almost
identical with the eight distances he had previously measured. Hence the
seeming puzzle (that had been pointed out in 1975) vanished. The
reconstruction of folio 107v was correct, but that was not the discovery

14 Details are given in the second edition of my translation of Galileo's Two New Sciences
(Toronto, 1989).
 MUSIC AND PHILOSOPHY IN EARLY MODERN SCIENCE 15

document for the law of free fall. On the actual discovery page folio 189v,
Galileo next found the rule for descents along two planes differing in both
slope and length, and verified numerically a theorem he had found
experimentally in 1602-that although the distance is greater, the time is
less for motion along two conjugate chords to the low point of a vertical
circle than along the single chord joining the same endpoints. Thus was
modem mathematical physics born-not of metaphysical principles, or
philosophical speculations-but of accurate measurements inspired by those
which had already refuted the ancient philosophical theory of musical con-
sonance.
Without Galileo's having been present at his father's musical experi-
ments in 1588, he probably would not have gone on to his own study of
pendulum motion. Without musical training, Galileo would hardly have
been able to make his very fIrst timings nearly exact. Music played not only
a unique, but an essential role in leading Galileo to his new physics, a
science of precise measurements, for music is an art demanding precise
measurement and exact divisions.
Galileo never composed a treatise on music, but he did once set forth a
novel theory of consonance, following his statement of the pendulum law in
the first section of his Two New Sciences. Confining hirnself to the octave
and the perfect fifth, Galileo considered amplitudes of vibration of two
strings whose lengths are as 3:2, supposing that a pulse is emitted only
when a string reverses its direction. The pattern of pulses reaching the ear
will then be: both-together, upper, lower, upper, both-together, and so on,
as long as vibrations continue. Each pulse as such is a toneless brief pres-
sure; only the pattern of single pulses that separates pulses of double
strength is responsible for the tonal sensation associated with the perfect
fifth. The simplest such pattern is that of strings sounding the octave; pulses
from the lower string are always doubly strong, each being accompanied by
a pulse from the upper, while between them is interposed a beat of single
strength coming from the upper string alone. The tonal sensation of disso-
nance will occur when the pattern departs from equality in time-intervals
between pulses, and is most marked when adjacent half-tones are involved.
Such was the physics of consonance proposed in Two New Sciences.
Galileo's account resembled one by G. B. Benedetti found in letters not
published unti11586, though written years earlier. Galileo did not make the
frequencies alone directly responsible for sensations of consonance and dis-
sonance, as Benedetti did, but rather indirectly, through pulses of air
reaching the ear with a temporal pattern of pressures having single and
double strengths. As a physicist, Galileo would not assurne that pitch was
16 STILlMAN DRAKE

an occult quality of the vibrating string, in the tenninology of the natural

philosophers. But as a musician, Galileo added this picturesque description
of the consonances of the octave and the fifth:

In the octave, pulses of the lower string are always accompanied

by pulses of the upper, but between the latter there is interposed a
solitary pulse at equal intervals. [... ] Such a harmony is too bland,
and lacks rue. The fifth, however, is characterized by its displaced
beats, that is, by the interposition of two solitary beats of the up-
per, and one of the lower, between each case of simultaneous
pulses; moreover, these three are separated by time-intervals one-
half of that which separates simultaneous pulses from pulses of the
upper string. Thus the effect of the fifth is to produce a tickling of
the eardrum, so that its gentleness is modified by sprightliness,
giving the impression simultaneously of a gentle kiss and a bite. 15

That suffices to answer scholars who complain that Galileo's new sci-
ence dehumanized nature when he relegated our sensations to the category
of "secondary qualities." 1t would be more accurate to credit hirn with
directing attention precisely to the very human quality of the sensation of
musical consonance by distinguishing that sharply from a mere succession
of mechanical pulses of air.

TIIE UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO

15 See my translation of Two New Sciences, p. 107.

 H. FLORIS COHEN

BEATS ANDTHE ÜRIGINS OF EARLY MODERN SCIENCE*

IN CHAPTER EIGHT OF HIS Spiegel der Orgelmacher und Organisten

(1511), the German organist and builder of church organs, Arnolt Schlick,
explains that when playing music, on keyboard instruments in particular, it
is impossible to have all consonant intervals tuned as pure. After giving
some examples of this, Schlick goes on to indicate that a variety of systems
have been invented towards arriving at a scale that is at least acceptable to
our hearing. The practical guidelines that follow upon his theoretical intro-
duction begin with the following passage:
Now, beginning on gamut F fa ut in the manual, the fifth ascend-
ing from it to tenor C: do not make it high enough, or completely
pure, but hovering somewhat lower, as much as the ear can stand,
yet in such a way that one does not easily notice the above men-
tioned deficiency unless the keys or notes of this said fifth are
touched and held still for a while. Then one may hear how it
sounds somewhat unsteady and wavering, and resists, and desires to
unite again. 1

Musicians will no doubt recognize what is being described here in so pic-

turesque a fashion, namely, how to use the phenomenon of beating for
tuning an organ. There is more than one reason for devoting some attention
to the passage, but before doing so let us consider a later description of the

• The argument in the present paper combines elements taken from two books of mine. For the
history of the science of music it relies chiefly on points to be found in Quantifying Music.
The Science o[ Music at the First Stage o[ the Scientific Revolution, 1580-1650 (Dordrecht,
1984). What l have to say about Olschki, Hessen, Zilsel, Koyre, White, and the general issue
of technology in the Scientific Revolution finds much more extended treatment in my forth-
coming The Banquet o[ Truth. An Historiographical 1nquiry into Nature and Causes o[ the
Seventeenth-Century Scienti[ic Revolution. The following notes serve only to identify pas-
sages actually quoted in the present paper. For more detailed discussions of the literature I refer
the reader to the books just mentioned.
1 "ltem fach an in ffaut im manual sein quint ascendendo cffaut I die mach dar zil nitt hoch genug
I oder gantz gerade in. sonder etwas in die niedere schwebend. so viI das gehör leyden mag I
doch das sollichs so man gemelt quint brilch nit leichtlich gemerckt werd. sonder so die claves
oder chor gedachter quinten gerilrt und ein weill still gehalten werden das mann hören mag wie
es etwas unstet laüt mit schilcken I sich sperr und bass oder meer in einander beger." Amolt
Schlick, Spiegel der Orge/macher und Organisten (Mainz, 1511). The English translation is
quoted (with some alterations) from the modem edition with translation edited by Elizabeth
Berry Barber, in Biblioteca Organologica, vol. 113 (Buren, 1980), pp. 78-79.
17
V. Coelho (ed.), Music and Science in the Age o[ Galileo, 17-34.
© 1992 Kluwer Academic Publishers.
18 H. FLORIS COHEN

same phenomenon more than a century after Schlick's booklet appeared. On

8 May 1628, the headmaster of Dordrecht high school, Isaac Beeckman,
was introduced by an organist of his acquaintance to this method for tuning
an organ. In his scientific diary Beeckman noted:

... he taps the pipes in such a way that the sounds ron counter to
one another as if they said wow, wow, wow, the one wow differing
from the other in time as much as one pulse in the radial artery
from the other, and then all is weIl. But if he makes them even
more unequal, the wows come still 5 or 6 tim es doser together;
and if he makes them worse again, the sound passes into some-
thing like rauling. 2

Beeckman goes on to argue that this wow-wowing, or beating, as it is

called less onomatopoeically, reveals itself when a pipe or string is slightly
mistuned. In his view, sound is made up of vibrational pulses. With pure
consonances these coincide regularly, but when mistuned the coincidences
grow progressively rarer, as the one lags more and more behind the other,
"until the one string has waggled to and fro once more often than it should
have, and then it catches up again with the other string."3 Every cycle of
coinciding, lagging behind, being caught up, and coinciding again manifests
itself as a wow. Take a slightly mistuned fifth by way of an example. When
tuned purely, the fifth is given, of course, by the frequency ratio of 2:3. If,
Beeckman says, a wow is heard every fiftieth vibration, then the ear
scarcely suffers. But if the pipe or string that emits the higher note of the
fifth is mistuned more,

it overtakes [the other] every 30th time or so, which begins to take
away the agreeability of the fifth. But if it is still worse, it rattles
and is really vicious, since now the ratio is no longer as 2 to 3, but
as 17 to 18 or 20 to 21 or 10 to 11, etc., which are all dissonances,
for instead of the one string moving three times against the other
one twice, the strokes now come together only once every eleven
or 12 times, or SO.4

So far Beeckman. Let us now begin to compare the significance of

Schlick's statements with what Beeckman had to say about beats. To begin

2 Isaac Beeckman, Journal tenu par lsaac Beec1cman de 1604 a 1634, vol. 3, ed. C. de Waard
(The Hague, 1939·1953), p. 51; for an analysis, see Quantifying Music, pp. 143·146, with the
original Dutch text reproduced on p. 279, n. 90.
3 Beeckman, Journal: "totdat d'een snare eens meer over ende weer gewagghelt heeft dan sy be-
hoorde, ende kompt dan weder gelyck se eerst was met de ander snare."
4 Beeckman, Journal. The original Dutch text is in Quantifying Music, p. 280, n. 91.
 BEATS AND THE ORIGINS OF EARLy MODERN SCIENCE 19

with, both authors have a "first" of sorts to offer to posterity. It has been
well-known among musicologists, I believe, that Schlick was the first to
describe in writing the practice of temperament with the organ. This is cer-
tainly not to say that Schlick was the first to temper by means of beats-he
does not claim to do anything more than to put down what in his time was
current practice. But the codification in writing was certainly rather new for
his time. Sirnilar to the case of other crafts, such as the making of mechani-
cal clocks or the founding of guns, the art of building church organs was
subject to a severe regime of guild regulations. Secrecy was jealously
guarded, not only among guild masters, but even more strongly so with re-
spect to the outer world. The printing press was the primary agency in
altering, at least to some extent, this state of affairs. Manuscript treatises in
Latin were no longer the near-exclusive conveyors of learning. Since the
middle of the fifteenth century, a vernacular literature began to appear and
masters of various crafts wrote manuals for the application of certain tech-
niques. It is to this new genre that Schlick's treatise obviously belongs.
Isaac Beeckman does more than that. Not only does he give abrief de-
scription of the procedure as explained to hirn by his friend, the organist,
but he goes on at once to reflect on the physical meaning of the phenomenon
of beating. In so doing he finds support in a theory he had conceived four-
teen years earlier to explain musical consonance. Briefly, this theory takes
its point of departure in his idea that sound is generated by the string or pipe
cutting the surrounding air into litde globules; these, on reaching the ear,
affect our sense of hearing as sound. On this unlikely foundation Beeckman
managed to lay a theoretical topsoil of, in parts, remarkable fertility.5
Pertinent sections of Marin Mersenne's Harmonie Universelle, for example,
were strongly inspired by Beeckman's account of consonance. Crucial to
Beeckman 's account is his realization that for every musical note the
procedure by which the string cuts off globules yields a particular
soundlsilence pattern. For, after having given a geometrical proof for his
contention that pitch depends directly on the frequency of vibration,
Beeckman shows that during one vibration al cycle the cutting-off rate is not
constant. At the points of maximal displacement of the string no globules
are cut off, so that momentary silence prevails, whereas when the string
rushes through its equilibrium position its speed is maximal, and many
globules are cut off by the surrounding air. Thus, every musical note is
characterized by a soundlsilence pattern of its own.
Now consonance is to be conceived as the exact coincidence of sounds

5 An extensive treatment of Beeckman's theory of consonance is in Quantifying Music, pp.

116-51; 188-204.
20 H. FLORIS COHEN

with sounds, and of silences with silences. In this sense the unison is
obviously the only true consonance. Other intervals, however, may share to
some extent in this property of consonance, since at least some sounds and
silences produced by one note that makes up an interval are matched by
those of the other note. How often do such coincidences take pi ace?
Clearly, this occurs the more frequently as the numeric ratios that make up
the interval are simpler. Thus, after the unison 1: 1, the octave 2: 1 shares
more than any other interval in this property of consonance-every other
cycle shows a coincidence of sound and silence. Next come the fifth 3:2,
the fourth 4:3, and so on. We shall not follow Beeckman here in his inge-
nious attempts to make this scale of degrees of consonance match actual
musical experience; but we can observe that-stripped of its corpuscular
substructure-Beeckman's explanation of consonance is remarkably similar
both to Mersenne's, which largely derives from it, and to Galileo's, which
was surely reached independently, and around the same time.
Unlike Galileo, though, who confined hirnself to a very brief exposi-
tion (which is formulated most brilliantly, while masking the manifold
difficulties the theory really entailed), Beeckman applied his theory to a
number of phenomena actually to be encountered in musical practice.
Among his applications, his account of tuning through beating is surely one
of the most successful, and he came closer, as far as I can see, to the core of
what heating is about than any other theorist before Heimholtz.
A first conc1usion, then, is that whereas Schlick gives a description of
tuning through beating, Beeckman, one century later, goes ahead and
provides an explanation of sorts. This is not necessarily significant. After
all, Schlick was a professional musician writing a manual for the benefit of
his colleagues, whereas Beeckman was a natural philosopher whose inter-
ests extended to the whole wide world. A musician writing one century later
than Schlick might very well have confined hirnself to an equally descriptive
account. A natural philosopher writing one century earlier than Beeckman
might equally well have explained beats through a physical theory of
consonance ... or would he? Have we perhaps caught Beeckman, in writing
his passage on beating, in the act of overstepping a crucial borderline in the
history of thought, the borderline known as the rise of early modern
science?
Around this particular question the remainder of the present paper is to
pivot. Before seeking answers, a modest detour will prove necessary for us
to arrive at a sharper formulation of the question-a formulation we need in
order to come up with a sensible, if surely far from definitive, answer. Our
point of departure on this detour is our observation that Schlick's booklet
 BEATS AND THE ORIGINS OF EARLy MODERN SCIENCE 21

belongs to the tradition of craft literature characteristic of the early age of

printing. What, during the sixteenth century, was the relation between
science and the arts and crafts; between technology and science?
Quite opposite opinions may be heard today on the relationship
between the two as they stand at present. At one extreme, science is held to
be little more than generalized technology; at the other, technology is taken
for liule more than applied science. A more realistic assessment is surely
situated at some intermediate point between these two extremes. However,
what all possible points of view on this question have in common is that
they presuppose a very elose link between science and technology. For our
own time this is only natural. The temptation is strong to project this elose
intertwinement back onto the past. But if one looks at the relation between
science and technology with the eyes of an observer before around 1750,
then the two would appear to have only very little to do with one another.
Early modem science arose in the late sixteenth and seventeenth cen-
turies. From the beginning its prophets and pioneers loudly proelaimed the
grandiose applications that were made possible by their new science.
Practice fell far short of the proelaimed benefits, though. In fact, until far
into the eighteenth century, the first and virtually only example of a technical
invention that was inconceivable without the benefit of previously-made
discoveries of physical principles (leaving out of consideration for the mo-
ment the borderline case of scientific instruments) was the steam engine.
One might broadly say that prior to the Industrial Revolution, technology
and science went their separate ways, cultivated as they were by people
from distinct spheres of interest who worked with distinct methods and di-
rected themselves towards distinct aims. One typical instance of these
separate spheres is offered by what we have just learned about the
phenomenon of beating. For what was the situation?
Let it be elear right from the start that the church organ, with its inge-
nious bellows, wind chests, pipework, tracker systems, keyboards, and so
on, is among the peaks of medieval technology. Regrettabl y, walls between
separate academic disciplines are so high, and the his tory of organ building,
which is known in great and fascinating detail, has been so compartmental-
ized within the domain of musicology, that it has apparently never occurred
to anyone to study the pre-baroque church organ as one, incredibly
sophisticated, specimen of medieval technology. Yet that is were it belongs,
too, on a par with the mechanical elock, with gothic architecture, the
compass, the printing press, the stirrup, and all those other inventions
which, whether or not they originated on West European soil, already in the
Middle Ages lent to the cultivation of technology in Western Europe an
22 H. FLORIS COHEN

unmistakably distinct character. It is primarily to the late historian of

technology, Lyon White, Jr., that we owe the awareness that what had early
on distinguished the technology of Western Europe from contemporary
civilizations is more than just the sum of a number of separate inventions.
White summed this up as follows:

By the early fourteenth century ... Europe not only showed an un-
matched dynamism in technology: it also arrived at a technological
attitude toward problem solving which was to become of ines-
timable importance for the human condition. [... ] My fundamental
proposition .. .is that the technological dominance of Western
culture is not merely characteristic of the modem world: it begins
to be evident in the early Middle Ages and is dear by the later
Middle Ages.6

One remarkable aspect of this dynamical, medieval technology, is that it

owes nothing to contemporary science, or, rather, to natural philosophy.
Tbe choice of pipes and stops in an organ has everything to do with a
proper, fine-tuned mixing of harmonics; the construction of mixture stops,
in particular, is fully based on that physical phenomenon. Nevertheless, not
one builder of organs had ever heard of harmonics, which, as a physical
concept, were quite unknown to natural philosophy at the time. With the
benefit of hindsight all those mIes of thumb, found purely empirically by
the master-builders and put in writing by Schlick, among others, may be re-
garded as applications of physical principles that are known to us at present.
But the salient point is that they were no more at that time than mIes of
thumb-that is, practicable hints devoid of any conscious, scientific foun-
dation. To intone and tune an organ the organist might employ beats using
the method described by Schlick, but it did not belong to his sphere of
interest to inquire what such beats were. And in one fundamental respect,
the situation was not much different for the leamed academics of Schlick's
time. In their relatively abstract systems of natural philosophy, which made
contact with empirical data of this type on only very few points, no room
was reserved for phenomena like these.
An analogous, quite celebrated case of a natural phenomenon becoming
manifest as a result of medieval inventions is that of the void. Aristotle had
demonstrated that space devoid of matter not only does not exist, but cannot
exist. Before Galileo, virtually no natural philosopher contradicted
Aristotle's proof of the impossibility of a vacuum, other than by the

6 Lynn White, Ir., Medieval Religion and Technology. Collected Essays (Berkeley and Los
Angeles, 1978), pp. 221, 80.
 BEATS AND THE ORIGINS OF EARLY MODERN SCIENCE 23

counter-argument that God, ifHe wished, might of course create a vacuum.

The fact that not so much God Hirnself as, rather, His humble servant, the
mechanic handling a suction pump, in his attempts to transport water over
heights larger than ten meters was busily engaged in the very act of creating
a vacuum in actual practice, escaped the natural philosoph er. 1t equally
escaped the technician himself, unskilled in theoretical reflection as he was.
Now the well-known point at which these two activities-the creation of a
vacuum in practice, and theoretical reflection upon it-unite is the occasion,
so picturesquely described by Galileo in 1638, when he stands watching the
engineers at work in the Venice Arsenal and his attention is directed by one
of them to the phenomenon that, when water is pumped up over more than
ten meters, the water column 'breaks'. Galileo begins to reflect on the phe-
nomenon, and arrives at a theory on 'the resistance of the void'. The theory,
to be sure, has never been adopted by anyone; nevertheless, for his pupil,
Torricelli, it served as far and away the most direct source of inspiration for
hirn to embark on the experiments and theories that are connected with his
name to this day.
Past cases such as these are among the most potent factors contributing
to the idea that the origin of early modern science around 1600 may be due
directly to the technology of previous centuries. This explanatory model has
appeared successively in many guises. To account, in one way or another,
for the birth of early modern science through technology and the arts and
crafts is still one quite customary way to explain how this complicated and
enigmatic historical process managed to occur in seventeenth-century
Europe.
Explanations of the Scientific Revolution along such lines focus on
what might be broadly termed the turn towards a new dynamism in the his-
tory of Western Europe from the early sixteenth century onwards. Whether
or not such feats as the voyages of discovery, the flowering of the arts and
crafts, the advent of gunnery, the invention of the printing press, the culti-
vation of mining, etc., were contrasted with the supposed quietude of
medieval contemplation, it is in areas such as these that a number of
historians have searched for the decisively new element in European history
that made the emergence of early modern science possible. These historians
would include, among others: Robert Merton (focusing on technology as
cultivated in the Royal Society); Paolo Rossi (pointing to scholarly attention
beginning to be paid to the crafts in the sixteenth century); Lynn White
(seeking the origins of early modern science in medieval technology); R.
Hooykaas (seeking origins of early modern science in the voyages of
discovery), and Elisabeth Eisenstein (seeking the origins of early modern
24 H. FLORIS COHEN

science in the printing press).

The earliest serious work of which I am aware in which these and
related themes are sounded together and given an inner coherence all their
own is Leonardo Olschki's three-volume Geschichte der neusprachlichen
wissenschaftlichen Literatur (History of Scientific Literature in the
Vernacular'; 1919-1927). The formal aim of Olschki's 1262-page effort
was to present an overview of studies on topics pertaining to science that
were written in the Italian vernacular between Leon Battista Alberti and
Galileo Galilei. His original intention to extend the coverage to Galileo's
disciples, and to add volumes about French scientific literature from Oresme
to Descartes and beyond, as weIl as about the German counterpart to this
genre, was never carrled out. Olschki did not limit his analyses to the formal
aspects Qf the language used by men like Alberti, Leonardo, Tartaglia, and
Galileo. Rather, he was concerned throughout to show how linguistic mat-
ters often did much to determine arguments, his treatment ofGalileo's great
works in the form of dialogues easily providing the culmination point of his
entire effort. Olschki's chief example of how language helped to determine
the direction of scientific thought is the increasing use, throughout the
Renaissance, of the vernacular as a reflection of a decisive switch from dry
and bloodless scholastic erudition towards a mixed scientific/technological
literature based upon the experience of the artisan, the practitioner, the
traveller-in short, of all those elements in Renaissance Europe that gave
life a new dynamism. Olschki's ultimate purpose was no less than "to lay
bare the cultural preconditions of the development of science." He believed
to have found a path towards this goal through an analysis of scientific lit-
erature in the vernacular. This new genre, after all,

arose when the secularization of the forms and conceptions of life

forced men to draw the sciences, which had removed themselves far
from the world, into the sphere of practical and mental activ-
ity ... This is why scientific literature in the vemacular starts with
the applied and the empirical sciences, so as to find, once having
arrived beyond the limits of practical necessities, the road towards
purely scientific abstractions in an independent way. The endpoint
of this development, to which this history of the rise and fonnation
of early scientific prose is devoted, is to be found in the work of
Galileo and of Descartes, whose creations and discoveries are not
the emanation of ancient and medieval methods of inquiry, but
rather the further development and the triumph of an idea. 7

7Leonardo Olschki, Geschichte der neusprachlichen wissenschaftlichen Literatur. Erster Band:

Die Literatur der Technik und der angewandten Wissenschaften vom Mittelalter bis zur
Renaissance (Heidelberg, 1919), pp. 5-6: " ... die kulturellen Vorbedingungen der wis-
 BEATS AND THE ORIGINS OF EARLY MODERN SCIENCE 25

Thus, Olschki was not concerned with demonstrating that Galileo's science was
focused more or less exclusively on practical issues. Rather, his point was that
what enabled Galileo to transcend the amassed erudition of his predecessors in
science was the recently emerged tradition he adopted from the new literature in
the vernacular to apply mathematical notions to practical matters of a technologi-
cal nature. That is to say, matters of perspective, mining, fortification,
ballistics, and so on, provided the turn towards the empirical without wh ich the
decisive renewal of science in the seventeenth century would have been incon-
ceivable. In Olschki's treatment, Galileo's invocation of the practical problems
he had encountered at the Venice Arsenal (which is found right at the beginning
of the First Day of the Discorsi ) acquires a highly programmatic value in an-
nouncing what had made the new science possible in the fIrst place. Despite this
new, and for the time, unusual, focus, Olschki took care to qualify:

The problems of the economy of power and of how much machines

can achieve, of the accuracy of guns, of the resistance of fortifica-
tions, are the very same ones that already through two centuries had
found treatment in the technical literature. Galileo, however,
considered the tradition of the workshops, with which he had
become acquainted through his teachers, primarily as the area of
experience and observation, as suitable for drawing the preliminary
lines of the theoretical foundations of the mechanical arts. This is
why the formulation of those questions is nevertheless fundamen-
tally different, and why their solution is fully independent from this
direct tradition of the workshops and of the theorists, even though
his attention is drawn time and again towards the possibilities of
applying in practice the theories he discovered through speculation
and experiment.8

senschaftlichen Entwicklung aufzudecken .... Sie entstand, als die Verweltlichung der
Lebensformen und -anschauungen die Menschen zwang, die weltfremd gewordenen
Wissenschaften für die praktische und geistige Betätigung heranzuziehen.... Deswegen beginnt
die neu sprachliche wissenschaftliche Literatur mit den angewandten und den Erfahrungs-
wissenschaften, um, jenseits der Grenzen praktischer Notwendigkeiten angelangt, selbständig
den Weg zu den reinen wissenschaftlichen Abstraktionen zu finden. Das Ende dieser
Entwicklung, welcher diese Entstehungs- und Bildungsgeschichte der neueren wis-
senschaftlichen Prosa gewidmet is, zeigt sich im Werke Galileis und Descartes', deren Schaffen
und Entdecken keine Emanation antiker und mittelalterlicher Forschungsmethoden, sondern die
Fortentwicklung und der Triumph einer Idee sind." The remainder of Olschki's three-volume set
was published as folIows: Zweiter Band: Bildung und Wissenschaft im Zeitalter der Renaissance
in Italien (Leipzig & Florence, 1922), and Dritter Band: Galilei und seine Zeit (Halle, 1927); a
reprint of all three volumes is by Kraus Reprint (Vaduz), 1965.
8 Olschki, vol. 3, pp. 156-57: "Die Probleme der Kraftersparnis und der Leistungsfähigkeit von
Maschinen, der Treffsicherheit von Geschossen, des Widerstandes von Festungsbauten sind die
gleichen, die schon durch zwei Jahrhunderte hindurch in der Literatur der Technik ihre
26 H. FLORIS COHEN

The subtlety of Olschki's phrasing should be noted: while indicating

that ultimately Galileo's source of inspiration was technological, Olschki
also makes it clear that Galileo brought the insights gained from that source
to a new, higher level of theoretical abstraction. According to this view,
Galileo was primarily a mathematical physicist in the Archimedean tradition,
yet wh at enabled hirn to overstep the limits of classical tradition and
scholastic erudition was precisely the creative elaboration of practical mat-
ters for wh ich the newly emerged tradition of the scientific and technical
literature in the vernacular had sharpened his eyes.
Later historians, going beyond Olschki hirnself, have appeared much
more ready to take a reductionist approach. A particularly blatant example is
that of the Soviet historian, Boris Mikhailovich Hessen. In 1931, at the
Second International Congress of the History of Science and Technology
(which was seven years before he was to perish in the Gulag Archipelago),
Hessen launched his famous thesis. It asserts, briefly, that science in the
seventeenth century owed its origin to the practical needs of the emerging
burgher class. Because the pioneers of the new science were engaged in
domains of research known to us tocontain the theoretical foundation of
problems in contemporary technology, we are entitled to infer, according to
Hessen, that those very problems called into existence those new theories.
Thus, we owe Galileo's mechanics to the sixteenth-/seventeenth-century
problem of maximal range in gunnery; Torricelli' s, Pascal' s, and
Guericke 's theories of the vacuum to the need commercial capital feit for
suction pumps to be employed in mining, and so on.9
A somewhat more sophisticated approach is to be found in the articles
of a far more subtle Marxist than Hessen was, or was compelled to be,
namely, Edgar Zilsel. In an array of articles dating from the early 1940s,
which are heavily indebted to Olschki's pioneering work, Zilsel asserted
that early modem science owes its rise to the confluence of two social

Erörterung gefunden hatten. Galilei hat aber die Überlieferung der Werkstätten, die er durch
seinen Lehrer erst kennen gelernt hatte, hauptsächlich als Gebiet der Erfahrung und
Beobachtung betrachtet, um in erster Linie die theoretischen Grundlagen der mechanischen
Künste festzulegen. Deshalb ist die Formulierung jener Fragen doch eine grundsätzlich ver-
schiedene, ihre Lösung von jeder unmittelbaren Überlieferung der Werkstätten und der
Theoretiker durchaus unabhängig, wiewohl seine Aufmerksamkeit stets wieder auf die
Möglichkeiten praktischer Anwendungen der spekulativ und experimentell gewonnenen Lehren
hingelenkt wird."
9 Boris Hessen, "The Social and Economic Roots of Newton's 'Principia,'" in Science at the
Cross Roads. Papers Presented to the International Congress o[ the History o[ Science and
Technology Held in London [rom June 29th to July 3rd, 1931 by the Delegates o[ the USSR.
2nd ed (London, 1971).
 BEATS AND THE ORIGINS OF EARLy MODERN SCIENCE Zl

groups which, before 1600, had remained separate from one another by a
barrier of social prejudice and of social distance.

The social antithesis of mechanical and liberal arts, of hands and

tongue, influenced all intellectual and professional activity in the
Renaissance.
[Meanwhile,] beneath both the university scholars and the
humanistic literati the artisans, the mariners, shipbuilders, carpen-
ters, foundrymen, and miners worked in silence on the advance of
technology and modern society .... Having outgrown the constraints
of guild tradition and being stimulated to inventions by economic
competition, they were, no doubt, the real pioneers of empirical
observation, experimentation, and causal research. 10

These artisans were generally ill-educated, but a few groups from

within their midst managed to emancipate themselves to some degree. These
were the famous artist-engineers (examples run from Brunelleschi to Cellini;
Stevin is counted among them, too), but also the surgeons, and the makers
of musical as weH as of nautical and astronomical instruments. Far removed
from the empty verbosity of scholastics and humanists, these superior arti-
sans in fact made a great number of scientific discoveries. However, they
lacked one crucial element: the analytical skill to systematize these
discoveries and raise them from the level of rules of thumb to exact
scientific laws. After all, "Natural science needs theory and mathematics as
weH as experiments and observations. Only theoretically educated men with
rationally trained inteHects were able to supply that other half of its method
to science."ll But this meant that

the two components of scientific method were still separated before

160O-methodical training of intellect was preserved for upper-
class learned people, for university scholars, and for humanists; ex-
perimentation and observation were left to more or less plebeian
workers. 12

This separation clearly manifested itself in two entirely different types of lit-
erature, one in Latin, the other in the vernacular. Authors who wrote in the
latter, which began to abound in the sixteenth century, usuaHy could not
read the former, while the former consistently ignored the latter. According

10 Edgar Zilsel, "The Sociological Roots of Science," American Journal 0/ Sociology 47

(1941/2), pp. 550-51.
11 Edgar Zilsel "The Origins of Gilbert's Scientific Method," Journal 0/ the History o/ldeas 2
(1941), p. 30.
12 Zilsel, "The Sociological Roots of Science," p. 553.
28 H. FLORIS COHEN

to Zilsel, "As long as this separation persisted, as long as scholars did not
think of using the disdained methods of manual workers, science in the
modern meaning ofthe word was impossible."13
Around 1550, however, the situation began to change. Though Zilsel is
outspoken about the change, he remains remarkably vague on the obvious
question of what caused this break in so persistent a pattern to occur:

About 1550, however, with the advance of technology, a few

learned authors began to be interested in the mechanical arts, which
had become economically so important. .. Eventually the sodal bar-
rier between the two components of the scientific method broke
down, and the methods of the superior craftsmen were adopted by
academically trained scholars: real seien ce was born. This was
achieved about 1600. 14

In the 1930s and ' 40s, the historian of science, Alexandre Koyre, leveled a
principled critique against the entire mode of thought introduced by such
authors as Olschki, Hessen, and Zilsel. Precisely because his objections are
so principled in nature, they continue to be of relevance for many sub se-
quent modifications the historiographical tradition in question has continued
to undergo up to the present time. Koyre's work served as the major source
of inspiration for the first post-World War II generation of American histo-
rians of science, yet today many consider it to be obsolete beyond repair.
One major sin that continues to be held against Koyre is that, as a purely
'idealist' historian, he is supposed to have ignored those practical matters in
history which he, as a true Platonist, regarded as really belonging to a lower
realm of being.
Such a view of Koyre certainly has fuel to burn on. Surely, the idea
was at the heart of Koyre's views that the revolution in science which took
place around 1600, above all in the work of Galileo and Descartes but also
in that of Kepler, Gassendi, Beeckman, and many others, was first and
foremost a revolution in thought. A conventional and respectable pattern of
looking at nature, Koyre asserted, was replaced rather quickly by a quite
different pattern, filled with insights which, in the old context, not only
were incomprehensible but even failed to make sense. To Koyre more than
to anybody else we owe the insight that the rise of early modern science was
much more than just the transition from a number of mostly wrong ideas
about nature towards conceptions of natural processes which, at present, are
still broadly taken to be right. The principle of inertia, for example, is not

13 Zilsel, "The Sociological Roots of Science," p. 554.

14 Zilsel, "The Sociological Roots of Science," pp. 554-55.
 BEATS AND THE ORIGINS OF EARLY MODERN SCIENCE 29

just a much improved version of Aristotle's notion that a body upon which
no force acts is at rest or comes to rest. Equally, the principle of F = mx ais
more than a rectified restatement of a more intuitive conception of force,
according to which force generates motion per se rather than accelerated
motion. On the contrary, these and related principIes form the core of a
fundamentally new world picture, of which they are at once the expression
and the fruit, as Koyre used to phrase it. The coming about of this world
picture, so he insisted, can only be understood as an 'intellectual mutation'.
What was the essence of this mutation? Motion, Koyre asserted, was
no longer regarded as a purposive process in a heterogeneous, finite
Cosmos. Owing chiefly to the work of Galileo and of Descartes, motion has
since been conceived as the value-free state ofbodies on their way through
the homogeneous infinity of Euclidean, geometrized space. All this implies
that the mathematization of nature which began to take place early in the
seventeenth century was taken by Koyre to be the core of the scientific revo-
lution of that period. (In fact, he originally defined his new concept of the
Scientific Revolution by the very transition just mentioned.) Clearly, such a
view leaves but little room for a role to be filled by technology in the
process. Even for Olschki, who more than his successors and emulators
kept the level of scientific theory formation distinct from the level of practi-
cal activity, there is nevertheless a clear connection at the very point where
the experiences Galileo gained in the arts and crafts gave occasion to
theoretical reflection. In Koyre' s conception, on the contrary, a chasm
remains yawning at the very point where the one, quite abstract conception
of motion gave way to the other-a chasm that certainly cannot be bridged
by whatever impulse at renewal might have come from the sphere of practi-
cal activity.
Rather, it is the other way around. In Koyre's view, technology itself,
as a result of the revolution in science, underwent a decisive transformation.
Contrary to what is suggested by his later reputation among historians of
science, Koyre was virtually enthralled by technology; at the very least, he
was profoundly impressed by the achievement of medieval technology. It
represented to him the very zenith of what purely empirical craftsmanship
can achieve, guided by nothing but traditions fixed in ruIes of thumb, and
learning through sheer experience of the trial-and-error type. The world in
which this empirical technology manifests itself, that is to say, the world to
which every domain of human life and strife before the seventeenth century
belonged, was the world of the approximate, of the roughly-such-and-such;
Koyre called this "le monde de l'a-peu-pres"-the world of the more-or-
30 H. FLORIS COHEN

less. 15 True, medieval man had at his disposal a few tools with which
measurements could be made, and he most certainly possessed the technical
capacity to construct such tools in abundance, yet he did not construct tools
for measurement and he did not actually carry out measurements, because
for the reigning mentality a rough approximation was good enough. Koyre
claimed the best witness for this to be the case of alchemy. For hundreds of
years alchemy was the only science of earthly matters that had succeeded in
acquiring a vocabulary, a notation, and a collection of apparatus that with-
stood the centuries and were indeed to pass on eventually into chemistry.
Treasures of observations were accumulated; important discoveries were
made; experiments were carried out. However, alchemy books read like
cook books---the same style of 'take a little bit of this and a teaspoon of
that' ruled here. Alchemy never succeeded in carrying out one precision ex-
periment, for the simple reason that it was never tried-but not for any lack
of precision instruments, to be sure, given the availability of quite precise
jewelers' balances. The same is true of thermometry: "It is not so much the
thermometer which is lacking, but rather the idea that heat is susceptible of
exact measurement."16 The same is true of the early history of optics; from
the invention of spectacles in the thirteenth century onwards it did not for
four full centuries occur to anybody to grind a lens with slightly smaller
dimensions and slightly higher curvature, thus inventing the microscope.
The same is true of the measurement of time, which was doomed to remain
relatively imprecise as long as it stayed within the domain of the artisans
(generally, mechanical clocks before Huygens' invention of the pendulum
clock had still to be checked regularly with sundials or hourglasses).
Here, Koyre stated, is the real point. As long as these things continued
to be situated in the realm of the artisan, the engineer, or the theoretically
unskilled, they were doomed to partake in the properties of the world of the
more-or-Iess. Seventeenth-century science, once applied to these and similar
areas, drew them into the new universe of precision. This, then, was the
fundamental transition. It could not but have been effected by those who
discovered how to apply mathematics-the embodiment of precision-to
the physical world, thus turning our world into one small part of the new
universe of precision. From about 1600 onwards, rigorous demonstration,
inexorable proof, and a preferably geometrical mode of argument become

15 Alexandre Koyre, "Du monde de l"a-peu-pres' a l'univers de la precision," in Etudes

d' histoire de la pensee philosophique (Paris, 1971), pp. 341-62. This artic1e appeared
originally in Critique 28 (1948).
16 Koyre, "Du monde de l"a-peu-pres'," p. 350: "Ce n'est pas le thermometre qui 1ui manque,
c'est l'idee que la chaleur soit susceptible d'une mesure exacte."
 BEATS AND THE ORIGINS OF EARLY MODERN SCIENCE 31

the new criteria, at first only in empirical science, but soon enough
expanding to technology, and from there on to virtually every other domain
of human action.

***
Two fundamentally distinct conceptions of the role of technology in the
rise of early modem science have now passed before our eyes. While
viewing the one, we cannot really imagine the Scientific Revolution occur-
ring without the benefit of the impulse given by technology to bring science
closer to reality-to put science in a position to reflect theoretically on
phenomena which would otherwise have remained hidden to it. According
to the other conception, the new science of the seventeenth century is, in
essence, both the product and the reflection of a fundamental tumabout in
the picture formed of the world. It principally took place in the mind and, in
its turn, lent to technology a new character in guiding it towards much
increased precision.
These two conceptions, I think, are in the end irreconcilable. Each can
(and has been) formulated in a more sophisticated manner; sharp edges have
been rounded off and reformulations have been offered with emphases
shifted, and so on and so forth. Yet ultimately, it seems to me, these two
conceptions of the rise of early modem science continue to stand as exem-
plars of the most fundamental split that has ron across the historiography of
the Scientific Revolution over the past half-century. And the question arises
of how to choose between the two, or- to put it somewhat more modestly
and realistically-how one can argue in favor of one over the other. In
principle, I think that two paths are open for reasoned argument in this
domain. We come to one by observing that our two distinct historical views
of the rise of early modem science are narrowly linked up with the concep-
tion one has of what generally characterizes science as a phenomenon in its
own right. Whether the essence of the new science of the seventeenth
century is sought in its empiricaVexperimental bent, or rather in the mathe-
matical approach, is panicularly decisive here. This is, of course, a very
basic distinction, and one could devote many more pages to this than would
be appropriate for the context of the present study.
Not surprisingly, the other path is arrived at by historical evidence.
Granted that one cannot properly talk about these matters without some idea
of what science truly is and was about, I suggest that we proceed as if we
could, and see how far we get. Thus I propose to make our choice between
the two conceptions of the rise of early modem science dependent on a
32 H. FLORIS COHEN

eloser definition of where precisely the ways of the respective adherents do

part, followed by an empirie al check against one specific historical example.
I regard it as an established fact that the tradition in the historiography
of the Scientific Revolution that started with Olschki has had at least the
great merit of sharpening our eye for the technological background to seven-
teenth-century science. This expressed itself at various levels. During the
course of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries something that is nowadays
called "engineering science" began to manifest itself. Perhaps Simon Stevin
may be mentioned as the most typical representative of the genre. Moreover,
to an extent that still stands to be defined by historical research, the rise of
early modern science has depended on the skills of instrument makers and
on contemporary limits set to their craft. This point can be strengthened by
observing that in many a pioneer of the new science, from Galileo to
Huygens and Newton, the scholar and the craftsman were to a certain extent
united. Finally, as noted already, it was technology that confronted pioneers
of the new science with a number of phenomena well-known in the world
of the arts and crafts-phenomena which, in the first decades of the seven-
teenth century, gave occasion to the formation of new theories. Now the
crucial question is whether this particular process constitutes the essence of
the revolution, so that the technology that made it possible can indeed be
regarded as a cause of the revolution. Or is rather the reverse true; that is to
say, is it that the formation of theories on the void, on beats, and so on, was
only made possible by a preceding, or at least by an independently grown,
upheaval in the entire pieture of the world?
I now return at long last to what Schlick and Beeckman had to say on
the phenomenon of beats, in order to find out whether their statements can
help in bringing the core question just formulated somewhat closer to a
resolution. Schlick's remarks fit into the pattern displayed before us by
Olschki and by later historians. Schlick describes, in the vernacular, a craft
tradition in which a given natural phenomenon is handled, without further
reflection, as a rule of thumb. Remarkably, and characteristically, the rule is
left quantitatively undetermined. Schlick indicates no measure; he says no
more than that the fifth F-c must beat "as much as the ear can stand" (so viI
das gehör leyden mag). Everyone knows that that extent may vary a trifle
from one person to another.
With Beeckman things are different. 1t is true that the quantification
found in his theory of beating is largely fictitious. Moreover, it betrays a
remnant of theoretical confusion between frequency of vibration and rate of
beating. Nevertheless, here at least a measure is being sought-a measure
that is part and parcel of a quite specific, theoretical framework. And this is
 BEATS AND THE ORIGINS OF EARLY MODERN SCIENCE 33

the other crucial difference. True, Beeclcman's attention to the phenomenon

had to be called by a craftsman. It also seems obvious to suppose that
Beeckman was particularly sensitive to signals of this type because of his
own roots in the world of the crafts; despite his academic study in theology,
he chose the making of candles and water conduits as a profession for many
years. This very background turns Beeckman into such a suitable person for
testing the theory of the technological origin of the Scientific Revolution. If
we go ahead and examine his explanation of beats closely, we find that it
leans from beginning to end upon his theory of consonance. Surely, if the
Dordrecht church organist had not alerted Beeckman to the craft practice of
tuning by means of beats, Beeckman might never have begun to think about
the origins of the phenomenon. Yet the signal did not catch hirn unprepared.
Around 1617 he had already speculated on what happens when a consonant
interval begins to deviate from purity-not yet seeing that this expresses
itself in beating. Two years later he wrote down a brief note on beating-
not yet seeing the link with the nature of consonance. Nine years later again,
one hint from his friend, the organist, was sufficient for making hirn see at
once how all of this hangs together. It was to his preceding theory that
Beeckman owed the fact that his thinking on the topic could actually bear
fruit. And this theory owes nothing at all to any technological insight, but is
rather the fruit and the expression of a novel theoretical approach: the
application of a new, non-Aristotelian principle of motion to the venerated
problem of consonance that, up to then, had been consistently treated as a
problem in fairly abstract arithmetic.
When we confront Schlick's passage on beats with Beeckman's, one
century later, we are not so much witnessing the birth of early modern
science out of contemporary technology. To be sure, we are facing a useful
impulse from the world of the arts and crafts, but nothing more than that.
The two passages from 1511 and 1628, respectively, are distinguished
above all by the fact that they stern from two different mental worlds.
Schlick's passage is characteristic of the world of the more-or-less, in
which it suffices to have a rough approximation and in which a treatment
along lines of what is about-such-and-such is good enough. Wh at
Beeckman does, on the contrary, is enacted in a new, budding universe-
the uni verse of precision-in which a quantitative measure is sought for
earthly, physical phenomena that, in their turn, are to be reduced to
movements of matter in geometrical space. For now, how this new universe
came into being remains unexplained-it is this very transition that consti-
tutes the true problem of the rise of early modern science. What was it that
made Benedetti combine two ancient ideas, on consonance and on the wave
34 H. FLORIS COHEN

propagation of sound, respectively, and in so doing cross a threshold the

ancients had never cared to explore? What was it that made Vincenw Galilei
hit upon the experimental exploration, far beyond the ancient monochord, of
certain physical variables on which musical pitch depends? What was it that
caused, within the passage of two decades and largely in mutual indepen-
dence, Stevin, Kepler, Galileo, Beeckman, Mersenne, and finally
Descartes, suddenly to become fed up with the arithmetical approach to the
problem of consonance that had satisfied the best minds in musical theory
for centuries? What was it that put almost all of these men on the track to-
wards an explanation in terms of the relative coincidence of vibrations?
Questions such as these-and they can easily be multiplied far beyond
the science of music--continue to form the crux of the matter. I hope to
have made a plausible case for the idea that contemporary craft traditions in-
deed made a contribution, but that the great "Why?" of the Scientific
Revolution of the seventeenth century continues to stand before us, unre-
solved at least in the direction we have pursued in the course of the present
argument.

UNIVERSITEIT TwENTE
 ALEXANDER Sn..BIGER

MUSIC AND THE CRISIS OF

SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY EUROPE

I T HAS BEEN JUST OVER 200 YEARS since the completion of Charles
Burney's monumental General History 0/ Music, a pioneering work of
musical historiography.l The final volumes cover the sixteenth century to
"the present period," that is, to 1789. It is interesting to look at Burney's
response to some of Galileo' s great and innovative musical contemporaries,
who were no more remote from hirn temporally than Beethoven and
Schubert are from uso
To Monteverdi, Burney's response was surprisingly cool. He paid
tribute to the composer' s bold dissonances, but, like a latter-day Artusi,
complained of contrapuntal deficiencies in Monteverdi' s recitatives. For ex-
ample, the Prologue to that seminal masterpiece of the early Baroque,
L' Orfeo, offended his ears by three successive fifths in contrary motion, by
the falling from the octave to the fifth, and by incomprehensible dissonant
anticipations, and he added that "by the difficuIty of finding such in other
composers, it should seem as they would have been as unpleasant to other
ears as my own."2 Frescobaldi, likewise, failed to arouse real enthusiasm,
aIthough Burney recognized the composer's historical significance. He did
see merit in the conservative Recercari and Fantasie "if we consider the state
of instrumental Music at the time they were produced," but, curiously, feit
that the toccatas-to us the essence of early Baroque modernism-had suf-
fered more from age. 3
More curious still is Burney's quite different response to the composers
of only one or two generations later-those working during or shortly after
the middle of the seventeenth century. "About this time," he wrote, "Music
had received great improvement in Italy, by the joint labours of Carissimi,
Luigi [Rossi], Cesti, and Stradella." His admiration for Carissimi, in par-
ticular, knew no bounds; he dec1ared that in this composer's works "may
certainly be traced more traits of fine melody than in those of any composer
of the seventeenth century," and he quoted excerpts from that composer's

ICharies Bumey, A General History of Music from the Earliest Ages to the Present Period
(1789), vol. 2, ed. Frank Mercer (New York, 1935).
2 Bumey, pp. 190-91, 516-17.
3 Bumey, pp. 423-24.
35
V. Coelho (ed.), Music and Science in {he Age ofGalileo, 35-44.
© 1992 Kluwer Academic Publishers.
36 ALEXANDER SILBIGER

cantatas "as authentie memorials of musical expression and refmements with

which the genius and intelligence of Carissirni had enriched the art, about
the middle of the last century."4 He expressed similar enthusiasm for Cesti,
and about Stradella's works wrote that they "seem superior to any that were
produced in the last century, except by Carissimi."5 With regard to instru-
mental music, he turned his admiration to Corelli, comparing him to Haydn,
the most celebrated composer of Burney' s own time. 6
Burney's estimation of early and later seventeenth-century German
composers shows the same disparity. Schütz received no more than a men-
tion without cornment in a list of "celebrated organists and composers" of
the earlier period, but Pachelbel was credited with having "greatly improved
both vocal and instrumental church music," and Buxtehude's harpsichord
compositions were called "masterly."7
Why did the great masters who today are regarded as the founders of
the Baroque style in music receive such cool treatment, while the composers
of the middle Baroque were lavished with extravagant praise? I do not
believe this can be disrnissed as an idiosyncratic error of judgement on
Burney's part; sirnilar assessments of the two groups of composers can be
found in the History 0/ Music by Burney's contemporary and riyal, Sir
John Hawkins.8 Rather, the explanation lies in a watershed in the history of
musical style, or a major "paradigm shift," around the middle of the seven-
teenth century. Burney and his contemporaries understood and could relate
to the music of the later composers because, in spite of an intervening cen-
tury of musical history, they were still operating under the same paradigm. 9
To put forward the middle decades of the seventeenth century as a cru-
cial turning point in the history of musie represents a radical departure from

4 Burney, pp. 556, 610.

5 Bumey, p. 574.
6Burney, p. 437.
7 Bumey, pp. 457-58.
8 John Hawkins, A General History 0/ the Science and Practice 0/ Music (London, 1776/rpt.
New York, 1963). An excerpt from L'Or/eo is introduced with the remark: "A specimen of
recitative music, in the form in which it was originally conceived, cannot at this day but be
deemed a curiosity; as must also an air in one of the first operas ever composed" (p. 526).
About Schütz Hawkins has much more to say than Bumey, but only about the composer's life,
not about his music. On the other hand, Carissimi's Jephte "is justly esteemed one of the fmest
efforts of musical skill that the world knows oP' (p. 595), and he surpasses Burney in his
admiration for Corelli (p. 677).
9 I do not mean to imply that Bumey, Hawkins, and their contemporaries lacked appreciation of
all earlier music; in fact, they generally showed great respect for the traditional masterpieces of
sixteenth-century polyphony, particularly those of the sacred repertory. My point concems
rather the disparity in their assessment of the music separated by one or two generations around
1650.
 MUSIC AND THE CRISIS OF 17rH-CENTURY EUROPE 37

the traditional periodization scheme, within which those years are regarded
as part of the comparatively uneventful middle phase of the Baroque-a
marking time between the establishment of the revolutionary new style in
the early years of the century and its culmination in the works of the great
eighteenth-century masters. The proposed revision of that view of seven-
teenth-century developments is based in part on a consideration of the nature
and mechanism of stylistic change.

***
Early historians like Burney saw musical change as a slow but steady
evolution towards the perfection of the state of music of their own time.1 0
More recently this model of continuous teleological evolution has been
replaced by one of a more discontinuous development marked by discrete
periods or cyc1es. In this periodization model, aperiod commences fairly
abruptly by the appearance of innovations that signal its new style; the new
style then continues to evolve slowly and smoothly until the onset of the
next period. For example, the Baroque period is taken to begin around 1600
with the introduction of monody, basso continuo, and the opera, and to end
around 1750 with the appearance of pre-c1assical style characteristics.
Perhaps not too surprisingly, historians often disagree about exact transition
dates between the style periods, but one notes an almost universal tendency
to want to move the transition dates, once established, back in time. Further
research always seems to uncover the presence of the agreed-upon defining
features of a new style in the music of an earlier generation, as has hap-
pened for the Baroque, the Classical, the Romantic, as weH as the Modern
periods.
For example, in Claude Palisca's well-known text, Baroque Music-a
penetrating and enlightning reexamination of the period-the beginning of
the Baroque is traced to the music of the mid-sixteenth-century composer
Cipriano de Rore, and a good portion of his text is devoted to the discussion
ofmusic written before 1600. 11 To be sure, Palisca, regards the early phase
of the Baroque, which he sees as lasting until around 1640, as an
"individualistic experimental phase," preceding a phase in which the style
"became more and more regulated by rules and standards," and we shall see

10 With regard to Bumey this is admittedly an oversimplification, since his attitudes towards
both earlier music and that of his own time are complex and sometimes contradictory; for a
fuller treatment of Bumey's view of musical his tory, see Kerry S. Grant, Dr. Burney as Critic
and Historian of Music. Studies in Musicology 62 (Ann Arbor, 1983).
11 Claude V. Palisca, Baroque Music (Englewood Cliffs, 1981).
38 ALExANDER SILBIGER

that the approximate date of 1640, the characterization of the earlier phase as
"individualistic" and "experimental," and of the later phase as "regulated by
mIes and standards" are indeed significant. 12
In addition to detecting elements of the new style earlier and earlier,
historians are forced to recognize that elements of the old style may persist
for quite some time into the new period. One could of course solve the
problem of such increasingly flexible boundaries by considering the transi-
tion between periods as a more gradual phenomenon. But when almost an
entire century has to be allowed for such a transition, we are for all practical
purposes returning to the earlier model of a more or less continuous evolu-
tion of musical style, and most historians would not be willing to give up
the idea that there was, for instance, a distinct Baroque style, arising out of
a revolution with respect to the stylistic assumptions of the previous era.
The way out of this dilemma lies, I believe, in revising our view of how the
transition between the style periods takes place-a revision based on certain
recent models for the history of science and for other historical processes.
In his epoch-making 1962 study, The Structure of Scientific
Revolutions, Thomas Kuhn postulates that during most periods scientists
operate within a certain paradigm, that is, a set of commonly shared
assumptions regarding the natural world; their research aims gradually to re-
fine scientific laws within the framework of this paradigm. From time to
time, however, they discover phenomena that seem to resist accommodation
within the paradigm. Some scientists begin to question the traditional as-
sumptions, while others reject such radical questioning. The foundations of
the scientists' model of the world become increasingly shaky, and eventu-
ally this instabiIity reaches a point of crisis. The resolution comes with the
rejection of the old paradigm and its replacement by a new one, which, at
least for the time being, allows scientists to resume their research in an
orderly manner. Thus, the earIier model of a progressive, continuous evolu-
tion of our scientific knowledge, that is, of our understanding of nature,
was replaced by one of successive cyc1es, each terminated by a phase of
growing instability, leading to a crisis and paradigm shift, or a scientific
revolution. 13

12 Palisca, p. 6.
13 Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure 0/ Scientijic Revolutions (2nd enlarged ed.; Chicago, 1970).
Kuhn has often been criticized for the looseness with which he uses the term "paradigm"---one
critic claimed to have counted thirty-one distinct senses in which it was used in the essay. In
his "Postscript-1969" Kuhn admits to two distinct senses: "the entire constellation of beliefs,
v alues , techniques, and so on shared by members of a given community" and "the concrete
puzzle-solutions which, employed as models or examples, can replace explicit rules of the
remaining puzzles of normal science" (p. 175). With regard to the history of music, I will be
 MUSIC AND THE CRrSIS OF 17fH-CENTURY EUROPE 39

Analogous cycles have been recognized in larger historie phenomena,

and the idea of a seventeenth-century crisis as a crucial moment in European
history has gained considerable currency. The roots of this crisis have been
seen in social, political, or religious conflicts, in changing econornic, demo-
graphie, and ultimately even climatological conditions: the "linIe !ce Age."14
The crisis model has been refined by the historian Theodore Rabb, who
traces the onset of a phase of instability to conditions far back into the six-
teenth century.15 The long smoldering conflicts came to a head with the
Thirty-Years War, and were largely resolved by the peace treaties of circa
1650, whose wide-ranging consequences have sometimes been character-
ized as "the birth of modern Europe." Symptomatic of the resolution of a
crisis is the return to a condition of stability; after the middle of the century
society moved into a comparatively long-Iasting era of relative peace and
calm. Rabb goes on to show that this instability-crisis-stability cycle is
reflected in many other aspects of European society, including science, lit-
erature, and the visual arts. He does not discuss seventeenth-century
developments in music, but it does not require a great historical imagination
to trace a sirnilar cycle.
The Franco-Netherlandish composers of the earl y Renaissance left to
the sixteenth-century the legacy of a well-defined universal style, marked by
a smooth polyphony with careful control of dissonance and metric hierar-
chy, and a tonal system based on diatonic octave species with limited
chromatic extensions. This style proved remarkably durable and adaptable
to regional dialects and progressive evolution without sacrifice of its funda-
mental assumptions or its universality. As long as they remained within its
confines, sixteenth-century composers had no difficulty writing works such
as a Mass or instrumental fantasy based on an earlier motet, chanson, or
madrigal, regardless of how far they were removed geographically and
temporally from the model; they were still working within the same

using "paradigm" in the first sense, although it would certainly be of interest to explore the
analogy to the second sense, with cantus firmus exercises serving as paradigm for the earlier
period, and figured bass exercises (replaced eventually by the chord progression exercises) as
paradigm for the later period. I should also mention that in the "Postscript" Kuhn expresses his
puzzlement at the eagerness with with others have sought to apply his model to other fields,
including "historians of literature, music, the arts, and of political development," because
unlike the history of science, "periodization in terms of revolutionary breaks in style, taste,
and institutional structure have always been among their standard tools" (p. 208). What has,
however, proven instructive in Kuhn's model is not the periodization per se, but his analysis
of the mechanism of the transition between periods.
14Charles Wilson, The Transformation of Europe 1558-1640 (Berkeley, 1976); Geoffrey
Parker, Europe in Crisis 1598-1648 (Ithaca, 1979).
15 Theodore K. Rabb, The Strugglefor Stability in Early Modern Europe (New York, 1975).
40 ALExANDER SILBIGER

paradigm--the paradigm represented by the works of Josquin, Willaert, and

Palestrina. The style continued to prove a satisfactory vehic1e for the most
profound musical expression until at least the middle of the seventeenth-
century, panicularly in Germany, England, and Spain. Yet some cracks had
begun to appear in its foundation at least a century earlier.
As is often the case, the forces of instability came initially from with-
out, from aseries of c10sely related developments, which inc1uded shifts in
musical patronage, humanistic notions of proper text setting, Tridentine
reforms, and, on perhaps a deeper level, the transformation of music' s
function from a ritual to a rhetorical expression. These forces eventually led
to the crisis that marked the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries: a
period of musical experimentation and polemics between adherents of the
old and the new. It is no coincidence that the period was unusually rich in
the production of treatises that sought to formulate the mIes of the an; Kuhn
notes that scientists too become conscious and concerned about mles when
their paradigms or models are feit to be insecure. 16 A further threat to the
old paradigm was posed by the increased use of chromatic alterations,
which destabilized the integrity of the octave species that had formed the
basis of the old tonal system. The experimental new styles, with their chro-
maticisms and their frequent shifts of moods and textures, undermined the
musical cohesion provided by the the old paradigm. The universal style of
the late Renaissance seemed to be cmmbling, without, however, as yet alto-
gether disappearing. The resolution of the crisis did not come until past the
middle of the century.
The new paradigm that emerged out of the crisis after ca. 1650 proved
remarkably stable. Many of its elements, although they continued to evolve,
did not change their basic nature until at least the middle of the following
century; other elements persisted until the later nineteenth century, when the
next major period of instability set in. Thus, to describe the new paradigm is
almost to describe the characteristics of the common practice that would
govem music for the next few centuries. We see the establishment of a set
of genres based on discrete extended movements, each with a constancy of
tempo, texture, and mood: in instrumental music, the.sonata, the suite, and
the concerto; in vocal music, the recitative-aria and other set-number struc-
tures of late Baroque opera, oratorio, and cantata. The recitative-aria
configuration provided aresolution to the music and text conflict that would
serve at least until its rejection by Wagner. A tonal system, based on major
and minor keys and contrasting key areas, provided the means for

16 Kuhn, The Structure o[ Sciemific Revolutions, p. 47.

 MUS1C AND THE CRIS1S OF 17fH-CENTURY EUROPE 41

introducing variety throughout the extended movements without sacrificing

musical cohesion. Careful study of seventeenth-century music is making it
increasingly clear that this tonal system did not really emerge in full until the
post-crisis years. As Neal Zaslaw has recently shown, the same applies to
that institution so central to subsequent musicallife: the orchestra, which, if
understood in the modern sense, originated in the 1660s and 70s from a
synthesis of French and Italian ensemble practices. 17 Even the one secure
signpost for the beginning of the Baroque, the birth of opera at the
Florentine courts around 1600, has been brought into question as the
appropriate starting point for this quintessential Baroque art form; Lorenzo
Bianconi has argued that the introduction of public commercial opera in
Venice in 1637 in many ways represents the true beginning of the operatic
culture that dominated musical Europe for the next century-and-a-half. 18
The notion of the middle years of the seventeenth century as a major
turning point for the history of music has received occasional earlier
recognition. At the 1967 IMS Congress in Lubljana six panels were orga-
nized on "Critical Years in European Musical History," which included
sessions on 1500-1530, 1640-1660, and 1740-1760. 19 In his introductory
remarks to the 1640-1660 panel, Luigi Tagliavini remarked that those
decades were in many respects decisive for European music history; he too
observed that during this period music lost the freedom, color, and instabil-
ity characteristic of the previous decades and settled into fixed types and
forms. With one exception, the "critical years" theme was not developed by
the contributors to the panel, who for the most part limited themselves to
descriptions of regional developments, with little attempt to relate these to
larger European trends. The exception was a paper by Werner Braun on
sacred music in Germany; Braun examined his topic within the perspective
of a crisis, which he defined, after the Grimm brothers' dictionary, as the
resolution of a battle of the old against the new. In his case the competition
was between the older German and the newer Italian styles, and he saw its
resolution in the emergence of the German church cantata. 20 A somewhat
similar development in England was traced by Fran~oise Mathieu-Arth for
the creation of later seventeenth-century musical theater out of the native

17 Neal Zaslaw, "When 1s an Orchestra Not an Orchestra?" Early Music 16 (1988), p. 489.
18 Lorenzo Bianconi, Music in the Seventeenth Century (Cambridge, 1987), pp. 161-89.
19 Luigi F. Tagliavini, "Symposium Critical Years in Eutopean Musical History, 1640-1660,"
in Report of the Tenth Congress of the International Musicological Society, Ljubljana 1967,
ed. Dragotin Cvetco (Kassel, 1970), p. 145.
20 Wemer Braun, "Die Entstehung der deutsche Kantata," in Report ofthe Tenth Congress ofthe
International Musicological Society, pp. 116-25.
42 ALEXANDER SILBIGER

Masque tradition and the imported Italian dramatic styles, although she did
not discuss this in tenns of a crisis resolution. 21
More recently, Lorenzo Bianconi in his unorthodox text on the seicento
included abrief chapter on the "crisis of the seventeenth century." He saw
this crisis more in tenns of sodal and political conflicts than of stylistic in-
stability, but he attributed to it profound changes in Europe's musicaliife,
particularly with regard to socio-economic aspects such as the dissemination
of music and patronage. Thus he conduded that "for music, in short, the
'crisis' of the seventeenth century assurnes truly revolutionary proportions:
the disintegration of the old order and the invention of new social proce-
dures," although he did not pursue the connection of the crisis with the
invention of new musical procedures. 22
The papers by Braun and Mathieu-Arth suggest a further point regard-
ing the new paradigm. In most music histories the revolutionary beginning
of the Baroque is presented primarily as an Italian phenomenon; the new
style made its way only gradually and much less dramatically to the rest of
Europe. In fact, the impact of this Italian style on local traditions was itself a
significant contributing factor to the instability and eventual crisis else-
where. The resolution of the crisis and the emergence of the new paradigm
seem, however, to have taken place throughout Europe at nearly the same
time. Nor is it dear that Italy should receive all the credit for this resolution.
Although the complex cross-currents between French and Italian music at
mid-century remain to be fully sorted out, the new paradigm may well have
emerged from a broader European base, echoing the international settlement
of the political crises.
Ironically, the Italian and French musical traditions at the same time
fonned an area in which the new paradigm fell most glaringly short of uni-
versality. Each settlement usually contains within it the genns of future
conflicts, and the distinct Italian and French stylistic strands, while in a
sense very much part of the new paradigm, would also continue to fonn a
fertile source of instability, not to be resolved until the advent of the dassi-
cal style a century later.

***
We now begin to understand why Burney had no difficulty relating to
the music of Carissimi, Stradella, and Corelli; wh at binds the music of his

21 Fran~oise Mathieu-Arth, "Du masque 11 l'opera anglais," in Report 0/ the Tenth Congress 0/
the International Musicological Society, pp. 149-58.
22 Bianconi, Music in the Seventeenth Century, pp. 28-33.
 MUSIC AND THE CR!SIS OF 17fH-CENTURY EUROPE 43

time to theirs is not a common unchanging style, but, rather, a common

paradigm. Corelli's works, in fact, continued to be republished throughout
the eighteenth century and were subjected to elaborate embellishments re-
flecting evolving tastes;23 in spite of chan ging musical fashions, musicians
throughout Europe continued to find his music suitable for performance and
recomposition. In France the operas of Lully maintained their roles as clas-
sical models and enjoyed frequent revivals, often in updated versions, until
past the middle of the eighteenth century. As was the case during the pre-
ceding style period, composers had no difficulty adapting or modernizing
earlier music governed by the same paradigm. Thus we find Handel
drawing upon compositions of Carissimi, Stradella, or Johann Caspar
Kerll, but not upon any music of the generation of Monteverdi and
Frescobaldi. Even with Bach, whose catholic musical interests certainly ex-
tended back farther in time, we fmd telling distinctions in his specific uses
of earlier compositions. He evidently admired Frescobaldi, but his admira-
tion-like Burney's-probably was directed in the main towards the
contrapuntal techniques displayed in the stile antico genres, and his studies
of a cappella vocal polyphony seem, with exception of a single Mass of
Palestrina, to have been confined to examples from after 1650.24 He ap-
pears entirely to have ignored Schütz-although opportunities to leam about
that composer certainly would not have been lacking25-and he went back
no further than Legrenzi, Corelli, Reinken, and Buxtehude in his own
musical adaptations. Of course, he did draw upon music from an earlier
paradigm in his settings of tradition al chorale melodies, and any student of
his chorale settings knows how ingeniously and wonderfully his own
paradigm is stretched to accommodate those archaic melodies.
A broad historical formulation, such as I have presented here, in-
evitably entails gross generalizations and simplifications of the intricately
tangled strains of musical development that took place across Europe. It
should also be kept in mind that while the central facts of the history of sci-
ence may consist of the establishment and acceptance of, say, the
Copernican system, Newton's laws, or Einstein's theories of relativity, the
central facts of music history-at least, in my view-are not the establish-
ment of the principles of polyphonie voice leading, of the major-minor key

23 See Hans Joachim Marx, "Some Unknown Embellishments of Corelli's Violin Sonatas,"
Musical Quarterly 61 (1975), pp. 65-76.
24 Christoph Wolff, Der stile antico in der Musik Johann Sebastian Bachs. Beihefte zum Archiv
für Musikwissenschaft 6 (Wiesbaden, 1968), pp.161-62.
25 For example, in his Lüneberg years (1700-1703) he would have encountered Johann Carl
Loewe von Eisenach, organist at the Nikolaikirche, who had been a devoted student of Schütz
in Dresden.
44 ALExANDER SILBIGER

system, or of classical forms, but the rich diversity of musical works of art
from which such principles have been abstracted. Nevertheless, as earl
Dahlhaus has argued, those works derive their meaning to us from their
embedding in a historical structure or framework. 26 I have aimed here to
provide a framework that, although surely in need of further refinement,
may provide a better fit than those in which we have tried to squeeze seven-
teenth-century music in the past.
Many questions have been left unanswered and many issues beg
further investigation. Most challenging among these is to draw closer con-
nections between these musical developments and the socio-political
developments traditionally associated with the crisis. In other words, can
the forces that precipitated the instability, crisis, and its resolution in the
musical domain be shown to connect with those that precipitated such phe-
nomena in society at large? But this question shall have to await a further
study. For now I will be satisfied if I have persuaded my readers that the
so-called early Baroque marked not so much the beginning of a new style as
the crisis of an old one, and that the so-called middle Baroque was not a
holding station between the establishment of a new style in the early seven-
teenth century and its culmination in the early eighteenth, but a crucial
period for music his tory that saw the birth of modern European music.

DUKE UNIVERSITY

26Carl Dahlhaus, Foundations 01 Music History, trans. J.B. Robinson (Cambridge, 1983), pp.
33-43.
 OWEN GINGERICH

KEPLER, GALILEI, AND TIIE lIARMONY OF TIIE WORLD

INWILLIAM SHAKESPEARE'S MERCHANT OF VEN/CE, Lorenzo, gazing

on the star-studded, moonlit sky, exelaims:

Sit, Jessica. Look how the floor of heaven

Is thick inlaid with patines of bright gold;
There's not the smallest orb which thou behold'st
But in this motion like an angel sings.!

The notion of heavenly harmonies is an ancient one, but nowhere do we

find it more deeply and eontinually expressed than in the work of Shakes-
peare's eontemporary, Johannes Kepler.
In the Epitome of Copernican Astronomy of 1621, which is Kepler's
Ion gest and most mature explanation of bis own formulation of the heliocen-
trie eosmology, the astronomer poses and answers a most astonishing series
of questions. "What is the reason for the size of the sun?"2 The sun is first
in arehetypal order, if not in temporal, responds Kepler; Moses makes light
the work of the first day of ereation, by which we ean understand the solar
body. But, if it was ereated first, then the solar body has no ratio to other
bodies; had it been ereated twice as great, then the whole world and man in
it would have had to be twiee as great. In other words, Kepler has grasped
the subtle relativistie argument that, for a single isolated body, size has no
meaning.
But his eateehism eontinues as he asks about the size of the earth in
ratio to the sun; this, he deelares, depends on our vision, the fact that the
sun appears as half a degree in the sky, or 1n20 part of a eirele. "What do
you think is the reason for this number?"3 Kepler replies that we must first
seek an arehetypal eause; he would prefer this to be geometrieal, for
example, based on a nO-sided polygon. If a geometrieal method existed for

! Merchanl o[ Vemce, V, 58-61.

2 The standard modem edition for the Kepler wodes and letters is Johannes Kepler Gesammelte
Werke (Munich, 1937-), a multi-volume series not yet fully completed; I shall cite it as JKGW,
where numbers after the colon refer to the numbered lines in the edition. Epitome o[ Coper-
nican Astronomy, JKGW 7, 277:7ff. This part of the Epitome has been translated in Great
Books o[ the Western World 16 (Chicago, 1938), p. 873 (hereafterGBWW). Another important
source is Michael Dickreiter, Der Musik-theoretiker Johannes Kepler (Bem and Munich, 1973).
3 Epitome o[ Copernican Astronomy, JKGW 7, 277:36ff; GBWW, 874.
45
V. Coelho (ed.), Music and Science in the Age o[Galileo, 45-63.
© 1992 Kluwer Academic Publishers.
46 ÜWEN GINGERICH

inscribing a 45-sided figure, then its sides could be repeatedly bisected to

form a 90-, 180-, 360-, and finally a nO-sided polygon, but, alas, there is
no geometrie al method for inscribing a 45-sided polygon within a cirele.
Hence we must look elsewhere, to musical harmonies. And 720 turns out to
be, in Kepler's opinion, the smallest number to encompass the systema
diapason duplex, that is, the ratios of the harmonies in both the major and
minor scales.
To see what Kepler means by this very odd and yet quite characteristic
question and its extraordinary answer, let us turn to an account of his life
story and the remarkable intertwining of astronomy and celestial harmony.
Kepler was born in 1571 in Weil der Stadt, a small village west of
Stuttgart. 4 (He was therefore seven years younger than Galileo, and, since
he died earlier, the Italian astronomer's life completely encompassed his
own years.) Sent to the local German school, he proved bright enough to be
transferred to the Latin school and subsequently he won a sc hol ars hip to
nearby Tübingen University. Since the university housing was over-
crowded, he spent his undergraduate days at a nearby preparatory school,
and took his baccalaureate by exarnination. Having moved to Tübingen for a
Master's degree, Kepler met the astronomer Michael Maestlin, who openly
taught about the heliocentric Copernican system. Now since the publication
ofCopernicus' De revolutionibus five decades earlier, its radical cosmology
had been considered an interesting, but fictitious, mathematical scheme that
did not speak to the actual physical, earth-centered world. 5 Kepler feit oth-
erwise, for he believed in areal heliocentric universe. A few years later, as a
24-year-old, he wrote biographically:

When I was studying under the distinguished Master Michael

Maestlin at Tübingen six years ago, seeing the many disadvantages
of the commonly accepted theory of the universe, I became so de-
lighted with Copemicus, whom Maestlin often mentioned in his
lectures, that I not only defended his opinions in the debates of the
physics candidates, but even wrote a thorough disputation about the
first motion, maintaining that it happens because of the earth' s ro-
tation. Thus I have gradually collected, partly through hearing
Maestlin and partly by my own efforts, the advantages that
Copemicus has mathematically over Ptolemy. At last in the year

4 The facts of Kepler's life are found in the standard biography, Max Caspar's Kepler, trans.
Doris Hellman (New York, 1959); a reprint with extensive new annotations by Owen Gingerich
and Alain Segonds is forthcoming (1993). See also Owen Gingerich, "Kepler," in Dictionary 01
Scientific Biography 7 (1973), pp. 289-312.
5 See, for example, Owen Gingerich, "From Copemicus 10 Kepler: Heliocentrism as Model and
as Reality," Proceedings 01 the American Philosophical Society 117 (1973), pp. 513-22.
 KEPLER, GALILEI, ANDTHE HARMONY OFTHE WORLD 47

1595 I pondered this subject with the whole force of my mind. And
there were three things above all for which I stubbornly sought the
causes as to why it was this way and not another: the number, the
dimensions, and the motions of the orbs. 6

After taking his M.A., Kepler continued in the theology program at

Tübingen, but midway through his third and final year he had been shipped
out to the provinces (under some protest) as a high school mathematics
teacher. There, in Graz in southem Austria, he pondered the question of the
number and spacing of the planets. In the ancient system of Aristotle and
Ptolemy, this had not been seen as a pressing problem. Astronomers envi-
sioned a system of ethereal spheres nested together as tightly as their
epicyclic mechanisms would allow, and hence they saw no further need to
fret about the spacing of the planets. They also assumed that God caused the
outermost sphere to rotate every twenty-four hours, with the motions
transmitted down through the spheres to the planets, including the sun and
moon.
Because in the Copemican system the outermost stars were fixed and
the planets went faster the closer they were to the center, any driving force
relevant to the Copemican system presumably had to come from the sun it-
self. Furthermore, the spacing of the planets no longer depended on a
tightly nested arrangement, but, on the contrary, there seemed to be a vast
amount of unnecessary, empty space; consequently, the planetary distances
appeared to be completely arbitrary.
In order to remedy these lacunre in the heliocentric theory, Kepler first
sought some kind of plane geometry that could account for the planetary
spacings, essentially a divine blueprint. "And then it struck me," he wrote.
"Why have plane figures among three-dimensional orbits? Behold, reader,
the invention and the whole substance of this little book!"7
What Kepler had noticed was that there are five, and only five, regular
solids, that is, polyhedra having identical regular polygons for each face. A
litde reflection shows that there can be three solids with faces made of equi-
lateral triangles (depending on whether three, four, or five triangles are
joined at each vertex), plus asolid with square faces and one with
pentagonal faces. What he subsequently discovered was that these could be
inscribed and circumscribed as five spacers between the spheres holding the

6 Abridged from Mysterium cosl7Wgraphicum,IKGW 1, 9: I1ff.; my translation.

7 Mysterium cosl7Wgraphicum, IKGW I, 13: 5-7.
48 OWEN GINGERICH

six planetary orbits (see Plate 1). At one stroke, Kepler had answered why
there were only six planets, and why they were so spaced. With the help of
his former teacher, Maestlin, Kepler soon published these ideas in his
Mysterium cosmographicum, the Secret ofthe Cosmos.s
Kepler asked other questions as weH, such as why the zodiac divides
the sky into twelve parts. And in this connection musical theory reared its
head. Kepler began by arguing that harmony, like the archetypal celestial ar-
rangements, is grounded in geometry, not in arithmetic or the mere number
juggling of his predecessors.9 They had discovered the harmonies, but not
the underlying cause of the harmonies-they had found the fact-in-itself or
the di oti of Aristotle's Posterior Analytics, but not the reason why, the to
oti 10 Kepler declared:

I followed the evidence of my ears at a time when, in establishing

the number of the divisions, I was still struggling over their
causes, and did not do the same as the ancients did. They advanced
to a certain point by the judgement of their ears, but soon abandon-
ing their leadership completed the rest of the journey by following
erroneous Reason, so to speak dragging their ears astray by force
and ordering them to turn deaf. Indeed, I have taken extra pains to
ensure that anybody may have a ready opportunity to consult his
hearing ... so that he can be sure that we are struggling over the
causes of what rests on the dependable test of the senses, and are
not improvised fictions of my own (a charge of which the Pytha-
goreans stand accused) and intruded in the place of truth. 11

Kepler considered the monochord, the single-string instrument beloved

of the musical theorists. The string as a whole represents the fundamental,
tuned at Gas on the lowest course of a six-course Renaissance lute. Kepler
then divided it into successive parts that were harmonious with the whole
and with each other, using the integer segments 1:5, 1:4, 1:3, 1:2,3:5,2:3

8 Mysterium cosmographicum, (Tübingen, 1596). For an English translation, including the

notes added by Kepler in the revised 1621 edition, see A. M. Dunean (trans.), Mysterium
Cosmographicum: Secret olthe Universe (New York, 1981); this English version will be eited
as Secret.
9 See D. P. Walker, "Kepler's Celestial Musie," Journal olthe Warburg and Courtauld Institutes
30 (1967), pp. 228-50, reprinted in his Studies in Musical Science in the Late Renaissance
(London, 1978), pp. 34-62.
10 For abrief diseussion of this point in a related eontext, see Owen Gingerieh and Robert S.
Westman, The Wittich Connection: Priority and Conflict in Late Sixteenth-Century
Cosmology (Transactions 01 the American Philosophical Society 78, part 7, 1988), pp. 42-
43. Kepler himself uses the Greek di oti and to oti in his Harmonice mundi, JKGW 6,94.
11 Harmonice mundi, JKGW 6, 119:39-120:9, Book 3, ehapter 2. English translation by E. J.
Aiton, A. M. Dunean, and J. V. Field.
 KEPLER, GAULE!, ANDTHE HARMONY OF THE WORLD 49

1:"11-\ LA mO~b! \'Mh.A."tTAJlVH O.

ItoIGV\.AarA rullPOlII

---"~--- ---
-.~-- {/ '1
---- , i
---- /
'1

PLATE 1. The six planetary spheres with the five nested polyhedral spaeers, shown in
Kepler's Mysterium cosmographicum (1621). The eube separates Satum and Jupiter, the
tetrahedron Jupiter and Mars, and so on. In the fIrst edition (1596) the same fIgure appears
hut in a mirror image.
50 ÜWEN GINGERICH

and 1:1. For example, the longer segment of the division 1:5 then gave a
length 5/6 of the whole, and so on. (He tacitly rejected 1:6 and 2:5 because
a string length of n{7 had been considered discordant since antiquity, but
later he labored long and hard attempting to rationalize this somewhat arbi-
trary decision. 12) The resulting notes are shown in the Mysterium cosmo-
graphicum: 13

*f.
=t~-II -I-~ = '~-\::!
"-"'" --'l "I':-
::::=:-
31 - --
----
, =:;
!~
i_ . i \\-- \ I ==+ J ~! 1 I
1-===
I i5
6
x:::::A ..
.~5
:=G:I
~ ..
J =+ I t::::::i 5
1
+=3 - =+=8
:':0:= J
=:=:::JS
~[.[­

=+=1
G Bb B C D Eb E G'
1 5/6 4/5 3/4 2/3 5/8 3/5 1/2
120 100 96 90 80 75 72 60

Given these fractions, the lowest common multiple is 120. Below the dia-
gram I have indicated both the fraction of the fundamental and integer length
of string required for the lower note in each pair, assuming the fundamental
length to be 120. The arrangement does not yield a full scale, since it lacks
A and F, but it gives an array of consonances inc1uding the fifth, D (80),
and the octave, G' (60); if the fourth, C (90), is taken as a higher funda-
mental, then the octave G' is its fifth. These three, G, D, and C, represent
the perfect tones. The procedure also yields a minor third, Bb (100), and a
major third, B (96), which are too c10se to be hannonious taken together, so
Kepler considers them as a single imperfect tone. Similarly, the minor sixth,
Eb (75), and the major sixth, E (72), represent a single imperfect tone; they
He a major and a minor third below the octave, respectively. Thus, the three
perfect and two imperfect tones come to five, which Kepler saw as exactly
the number of Platonic polyhedra. Furthermore, when only the perfect tones
are considered, they can be represented with an integer fundamental of 12
(that is, 12,9,8,6), and twelve is the division of the zodiac. For Kepler,
this was the answer as to why the zodiac divides the sky into twelve parts.
If this seems a bit far-fetched, we have only to look at the notes Kepler
added to the second edition of the Mysterium, published in 1618: "It is
pleasant to contemplate my first efforts at my discoveries, even though they
were wrong," he says; "Behold how I anxiously sought the genuine and

12 Walker, "Kepler's Celestial Music" (n. 9), describes in considerable detail Kepler's rejection
of the division into sevenths.
13 Mysterium cosmographicum, JKGW I, 40; Secret, p. 132.
 KEPLER, GAULEI, AND THE HARMONY OFTHE WORLD 51

archetypal causes of the concordances (wh ich I was studying) like a blind
man, as if they were absent. The plane figures are themselves the causes of
the concordances, not because they are the surfaces of solid figures .... It is
not surprising that the fitting of harmonies to the solids is not obvious; for
what is not in the bosom of Nature cannot be drawn out."14 In any event,
because Kepler in the 1590s had not yet come to terms with the entire musi-
cal scale, he was still far from his special number 720.
When Kepler's book was ready, early in 1597, he sent two compli-
mentary copies to Italy along with a friend, Paul Hamburger, with
instructions to give them to anyone appropriate. 15 Hamburger was already
on bis way back when he realized that he had not carried out tbis obligation,
but inquiry revealed that the books could appropriately be given to a young
Pisan professor named Galileo Galilei. The Italian mathematician hastily
penned a "thank you" note to send back with the emissary, saying that he
had had time to read only the introduction, and that he, too, was a Coper-
nican, albeit secretly.I 6 The recipient was obviously unknown to Kepler,
for when he received the letter, he communicated with some bemusement to
Maestlin that he had just heard from an Italian whose last name was the
same as his first. 17 To the Pisan, Kepler wrote concerning his covert
Copernican sentiments, encouraging hirn to "Stand forth, 0 Galileo!"18 But
nothing more was heard from that quarter for more than a decade, until
Galileo's telescopic discoveries burst upon the scene.
Meanwhile, Kepler had also sent a copy of his Mysterium to Tycho
Brahe, the greatest observational astronomer of the century. Tycho, in
Denmark, urged Kepler to come for a visit, but the distance was much too
far for the young and newly-married Kepler to entertain. "That is why I
consider it an act of Divine Providence that Tycho came to Prague," Kepler
later wrote. 19 He did not mention as an act of Providence the fact that he,
along with the other Protestant teachers in Graz, suddenly became victims
of the Counter Reformation and were given until sundown to leave town.
Thus fate bound together this pair of astronomers-grand, self-possessed,
already-farnous Tycho Brahe, and Johannes Kepler, the visionary young
seeker for the causes of the cosmos, just on the threshold of his own farne.

14 Mysterium cosmographicum (1618), p. 46, note 13 and p. 47, note 18; revised from Secret,
ff" 141 and 143.
For further details, see the chapter "Galileo, Kepler, and their Intermediaries," esp. pp. 123-
27 in Stillman Drake, Galileo Studies (Ann Arbor, 1970).
16 Galileo to Kepler, 4 August 1597, JKGW 13, 130:15-16.
17 Kepler to Maestlin, early October 1597, JKGW 13, 143:121.
18 Kepler to Galileo, 13 October 1597, JKGW 13, 145:51.
19 Astrorwmia rwva (Prague, 1609), JKGW 3, 109:7-8.
52 OWEN GINGERICH

Kepler came to the imperious Tycho with mixed feelings; he would

rather have had a faculty position at Tübingen, but, on the other hand,
Tycho had the best observations, though he lacked an architect for building
a new astronomical sttucture.20 Fortunately, Tycho and his chief assistant,
Christian Longomontanus, were concentrating on Mars-the only planet
with a sufficiently eccentric orbit and with approaches elose enough to earth
to unlock the planetary secrets, as Kepler later appreciated. Kepler bet
Longomontanus that he could solve the problem of Mars within a week,21
but in reality it took most of six years, from 1600 into 1605. Although
Kepler soon had an orbit considerably better than any that had gone before,
it still yielded errors of 8 minutes of arc (approximately a quarter of the
moon's diameter). Later he wrote, "Divine Providence gran ted us such a
diligent ob server in Tycho Brahe that his observations convicted this calcu-
lation of an error of 8'; it is only right that we should accept God's gift with
a grateful mind .... Because these 8' could not be ignored, they alone have
led to a total reformation of astronomy."22
Kepler did not let the problem go until he had found the elliptical path
and the so-called law of areas. By the time he had finished teasing out an
orbit half-concealed by a elutter of inevitable observational errors, not only
the theory of Mars but Kepler hirnself had surely been through the refiner's
fire. He could handle the tedious task of making the planetary tables so that
Emperor Rudolf II could have more accurate horoscopes, but he also knew
that his polyhedra, the regular Platonic solids, did not fit between the plane-
tary orbs with as much precision as his art and science could now
command.
In 1609 his greatest book was published, the Astronomia nova or
Commentary on the Motion 0/ Mars, one of the few with virtually no men-
tion of musical harmonies. By then Tycho Brahe was long since dead, and
Kepler had inherited his position as Imperial Mathematician (but with only a
fraction of Tycho's salary).
The following few years marked aperiod of both excitement and great
turmoil in Kepler's life. In the spring of 1610, Galileo published his
Sidereus nuncius, which carried the news of his astonishing telescopic dis-
coveries. Kepler was not one of the lucky recipients of the new optical
tube-Galileo reserved them for men of political influence-although
eventually Kepler borrowed one long enough to confirm the novel findings.

20 Kepler teIls himself this in a private memo entitled "Refleetions on a Stay in Bohemia," now
~ublished in the documents volume of the collected works, JKGW 19, 37.
1 Kepler to Longomontanus, early 1605, JKGW 15, nr. 323:188-89.
22 Astronomia nova (Prague, 1609), JKGW 3, 178:1ff.
 KEPLER, GAULE!, AND TIIE HARMONY OF TIIE WORLD 53

In a public letter to Galileo, published as the Conversation with the Sidereal

Messenger, Kepler paraphrased Galileo, saying, "I behold 'great and most
marvelous sights proposed to philosophers and astronomers', including
myself, if I am not mistaken; I behold 'all lovers of true philosophy sum-
moned to the commencement of great observations' ."23 In spite of his lack
of a telescope, Kepler announced that he accepted the new discoveries, and
in gratitude Galileo responded that "You were the flrst one, and practically
the only one, to have complete faith in my assertions."24 It was one of the
very rare times that the Italian deigned to write directly to his German con-
temporary.
But, within months of these cosmic events, Kepler's world suddenly
collapsed: his wife and several children became seriously ill and died,
Prague tumed into a war zone as the Thirty Years' War heated up, and his
patron Rudolf II was forced to abdicate. It was, Kepler said, "an altogether
dismal and calamitous year."25 The lonely astronomer sought a quieter
horne in Linz, where the authorities pressed hirn to get on with the Tabulae
Rudolphina for computing planetary positions. "Don't sentence me com-
pletely to the treadmill of mathematical calculations," he pleaded to a corre-
spondent, "leave me time for philosophical speculations, my sole
delight. "26
In 1617, Kepler was obliged to travel back to Württemberg to look af-
ter his Mother' s witchcraft trial, which was a showcase for human fears,
greed, and stupidity; he took along a book by Galilei for reading on the
joumey27-not by the astronomer Galileo, but by his father, the musician
Vincenzo. Kepler had remained interested in the relationship of musical
harmony to geometry, and soon after writing the Mysterium he had outlined
a more ambitious book on celestial harmonies. In his correspondence,
Kepler continually retumed to his notions about harmony in the cosmos.
Vincenzo Galilei's Dialogo della musica antica e moderna surely helped
rekindle his interest in musical theory. Even though Galilei rejected the
multi-voiced polyphony of his day, which was to play such a fundamental

23 Edward Rosen (trans.), Kepler' s Conversation with Galileo' s Sidereal Messenger (New York,
1965), p. 11.
24 Galileo to Kepler, 19 August 1610, JKGW 16, nr. 587:1-2.
25 Kepler to Peter Crüger, 1 March 1615, JKGW 17, nr. 710:13.
26 Kepler to Vincenzo Bianchi, 17 February 1619, JKGW 17, nr. 827:249-51
27 Kepler to Wacker von Wackenfels, early 1618, JKGW 17, nr. 783:2lff. Vincenzo Galilei's
Dialogo della musica antica e modema was published in Florence in 1581 and reprinted there in
1602. On Galileo's father, see the articles in this volwne by Howard Brown (esp. n. 1) and
Claude Palisca. See also D. P. Walker, "Vincenzo Galilei and Zarlino," in Studies in Musical
Science in the Late Renaissance (London, 1978), pp. 14-26. A useful summary of Vincenzo's
life and works is in Chiara Orsini, "Vincenzo Galilei," 11 Fronimo 62 (1988), pp. 7-28.
54 OWEN GINGERICH

role in Kepler's harmony of the world, Galilei's book became Kepler's

most quoted musical source (see Plate 2). By now Kepler realized that in his
earlier works he had not addressed a critical question: the theoretical
foundation of the musical scale itself. He had thus far only established
certain harmonic intervals. Yet, he wrote, "since the harmonic proportions
are infinite, our knowledge, as far as it goes, is still rough, unpolished,
unnoticed, and unnamed, and heaped together or, rather, scattered like some
mass of rough stones or timber; the next thing is for us to proceed to polish
them, to attach names to them, and finally to construct from them the
splendid edifice of the harmonic system, that is, the musical scale.'>28
Let us look at how Kepler proceeded to construct the musical scale
mathematically, keeping in mind that the construction he defends is not new
with hirn but, rather, is one of several mentioned by Ptolemy and the one
discussed and favored by Kepler' s Italian contemporary Giuseppe Zarlino.
Let us consider the ratios between certain of the harmonies in Kepler's
earlier table:

G Bb B C D Eb E G'
120 100 96 90 80 75 72 60

The ratio of the interval D/C is 8/9, whereas C/Bb is 9/10 and C/B is 15/16.
These are, respectively, the major whole tone, the minor whole tone, and
the semitone, and for Kepler they provide the basic units for building the
scale. 29 Note that successive ratios of 8/9,9110 and 15/16 yield, by multi-
plication, 3/4, which is the interval of the fourth between G and C. This
pattern suggests that an intermediate note (A) between G and Bb or B ought
to have a ratio of8J9 with the fundamental G; the resulting diatonic se-
quence, G-A-B-C, is the so-called tetrachord derived from ancient Greek
musical theory. Likewise, the high G can have a ratio of 8/9 with the other
intermediate note, F, and the sequence D-E-F-G is also a tetrachord. Kepler
noted that the tetrachords could have different patterns of whole and half
steps, just as in the major and minor scales,30 and he prepared a large grid
of possible combinations of the different tetrachords.

28 Harmonice mundi, JKGW 6, 114:5-11, Book 3, chapter 2; English translation by E. I.

Aiton, A. M. Duncan, and I. V. Field.
29 The musical notation is nicely discussed by Elliott Carter, Ir., in a long technical footnote
in GBWW, pp. 1026-28.
30 Harmonice mundi, JKGW 6, 152. The notion of major and minor scales was just in the
process of formation, and Kepler's use of "dumm" (or hard) and "molle" (or soft) does not fully
match the modem use; D. P. Walker (n. 9) points out that Kepler generally uses "dumm" when a
scale or chord contains aB and "molle" when it contains a B-flat, as was common at the time.
 f
f
~
~
f~
~
~
~
S
PLATE 2. Manuscript page of Kepler's notes on Galilei's Dialogue on Ancient and Modern Music.
showing tetrachords (St. Petersburg Kepler Archive. volume XXI, fo1. 136v).
~
56 OWEN GINGERICH

If the fundamental is held as 120, it is no Ion ger possible to work out these
ratios with integers, but we can do it easily with the string length
renumbered as 720. U sing the following sequence of ratios to generate the
scale, we get the string lengths shown on the subsequent line:

8/9 9/10 15/16 8/9 15/16 9/10 8/9

720 640 576 540 I 480 450 405 360
G ABC D Eb F G'
This combination of tetrachords does not create a very pleasant scale, as the
two semitones or half steps (B-C and D-Eb) are too near each other. Hence
Kepler makes the following interchange in the first tetrachord to produce a
rninor seale:

8/9 15/16 9/10 8/9 15/16 9/10 8/9

720 640 600 540 I 480 450 405 360
G A Bb C D Eb F G'
AIternatively the sernitone in the upper tetrachord can be rearranged to pro-
duce what he called a "major" scale (cantus durus)-a scale in the
Mixolydian mode:

8/9 9/10 15/16 8/9 9/10 15/16 8/9

720 640 576 540 I 480 432 405 360
G ABC D E F G'

These particular string lengths correspond to wh at is called "just intona-

tion," and Kepler found them both mathernatically and musically satisfying.
Whether singers unaccompanied by tuned instruments could actually keep
these pitches was another matter. Kepler, having read both Zarlino and
Galilei, was aware of their acrimonious debate as to whether contemporary
a capella singing was in just intonation, as the former believed, or a tem-
pered scale, as Vincenzo Galilei correct1y argued. Kepler, for reasons of
mathematical harmony, preferred the just scale, and he feIt that Galilei's at-
tempts at tempering the sc ale were, from a theoretical viewpoint, "ruinous":

See another very clever tempering of this sott by Vincenzo Galilei,

made not in ignorance of the mathematical size of the notes, but
with a particular intention. And I indeed recognize its mechanical
function, so that in instruments we can enjoy alm ost the same
 KEPLER, GAULEI, ANDTIIEHARMONY OFTHE WORLD 57

freedom of tuning as can the human voice. However for theorizing,

and even more for investigating the nature of melody, I consider it
ruinous; and the effect of it is that the instrument never truly at-
tains the nobility of the human voice. 31

We have, incidentally, just seen the origin of the magie number 720,
the systema diapason duplex, that Kepler claimed was the reason for the
sun's apparent size in the sky being In20 of the entire ecliptic circle. But
Kepler's love for the just intonation went much deeper than this. For years
he had puzzled over the precise spacing of the planets, supposing that the
five Platonie solids had provided a rough template for their arrangement.
However, the fine tuning eluded hirn until he finally began to work out the
harmonic details of their fastest and slowest motions. Kepler claimed that
these planetary speeds, properly transposed, fell into a scale of just intona-
tion. For example, the slowest motion in the solar system is Saturn at
aphelion (farthest from the sun), whieh Kepler placed in correspondence
with a low G. The fastest planetary motion-Mercury at perihelion (closest
to the sun)-is 27 x 720/432 times swifter, whieh corresponds to an E
seven octaves higher. Saturn at perihelion goes 720/576 times faster than at
aphelion, and Jupiter 2 x 720/576 times faster, so each would correspond to
B, though Jupiter's B would be an octave higher than Saturn's.
It is revealing to trace through some of Kepler's calculations in detail,
but rather it is more instructive, and even shocking, to watch his specific
application of the planetary speeds to his scale of just intonation. Since he
rejected the actual speeds of the planets in favor of the apparent angular
speeds as seen from the sun, all that mattered was the period of each planet
and the eccentricity. These data are readily found in his Epitome 0/
Copernican Astronomy and are displayed here in Table 1. The mean daily
motion follows directly from the period,32 and speeds at aphelion and peri-
helion are found by taking the eccentricity into account. 33 Each speed is
then scaled, an octave at a time, by repeated halving until a further step
would take it below the l' 46" Kepler had found for Saturn's aphelion. The
discrepancies between the exact calculations and Kepler's, shown in the al-
ternate lines in italies,34 arise primarily from a variety of approximations
used by Kepler in calculating the eccentric velocities, except for Mercury,

31 Harrnonice mundi, JKGW 6, 145:6-12, Book 3, ehapter 8. English translation by E. J.

Aiton, A. M. Dunean, and J. V. Field.
32 Kepler gives the periods in tenns of Egyptian years of exaetly 365 days.
33 The aphelion and perihelion eolumns are eorrectly found by dividing the mean speeds by (1 +
e)2 and (1 - e)2, respectively.
34 Harmonice mundi,JKGW 6, 321; GBWW, p. 1031.
58 OWEN GINGERICH

where he has quite unconvincingly argued that the extremes must reflect a
slightly diminished mean motion. 35

TABLEI
Planetary Speeds at Aphelion and Perihelion

Period Mean Daily Motion Eccentricity

Saturn 29Y 174d 4h 58ffi = 10759d208 2' 0" 27''' 0.05700

Jupiter 11 317 14 50 4332.625 4 59 8 0.04822
Mars 1 321 23 3 686.979 31 26 31 0.09263
Earth 365 5 49 = 365.2424 59 8 20 0.01800
Venus 224 17 53 224.7451 96 6 32 0.00694
Mercury 87 23 15 87.9688 245 32 30 0.21000

Aphelion Aphelion Perihelion Perihelion

Scaled Scaled

Saturn l' 48" l' 48" 2' 15" 2' 15"

1 48 1 46 215 2 15

Jupiter 4 32 2 16 5 30 2 45
4 30 2 15 5 30 2 45

Mars 2620 3 18 3811 2 23

2614 317 38 1 2 23

Earth 57 4 147 6120 1 55

57 3 147 6118 1 55

Venus 9447 258 9727 3 3

9450 258 9737 3 3

Mercury 16742 237 39326 3 4

164 0 234 384 0 3 0

35 Kepler diminishes the Mercury eccentricity to 0.1736.

 KEPLER, GAULEI, ANDTHE HARMONY OFTHE WORLD 59

Kepler next eonverted his major and minor seales to speeds, taking the
motion of Saturn at aphelion to eorrespond with low G (and then, sirnilarly,
the motion of Saturn at perihelion). It is more revealing, however, to work
the other way and to eonvert the speeds to string lengths in the sc ale in
whieh 720 is the fundamental, and to list them in deseending order:

TABLE2
String lengths corresponding to
pIanetary speeds at Aphelion (A) and Perihelion (P)

Just Saturn Aphelion Saturn Perihelion

Scale "Major Scale" "Minor Scale"

G 360 Earth A 360 G Jupiter A 360 G

MarsA 391 p#
F 405
Venus P 421
Mercury P 428 ...E Earth P 423 ...E
E 432 VenusA 433 E
Eb 450 Earth A 454 ...Eb
Saturn A 459
Jupiter P 468 ...D
D 480 MarsA 493 _D
Mercury A 501 _C
Venus P 531 _C
C 540 MarsP 539 C Mercury P 540 C
Saturn P) Venus A 547 B
576 Jupiter A) 571 B
Bb 600 Jupiter P 590 _Bb
A 640 Mercury A 631 A
Earth P 671 MarsP 680
G 720 Saturn A 727 G Saturn P 720 G

Kepler found more "hits" by sealing from the Earth's aphelion speed
rather than Saturn's aphelion, "But who wants to quarrel about I" in the
motion?" he asks.3 6 The first pattern gives notes in the major seale, but it
has no plaee for the perihelion of Venus or of the Earth. The second pattern,
however, uses both of these and comes out as a rninor seale. There is the

36 Harmonice mundi, JKGW 6, 318:22-23; GBWW, p. 1036.

60 ÜWEN GINGERICH

lack of the F in either pattern, but "indeed in music f# often replaces F, as is

seen everywhere."37 (What Kepler was seeing and hearing was, of course,
the modern G-major scale with the f#.)
Kepler illustrates his wonderful conception with the passages of notes
shown in Figure 3. To the casual reader, it appears that Kepler has shown
thatjust intonation lies in the celestial harmonies. But a careful inspection of
Table 11 reveals what a shambles the scheme really iso All too many corre-
spondences are approximate, as even Kepler admits. (These are designated
with _ in the table.) In a section that folIows, Kepler gives no fewer than
fifty propositions to justify every deviation, and to argue for an intricate set
of interlocking harmonies and tonal intervals. But surely any intonation
could be hammered into such a frame. From anyone else, the carefully-
crafted excuses and scales would be considered the edifice of a madman.
But to Kepler, this was truly Divine Harmony, a geometrical vision
into the mind of God and into the hidden workings of the universe.
"Geometry is coetemal with the Mind of God before the creation of things;
it is God himself, has supplied God with the models for the creating of his
world, and has been directly transferred to man with the image of God,"
Kepler wrote in Book IVofthe Harmonice. 38
How did Kepler's system of geometrical planetary harmonies work in
the real cosmos? Naturally, a planet could resonate with only one note at a
time, and only rarely one of the potentially harmonious notes at the extremes
of its motion. The notes were, of course, silent: "There are no sounds in the
heavens, nor is the movement so turbulent that any noise is made by rub-
bing against the ether."39 Still, the most wise Creator could appreciate these
majestic concordances. And with seven planets simultaneously singing their
silent tones, sometimes in consonance, mostly in dissonance, the celestial
harmonies resembled a grand cosmic polyphony. Swept on by the grandeur
of his vision, Kepler exclaimed:

It should no longer seem strange that man, the ape of his Creator,
has finally discovered how to sing polyphonically, an art unknown
to the ancients. With this symphony of voices man can play
through the eternity of time in less than an hour and can taste in

37 Harmonice mundi,JKGW 6, 319:4; GBWW, p. 1036.

38 Harmonice mundi, abridged from lKGW 6, 323:32-35, Book 4, ehapter 1. English
translation by E. J. Ai1On, A. M. Dunean, and J. V. Field. This eehoes a theme already sounded
in his Conversation with Galileo's Sidereal Messenger, p. 43, where he wrote, "Geometry is
unique and etemal, and it shines in the mind of God. The share of it whieh has been granted 10
man is one of the reasons why he is the image of God."
39 Harmonice mundi,lKGW 6, 311:33-34; translation from GBWW, p. 1030.
 HAR.MONI CIS L IB. v. 207
mnia (infinita in pocentia ) permeantes aau : id quod alicer ame non
pocuic e'xprimi, quam per continuam feriern Notarum interrnedla-
- ~ - .
~--
--
-- ~~~~~f;. ~fiG j
tt-~~--- -~t-
=t~rl~! -= ----
=~~:!~i -- ---...... .. --.- --.-...--.-.............
~acurnus Jupiter Mar~fere Terra ~
.ts
~
-~f:~ -----:rl-~-~ - -~--- ~
-S-=:==~-~~:+ --=-_:~:=:= ~~:~.!: -.~~:.
~:~-~- -:=~:i:::
-e- - '"-
Vcnus Mercurius Hic locum habet etiam) I
Sil
ftl111. Venus fere manet irt unifono non requans renfionis amplitu- ~
dlne vel minimum ex concinnis intervallis. ~
Atqui ftgnatnra dliarum in comtnuni Syfiemate Clavium, & for .. S
PlATE 3. According to Kepler, each planet "sings" a range ofnotes depending on its varying speeds. Mercury, with the most
eccentric orbit and highest speed, has the highest and largest range. It does not descend faster than it ascends-the depiction
is simply the result of the crowding to allow place for the moon at the right From Kepler's Harmonice mundi (1619).
0\
-
62 OWEN GINGERICH

small measure the delight of God the Supreme Artist by calling

forth that very sweet pleasure of the music that imitates God.40

Max Caspar, in his biography Kepler, gave an extended and perceptive

summary of the Harmonice, conc1uding:

Certainly for Kepler this book was his mind's favorite child. Those
were the thoughts to which he clung during the trials of his life and
which brought light to the darkness that surrounded him ... With the
accuracy of the researcher, who arranges and calculates observa-
tions, is united the power of shaping of an artist, who knows about
the image, and the ardor of the seeker for God, who struggles with
the angel. So his Harmonice appears as a great cosmic vision, wo-
yen out of science, poetry, philosophy, theology, mysticism ... 41

For Kepler, the Harmonice was not yet finished-there was still more
to come. In the course of these harmonic investigations, he discovered that
the square of the time (in years) required for a planet to orbit the sun
equaled the cu be of its average distance from the sun (in astronomie al
units).42 "If you want the exact time," Kepler candidly remarked, "it was
conceived on March 8th ofthis year, 1618, but unfelicitously submitted to
calculation and rejected as false, and recalled only on May 15, when by a
new onset it overcame by storm the darkness of my mind with such full
agreement between this idea and my labor of seventeen years on Brahe' s
observations that at first I believed I was dreaming and had presupposed
my result in the initial assumptions. "43
This "harmonie law," one of the permanent achievements of Kepler's
astronomy, gave hirn great pleasure, for it neatly linked the planetary dis-
tances and their periods-the distances that played such a central role in the
nested Platonie solids of the Mysterium, and the velocities or periods that
figured so prominently in the celestial harmonies of the Harmonice mundi.
The discovery made Kepler so ecstatic that he immediately added these
rhapsodic lines to the Introduction of Book V:

Now, since the dawn eight months ago, since the broad daylight
three months ago, and since a few days ago, when the full sun il-
luminated my wonderful speculations, nothing holds me back. I

40 Harmonice mundi, JKGW 6,328; GBWW, p. 1048; my translation.

41 Caspar, Kepler, pp. 288-90, slightly retranslated.
42 More precisely, he found that the ratio between the periodic times
for any two planets is
precisely the ratio of the 3/2 power of their mean distances. Harmonice mundi, JKGW 6,
302:21-23; GBWW, p. 1020.
43 Harmonice mundi, JKGW 6, 302:14-15; GBWW, p. 1020.
 KEPLER, GALILEI, ANDTHEHARMONY OFTHE WORLD 63

yield freely to the sacred frenzy; I dare frankly to confess that I have
stolen the golden vessels of the Egyptians to build a tabemacle for
my God far from the bounds of Egypt. If you pardon me, I shall re-
joice; if you reproach me, I shall endure. The die is cast, and I am
writing the book-to be read either now or by posterity, it matters
not. It can wait a century for a reader, as God himself has waited
six thousand years for a witness.44

Kepler hirnself gave the harmonie law relatively litde emphasis, and it
remained for later scientists to single out its importanee. Nevertheless, it
represents the eulmination of a life-long seareh and illustrates his imagina-
tive approach to the mysteries of the universe. The harmonie law would
prove to be a foundation stone for Isaae Newton's grand gravitation al
synthesis. Thus, Kepler' s great eosmic vision of eelestial harmony-part
fantasy and ehimera-had indeed ultimately brought hirn eloser to the
eternal arehiteeture of bis Creator.

HARvARO-SMITHSONIAN CENTER FOR ASTROPHYSICS

44 Harmonice mundi, IKGW 6,290; GBWW, p. 1010; my translation.

 PARTII:
Symbolical and Philosophical
Perspectives on Galileo and Music
 FREDERICK HAMMOND

THE ARTISTIC PATRONAGE OF THE BARBERINI

AND THE GALILEO AFFAIR

ror Isabei and Laurance Roberts

JUNE 22, 1633: GALll...EO GALILEI, DRESSED in the white habit of a peni-
tent, kneels in Santa Maria sopra Minerva in Rome to renounce his
Copemican teaching. January 20, 1634: in a Roman palace a brilliant audi-
ence watches enthralled as a female figure in armor descends on a trophy of
antique weapons to greet a visiting prince. What conceivable connection can
there be between the two events?
The artistic patronage of the Barberini family in the 1630s and the
Galileo affair are related not as cause and effect, but as parallel effects of a
larger complex of causes. The present discussion of Barberini patronage is
based on five hypotheses. First, that all the important members of the family
of Urban VIII personally influenced artistic projects. Second, that these
artistic projects embodied identifiable goals for the papacy and for the fam-
ily. Third, that these goals were specific and consistent enough to comprise
what we may term a "program." Fourth, that this program was expressed in
a coherent symbolic language. Fifth and last, that the Barberini program
changed in emphasis and forum in response to political and intellectual
events-including the Galileo case-:-during the two decades of Urban
VIII's pontificate.1 In the early years of his reign the program was con-
ceived largely in political terms and reflected primarily the pope's own
ideals. In later years, it gradually shifted from the realm of practical politics
to that of public relations, with symbolic events becoming correspondingly
more important. Rome rather than Europe became the principal theater of the
Barberini pro gram, and it came increasingly under the direction of the
pope's three nephews. This change accelerated at the period of the Galileo
trial and its aftermath, and the Galileo affair played its part in this evolution.

1 The Barberini program is demonstrated in two important recent studies: Patricia Waddy,
Seventeenth-Century Roman Palaces: Use and the Art o[ the Plan (New York and Cambridge,
MA., 1990), for the architecture of the old Barberini "Casa Grande" ai Giubbonari and the new
palace at the Quattro Fontane; and lohn Beldon Scott, Images o[ Nepotism: The Painted
Ceilings o[ Palazzo Barberini (Princeton, 1991), for the decoration of the Quattro Fontane
palace.
67
V. Coelho (ed.), Music and Science in the Age ofGalileo, 67-89.
© 1992 Kluwer Academic Publishers.
68 FREDERICKHAMMOND

The earlier stages of the Barberini program followed a traditional pattem. 2

The crucial step in the upward mobility of the Barberini was taken by Urban
VIII's unc1e Francesco, who moved from Florence to Rome in the mid-
sixteenth century. He obtained lucrative offices at the papal court, amassed
and inherited a fortune, and purchased a small palace in the heart of old
Rome. Of undistinguished Tuscan origin, the Barberini began to recreate
their family as a Florentine noble house. They changed the form of their
name to encourage the impression that they had been territorial lords and
altered their arms from three rather plebian silver horse-flies on a red field to
three gold bees on a blue background, dropping in the process the wool-
shears that indicated the original source of their prosperity. A tenuous
connection with the fourteenth-century poet Francesco da Barberino was re-
vived to provide a patina of "old" culture.
The intellectual and literary ability of Francesco Barberini's nephew
Maffeo--the future Urban VIII-was ideal for building an ecc1esiastical ca-
reer on this solid foundation. After his graduation from Pisa with a
doctorate of both laws, Maffeo became Governor of Fano, Bishop of
Spoleto, papal nuncio to Paris (where he received the cardinalate), and
Legate of Bologna. On returning to Rome he set hirnself up in princely, or
rather prelatial, style, enlarging the family palace and commissioning a
family chapel. Maffeo was a poet of genuine gifts, working in Italian,
Greek, and Latin, and published as early as 1606. His poetry was guided
by the principle of delectare et docere, to inculcate moral instruction by the
beauty of the poetry, and was often expressed in visual images. He was an
early patron of Caravaggio, and by 1623 he had already received the dedi-
cations of several books of music and an important work on symbolic
imprese. 3 On 6 August 1623 Maffeo Barberini was elected to the papacy at
the unusually early age of fifty-six (Plate 1).

2 For a detailed but revisionist history of the Barberini see Pio Pecchiai, I Barberini, in
Archivi: Archivi d'ltalia e Rassegna Internazionale degli Archivi (Rome, 1959) and Waddy,
Seventeenth-Century Roman Palaces; on upward mobility see Francis Haskell, Patrons and
Painters (New York, 1971), pp. 3-23. For the careers of Urban VIII and his family I have fol-
lowed Ludwig Freiherr von Pastor, Geschichte der Päpste seit dem Ausgang des Mittelalters
(Freiburg in Breisgau, 1886-1889), and various translations, whose account of the pope is
based largely on the manuscript life by Nicoletti, and the relevant entries in the Dizionario bi-
ograjico degli italiani (Rome, 1960--).
3 Teatro d'lmprese di Giovanni Ferro al/'lll.mo e R.mo S.r Card.nal Barberino ... in Venetia,
MDCXXlll Appresso Giacomo Sarzina. The Barberini interest and expertise in symbolic repre-
sentation is further demonstrated by the fact that Urban's nephew Taddeo owned two copies of
Cesare Ripa's lconologia and had borrowed another one from his brother Francesco (Rome,
Archivio di Stato, Not. A. C., 6601, fols. 912ff.; Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Barb. lat.
3097, fol. 4). On Maffeo Barberini and Caravaggio, see Haskell, Patrons and Painters, p. 25.
 1HE BARBERINI AND THE GALILEO AFFAIR

PLATEI: Pope Urban VIII (Maffeo Barberini) by Gianlorenzo Bemini,

engraved by Claude Mellan
70 F'REDERICK HAMMOND

To read intelligently the response of the Barberini to the Galileo affair, it is

necessary to see how Urban VIII and his family employed symbolic
statement. Beginning with the new pope's choice of the name Urbanus, his
program was consciously expressed in symbols and images. Since the last
distinguished holder of the name had been Urban 11, who preached the fIrst
Crusade, the new Urban linked himself both with the Roman civic heritage
and with the Church militant and triumphant while avoiding identifIcation
with any recent pontifIcate.4 This fusion of old and new Rome, a recurring
theme of Urban' s program, was embodied in his possesso, the ceremonial
cavalcade in which a new pope took possession of Classical and Christian
Rome. Starting from St. Peter's, the traditional site of the fIrst pope's mar-
tyrdom and burial, the procession moved to the Campidoglio, the seat of
Roman civil govemment, and culminated at the Lateran basilica with the
pope' s enthronement as Bishop of Rome. The triumphal arch that the City
hastily erected on the Campidoglio for the occasion-"Rome dedicating her-
self to Urban"-was approached up the hill by statues symbolizing the
virtues of the new pope. It was decorated with his arms and with scenes of
important events in his life, and was crowned by fIgures from Roman sa-
cred and secular history illustrating the duties and powers of the papacy
(Plate 2).
These symbols were still valid for Urban. The primary objective of his
religious program was "the conservation of the Catholic religion where it is,
and its restitution and propagation where it is not," as his nuncio to Paris
was instructed. 5 Urban intended to restore the papacy to its historic influ-
ence, to guarantee the peace of Italy and of Europe by mediating between
France and Spain. He even claimed the right, asserted in the decorations for
the possesso, to depose secular rulers in defense of the Church. Armed
force was an integral part of this program: the new universal pastor built
fortresses in northem Italy, added breastworks to Castel Sant' Angelo, cre-
ated a major harbor at Civitavecchia, and installed an armory in the Vatican
itself.
Urban implemented bis symbolic possession of Church and State in the
promotion of his relatives. His immediate family in Rome consisted of two
brothers, Carlo and Antonio, and three nephews: Carlo's sons Francesco,
Taddeo, and Antonio, Jr., aged respectively twenty-six, twenty, and sixteen

4 Compare, in our own time, the dissociation with previous regimes expressed by Cardinal
Roncalli in naming himself lohn XXIII and the synthesis attempted in Cardinal Luciani's
choice of the name lohn Paul I.
5 Cardinal Francesco Barberini in Auguste Leman, Recueil des instructions generales aux
nonces ordinaires de France de 1624 a1634 (Paris, 1920), p. 89.
 THE BARBERINI AND THE GALß..EO AFFAIR 71

PLATE 2: Agostino Mascardi,Le pompe dei Campidoglio (Rome, 1624)

72 FREDERICK HAMMOND

at their uncle' s accession. Despite his unworldliness, the eIder Antonio-an

ascetic Capuchin monk-was named a cardinal, Librarian of the Vatican,
Grand Penitentiary, and eventually Cardinal Secretary of the Inquisition
(and a member of the committee that sentenced Galileo). The pope's other
brother, Don Carlo, became General of the Church, Governor of Borgo,
Castellan of Castel Sant' Angelo (the papal Fort Knox), and later Duke of
Monterotondo and Prince of Palestrina.
Of Carlo's three sons, the eldest, Francesco, was made cardinal-
nephew, Urban's flrst creation. Taddeo, like his father, remained a layman
to perpetuate the family by marrying into the old Roman baronial nobility;
on Carlo's death Taddeo inherited his military posts and their incomes as
weIl as his father's titles and properties. In 1631 the Della Rovere family of
Urbino became extinct, and Urban conferred their hereditary title of Prince
Prefect of Rome on Don Taddeo. The third nephew, Antonio, became a
cardinal in 1627, over Francesco's objections. Owing to the deaths of the
nephews of two previous popes in the course of Urban's reign, the greatest
beneflces of the Church fell one by one to the younger Barberini cardinals:
the abbacies of Pomposa, Farfa, and Grottaferrata, protectorates of religious
orders, countries, and the Cappella Pontificia, the archpresbyteries of Santa
Maria Maggiore, the Lateran, and St. Peter's, legations to France, Spain,
and Urbino, the posts of Secretary of Breves, Vice-Chancellor of the
Church, and finally Chamberlain of the Church, who functioned as pope
during an interregnum.
These sacred and secular offlces produced enormous revenues, much
of which were spent on the magnificences appropriate to Renaissance
princes: family churches, chapels, and palaces; the support of writers,
artists, and artisans; the encouragement of knowledge in the form of learned
academies, libraries, and publications; the collection and display of precious
objects; the funding of public events such as processions, operas, dramatic
performances, fireworks, banquets, religious ceremonies; and simple con-
spicuous consumption. 6 The Barberini vision could be described as a
Renaissance papacy like that of Leo X Medici, ruIed by a pope with the
powers of the medieval Gregory VII, and establishing the papal familyon
the scale of Paul III and the Farnese.

6 See Werner L. Gundersheimer, "Patronage in the Renaissance: An Exploratory Approach,"

Patronage in the Renaissance, ed. G. F. Lytle and Stephen Orgel (Princeton, 1981), pp. 3-23,
and Charles Hope, "Artists, Patrons, and Advisers in the Italian Renaissance," Patronage in the
Renaissance, pp. 293-343. On Barberini and papal revenues see Johannes Grisar, S. J.,
"Päpstliche Finanzen, Nepotismus und Kirchemecht unter Urban VIII," Miscellanea Historiae
Pontificiae (Rome, 1943), pp. 207-366.
 THE BARBERINI AND THE GALILEO AFFAIR 73

Urban' s accession was welcomed by his honored friend Galileo as a

"mirabil congiuntura"-a profound phrase expressing both the astrological
determination of Urban's election (a theme later embodied in the ceiling
frescoes of Palazzo Barberini) and its adventitious character. "I am turning
over in my mind things of some moment for the republic of letters," Galileo
wrote, "which if they are not carried out in this marvelous conjunction, it is
not the case, at least for what is expected on my part, to hope ever to en-
counter another one like it."7 In anticipation of a new golden age, the poet
Giovanni Battista Marino hurried back to Italy from Paris, crowing that "we
have a pope who is a poet, a virtuoso, and our great friend." (At Marino's
death, his "great friend" immediately placed Marino's masterpiece,
L' Adone, on the Index.)8 Francesco Stelluti of the Accademia dei Lincei,
Rome's premier scientific academy, wrote to Galileo ofUrban vrn, "we are
about to have a supreme patronage. He greatly loves our prince [Federico
Cesi, head of the Lincei], and .. .immediately named our Virginio Cesarini
his Maestro di Camera [head of the pope's private household]; and
Monsignor Ciampoli not only remains in his office as Secretary of Letters to
Princes, but has also been made Cameriere Segreto; and Cavalier Dal
Pozzo, also our Linceo, will serve the nephew of the Pope, the one that will
be Cardinal [Francesco]."9 In addition to Cesi, the poets Cesarini and
Ciampoli, and the antiquarian Dal Pozzo, the predominantly Tuscan intellec-
tual circle of Urban vrn included Bernini and Pietro da Cortona, the com-
posers Johann Hieronymus Kapsberger and Domenico Mazzocchi, the
lutenist Giuseppe Baglioni, the ex-Jesuit rhetorician and historian Agostino
Mascardi, the humanist Francesco Bracciolini delI' Api, the writer and art-
collector Lelio Guidiccioni, and the renegade scientist-monk Tommaso
Campanella. lO And, of course, Galileo himself, corresponding member in
Florence.

7 Galileo in Bellosguardo to Federico Cesi in Rome, 9 Oetober 1623. Seott, Images o[

Nepotism, pp. 80-81, points out that Tommaso Campanella employed the term "Congiuntione
Magna" for the proximity of Jupiter and Satum that foretold the eleetion of Urban VIll. Cf.
Pietro Redondi, Galileo eretico ([urin, 1983); trans. Raymond Rosenthai as Galileo: Heretic
(Prineeton, 1987), pp. 85-134. (Page referenees are to the Italian original.) This brilliant work
eontains some eurious lapses, sueh as the misidentifieation of 6 February 1626, a Friday, as
"giovedf grasso" (p. 85), eompounded in the English by a non-existent "Holy Thursday, the
last day of Carnival" (trans., p. 68). Sinee the year is elsewhere identified as Holy Year, whieh
began on Christmas Eve 1624 and ended a year later, presumably 1625 (when 6 February did
fa\l on a Thursday) is meant rather than 1626.
8 On Marino and Urban VIll see Mare Fumaroli, L' inspiration du poete de Poussin (Paris, 1989).
9 Stelluti in Rome to Galileo in Florenee, 12 August 1623.
10 Pastor, The History o[ the Popes, trans. Dom Emest Graf (London, 1938), vol. XXVIll, pp.
49-51, 419-434.
74 FREDERICK HAMMOND

The primary task of the writers and artists under the "supreme patron-
age" of Urban VIII was to implement the Barberini program by glorifying
the pope and his farnily. Maseardi designed the ieonographie program for
Urban's possesso and published an aeeount of the oeeasion. Work began
on an immense farnily palaee uniting the efforts of Mademo, Borromini,
and Bemini, to be freseoed by Pietro da Cortona and Andrea Saeehi on a
seale unpreeedented in Roman seeular arehiteeture. Kapsberger and
Mazzoeehi set Urban's poems to music. Composers and poets of the papal
cirele vied to eelebrate the wedding of Don Taddeo and Anna Colonna.
Eneomiastie works poured from the pens of Urban' s literary eircle-it took
Ludwig von Pastor a whole ehapter to eatalogue them.
The patronage of eaeh Barberini had its own eharaeter, eventually re-
fleeted direet1y or indireet1y in their reaetion to the Galileo ease. Owing to
the historie al aecidents of surviving documentation, it is easier to diseem the
artistie tastes ofUrban's nephews than of the pope himself. l1 We do know
at least one instanee of Urban's personal intervention as a patron. The
eommission for the great eeiling freseo of the salone in the Palazzo
Barberini had been given to Andrea Carnassei, a seeond-rate painter patron-
ized by Don Taddeo. The pope reassigned the commission to Pietro da
Cortona, who worked to a program by Franeeseo Braeeiolini in whieh
Urban himself had substituted the figure of Divine Providenee for the Jove
of the original seheme. 12 True to his principle of instruetion by delight,
Urban demanded an artist of the highest quality and clothed the exaltation of
his family in Christian imagery. Inereasingly, the pope's personal patronage
focused on Bemini's projeets in the basiliea of St. Peter, which the pope
eonseerated in 1626: Urban's tomb, eommissioned at the beginning of his
reign, the baldaeehino of the high altar (1624-1633), and the eentral eross-
ing eomplex (1627-1641).13

11 The pope's fmances were handled by the Reverenda Camera Apostolica: see Maria Grazia
Pastura Ruggiero, La Reverentia Camera Apostolica e i suoi archivi (secoli xv-xviii) (Rome,
1984). On the Barberini financial records see Luigi Fiorani, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana,
Archivio Barberini, Indexes (Vatican City, 1978-1980), and Frederick Hammond, "More on
Music in Casa Barberini," Studi Musicali 14 (1985), pp. 235-262. Urban had a passion for
hearing poetry set to music. He received numerous musical settings of his own poetry, praised
the Sistine Chapei performance of a Palestrina mass, accepted the dedications of two collec-
tions of old-style masses by Kapsberger and Landi, and is said to have paid Baglioni the
astonishing salary of one thousand ducats a year; see my forthcoming study on the musical
ratronage of the Barberini.
2 Scott,Images 0/ Nepotism, pp. 125-179.
13 See Irving Lavin, Bernini anti the Crossing 0/ St. Peter's (New York, 1968) and Franco
Borsi, Bernini (Milan, 1980). Urban's attention was also given 10 details, as when he commis-
sioned an altarpiece for the relatively unimportant church of San Sebastiano in Campo Vaccino
 THE BARBERINI AND THE GALILEO AFFAIR 75

Cardinal Francesco Barberini's copious financial records document bis

artistic tastes more clearly. Among his artists we find Nicolas Poussin,
Simon Vouet, Pietro da Cortona, and Claude Mellan. Francesco' s com-
posers included Kapsberger, Girolamo Frescobaldi, Stefano Landi,
Domenico and Virgilio Mazzocchi, and Marco Marazzoli. His former secre-
tary Giovanni Battista Doni became the most important Roman student of
ancient music. Francesco's other antiquarian interests, which inc1uded the
study and publication of Greek texts, were guided by Cassiano Dal Pozzo,
hirnself an influential patron of Poussin. Although his own musical tastes
seem to have leaned toward the late-Renaissance madrigal, Francesco was
largely responsible for the great age of Roman opera between 1631 and
1643, presenting during Carnival one and sometimes two operatic produc-
tions to texts by the young Tuscan Giulio Rospigliosi, the future Pope
Clement IX.14 Despite the sometimes bitter rivalry between Francesco and
Antonio, on such occasions instruments, composers, artists, and perform-
ers were shared among the Barberini nephews.
The household of Don Taddeo Barberini inc1uded Galileo's friend the
hydraulist Dom Benedetto Castelli, appointed by the pope as tutor to the
young prince. Cardinal Francesco praised Taddeo's taste and refinement
and attributed to hirn an important role in the perfection of the new Palazzo
Barberini. Taddeo employed the composer and performer Michelangelo
Rossi in 1630 and 1633, and maintained a dancing-master and a castrato
singer as members of his household. (Although the practice of castration
was condemned by the Jesuits, the highest-paid soloists of the period were
the castrato singers of the papal chapel, on whom all three of the Barberini
musical establishments depended for festal occasions.)15 Don Taddeo's
corps of pages furnished choruses and dancers (usually for a warlike
moresca) for the family operas. In 1633 Taddeo presented his one opera,
the Michelangelo Rossi/Rospigliosi Erminia sul Giordano, with sets de-
signed by Camassei.
The younger Cardinal Antonio Barberini's patronage was expended
more in spectac1e and music than in architecture or major projects in the

(the Forum), specifying in the contract not only the subject but even the number of figures
(Haskell, Patrons und Painters, p. 10).
14 In addition to the Dizionario biografico entries, see Margaret Murata, Operas tor the Papal
Court 1631-1668 (Ann Arbor, 1981), and Hanunond, "More on Music in Casa Barberini," Studi
Musicali 14 (1985), pp. 235-62 and "Girolamo Frescobaldi and a Decade of Music in Casa
Barberini," Analecta Musicologica 19 (1979), pp. 94-124.
15 On the controversy about castrati see Redondi, Galileo eretico, pp. 317-318; Franca
Trinchieri Camiz, "The Castrato Singer: From Informal to Formal Portraiture," Artibus et
Historiae 18 (1988), pp. 171-186. For Francesco Barberini's manuscript life of Don Taddeo see
Waddy, Seventeenth-Century Roman Palaces, pp. 331-341.
76 FREDERICK flAMMOND

visual ans. He presented a splendidjoust in Piazza Navona in 1634, and in

1639 he underwrote the celebrations for the centenary of the Jesuit Order.
His most significant contribution to the Palazzo Barberini, the addition of a
theatre seating some 3,500-4,000 people, was completed in the same
year. 16 In 1642 Antonio produced there his one venture into opera, Luigi
Rossi's setting of Rospigliosi's Il palazzo incantato, a fantasy on themes
from Ariosto with designs by the Cardinal's favorite painter, Andrea
Sacchi. Cardinal Antonio's musical establishment centered on brilliant
singer-composers: Loreto Vittori, Mare' Antonio Pasqualini (Plate 3),
Lorenzo Sances, Luigi Rossi (all of them featured in the Palazzo incantato),
as weH as the harpist and composer Marco Marazzoli. The most significant
musical remains of Antonio's household comprise manuscript volumes of
sacred and secular cantatas.
The works of an created for Urban VIII and his nephews stated ele-
ments of the family program in a variety of ways. The most grandiose of
these declarations was the new Palazzo Barberini at the Quattro Fontane,
whose unique H-shaped plan has puzzled architectural historians. Recently,
it has been explained convincingly as a symbolic representation of the papal
family: the left-hand wing the residence of the family prince, the right-hand
one the residence of the family cardinal, and the great salone joining them
which looks out over a huddle of undistinguished buildings across Rome to
St. Peter's, the image of the pope, the unifying source of power and
legitimacy,I7
The more ephemeral productions of the Barberini, such as books,
plays, and operas embodied other symbolic messages. Cardinal Francesco's
first publication was a presentation volume advertising his own restoration
of the Lateran basilica, Nicolo Alemanni's De lateranensibus parietinis
(Rome, 1625). During Camival of 1632, Don Taddeo Barberini presented a
sacred drama, La regina Esther, a story synonymous with obedience and
loyalty to one's own, presumably acknowledging the dignity of Prince
Prefect of Rome conferred on hirn the preceding August. The publication in
1642 of Girolamo Teti's description of the Barberini palace, IEdes
Barberinte, dedicated to Cardinal Antonio, and the Cardinal's production of
Il Palazzo incantato the same year commemorated the younger cardinal's
supplanting of his two brothers in the "enchanted palace" at the Quattro
Fontane.
The works of art produced for the Barberini were identified by the
family emblems: the olive branch of peace; the lyre and laurel of poetic

16Waddy, Seventeenth-Century Roman Palaces, pp. 246-248.

17Waddy, Seventeenth-Century Roman Palaces, pp. 179-244.
 TIm BARBERINI AND THE GALILEO AFFAIR 77

PLATE 3: Mare' Antonio Pasqualini by Andrea Sacchi (New Yorlc,

The Metropolitan Museum of Art)
78 F'REDERICK HAMMOND

achievement; the sun of beneficence; and the ubiquitous Barberini bees, ob-
served by Francesco Stelluti through the microscope that Galileo brought to
Rome in 1624, composed heraldically for a broadside (Melissographia)
dedicated to Urban VIII by the Lincei, rendered in in two dimensions by
Cortona and in three by Bernini (Fontana delle api, 1644). The bees and the
other farnily emblems were worked into symbolic and allegorical complexes
in such masterpieces as Bernini' s baldacchino and the ceiling frescoes of the
new Palazzo Barberini, created during the years of the Galileo affair.
(Andrea Sacchi's Divine Wisdom, painted under the direct supervision of
the Barberini and finished in 1630, appears in fact to represent a heliocentric
universe.)18 The Barberini arms also formed part of the symbolic complex
on the title-page ofGalileo's Saggiatore: "we have decided to engrave the
title-page in copper," Francesco Stelluti wrote Galileo, "and to dedicate the
book in the name of the Academy to the Pope, where there will go his arms
and the arms of the Academy, with two statues, the one representing natural
philosophy and the other mathematics."19
Urban VIII was notoriously superstitious, and he shared with his
nephews a belief in symbolic images that surfaced in the Galileo affair. On
Stefano Della Bella' s engraved title-page of the Dialogue on the Great World
Systems, there appears a device of three dolphins employed by the printer,
G. B. Landini. The Dominican Niccolo Riccardi, who as Master of the
Sacred Palace had licensed the publication of the Dialogo, "conveyed to
me"-the writer is Filippo Magalotti-"with great secrecy that there had
been much consideration about the device, which I believe is on the title-
page of the book ... these three dolphins, one holding in its mouth the tail of
the other." Although Magalotti assured hirn that Galileo "did not consider
such low and trifling matters," Riccardi instructed the Florentine inquisitor
"to inform hirnself immediately, whether the device of the three fish is the
printer's or Sr. Galilei's, and manage adroitly to write me its meaning."20
Why did this elegantly innocuous decoration cause so much concern to
the Barberini? It has been suspected of concealing Masonic meanings or of
conveying a possible satire on the three papal nephews. In Italian, delfino
means both "dolphin" and "Dauphin," and the eternal round of the three
mammals, each attacking the tail of the next, could indeed be taken as a

18 For the Bemini fountain, see Borsi, Bernini, pp. 311-312; for the ceiling frescoes, Scott,
Images 0/ Nepotism, p. 38.
19 Stelluti in Rome to Galileo in Florence, 8 September 1623.
20 Filippo Magalotti in Rome to Mario Guiducci in Florence, 7 August 1632; Niccolo Riccardi
in Rome to Clemente Egidii in Florence, 25 July 1632.
 THE BARBERINI AND THE GALILEO AFFAIR 79

visual pasquinade on the ceaseless and self-defeating consumption of the

three heirs to the francophile Urban VIII.
In order to understand such references to current events, it is necessary
at this point to refer briefly to the political context of the Galileo affair.
Theoretically, in the chaotic events subsumed under the general heading of
the Thirty Years' War, Catholic Europe opposed Protestant Europe. In fact,
there were numerous cross- and sub-alliances on both sides (in addition to
the Turkish threat on the border of Christian Europe). Catholic France
joined the Protestant Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden in opposing Catholic
Spain, with covert encouragement from the papacy. Anti-papal Venice
tended to support the opponents of the pope. Spain was technically allied
with the Empire, whose financial demands pushed the Spanish economy
into bankruptcy; their relationship was further complicated by the fact that
the King of Spain was the riyal claimant and heir to the Empire. In the first
decade ofUrban's reign these conflicts erupted in Italy, first in the Valtellina
and then in the War of the Mantuan Succession, both of them failures for
papal diplomacy. The German soldiers who sacked Mantua in 1630 brought
with them the Plague, which spread north to Venice (through Claudio
Monteverdi' s librettist Alessandro Striggio) and southward to Bologna,
Florence, and Rome, literally decimating populations. 21
In 1631, at the height of the Plague, all these knots began to come to
the comb, as the Italians say. In January France had signed a treaty of al-
liance with Gustavus Adolphus against the Hapsburgs. On Good Friday the
Jesuits opened their attack on Galileo and on the liberal francophile tenden-
eies of the papacy in the sermon preached by Orazio Grassi before Urban
VIII in the Sistine Chapel. In case there was any doubt of his ultimate tar-
get, in flaying Galileo's Dialogue, Grassi-himself an architect-took as
his image "The edifice that with its hands Divine Wisdom had erected." The
new Palazzo Barberini was still abuilding, and the paint was hardly dry on
Sacchi's fresco of the Divina Sapienza. 22 The house of Divine Wisdom,

21 On the political history of the period see Geoffrey Parker, Europe in Crisis 1598·1648
(lthaca, 1979). For descriptions of the Plague in Tuscany see Carlo Cipolla, Cristofarw e la
peste (Bologna, 1976), and Eric Cochrane, Florence in the Forgotten Centuries (Chicago,
1973). Colin Ronan, Galileo (New York, 1974), contains some interesting visual material, in-
c1uding a rare engraving of the treatment of the Plague in Rome (p. 190) and a portrait of
Benedetto Castelli (p. 147).
22 Scott, Images of Nepotism, pp. 34-35. Teti, in the A!des Barberina! of 1642, made the par-
allelism explicit, describing an occasion on which Urban VIII sat under the Sacchi ceiling
while a lesson from the Book of Wisdom was read as a threefold epiphany of the Divine
Wisdom, "her Divine and lucid Archetype in the Holy Writ, her prototype in Urban and her rep-
resentation in the painting" (Scott, p. 95).
80 FREDERICK HAMMOND

Grassi thundered, "that eternal temple of the peace between God and men,
is dernolished by impious pillagers, destroyed, razed to the ground.''23
Urban's ability to resist Spanish and Jesuit pressure was eroded by the
defeat of France in the War of the Mantuan Succession. In 1631-1632
Gustavus Adolphus was more successful than his French allies had antici-
pated, charging into the Catholic German confederation with a success that
surprised even himself, and taking Prague and half the Empire. In early
March of 1632 the pope's negotiations with France were denounced before
the College of Cardinals by Cardinal Borgia, who also functioned as a
Spanish ambassador; the eIder Cardinal Antonio Barberini, the pope's
brother, had to be restrained from attacking Borgia physically.24 By May,
Gustavus Adolphus had invaded Bavaria and was ready to cross the Alps.
Francophile intellectuals and artists such as Dal Pozzo, Poussin, and
Campanella retired or fled. The Jesuits celebrated their return to power by
banning the teaching of atomism, offering as a sop to Urban VIII a splendid
new edition of his poems on whose admonitory title-page Bernini depicted
David, the poet-king, strangling a lion, presumably representing Heresy.
Galileo's Dialogue, published in Florence February 1632, was precipi-
tated into the midst of this political turmoil. Copies reached Rome by May,
and by July the book was informally banned. Between mid-August and
mid-September Urban's special comrnission on the Dialogo met five times
in an attempt to keep the book out of the hands of the Holy Office, but the
influence of the pope and the anti-Hapsburg alliance plummeted anew in
November with the death of Gustavus Adolphus at the battle of Lützen. The
year closed with celebrations in Rome for the death of the King of Sweden
and the succession of his Catholic cousin as King of Poland.
In April of 1633 Galileo arrived in Rome and his trial began. The ten
Cardinal Inquisitors included Gaspare Borgia, the pope's Ieading opponent
in the Sacred College; the eIder Antonio Barberini; the implacable
Dominican Desiderio Scaglia, who had been suspected of trying to invali-
date the election of Urban VIII; Guido Bentivoglio as Supreme Inquisitor
General; and Francesco Barberini himself as Secretary General of the
Commission. On June 22 the trial ended with Galileo's abjuration.
What the Barberini got from the Galileo affair and the surrounding
events was, to put it bluntly, a lot of bad publicity. Urban had been accused
of negotiating with the Protestants, he had been denounced as a virtual
Antichrist by the Spanish-Imperial faction, and he had narrowly escaped

23Quoted by Redondi. Galileo eretico. pp. 288-289.

24 See J. H. Elliott. The Count-Duke o[ Olivares (New Haven & London. 1986). p. 431. with
sources in n. 109.
 THE BARBERINI AND THE GAULEO AFFAIR 81

being implicated with bis former protege Galileo in heresy. The Grand Duke
of Tuscany and his ambassador nagged the pope incessantly on Galileo's
behalf, and the wires of the European intellectual network-the correspon-
dences of Mersenne, Fabri de Peiresc, Doni, Descartes-were humming
with criticism of the Barberini. Although Urban attempted to remain aloof
from the situation, certainly Cardinal Francesco was aware ofit. We might
therefore expect areaction on the part of the Barberini against the Medici
and placating Spain, the Empire, the Dominieans, and the Jesuits; a retreat
from scientific interests; a reaffrrmation of sacramental doctrine; a public as-
sertion of the family's power and clemency-and a few private revenges.
All of these in fact occurred; but as a result of the declining and shifting
power of the Barberini papacy, many had to be symbolic rather than politi-
cal in expression.
The celebrations orchestrated by the three papal nephews during and
immediately after the Galileo case were among the most brilliant ofUrban
VIII's reign. In Carnival of 1633 Cardinal Francesco sponsored, not an
opera, but a Quarantore or Forty Rours' Devotion in his new basilica of San
Lorenzo in Damaso. In the palace at the Quattro Fontane, Don Taddeo pro-
duced the opera Erminia sul Giordano. In 1634 Cardinal Francesco
presented a revised version of II San!' Alessio there, and Cardinal Antonio
produced his joust in Piazza Navona.
The 1633 Quarantore raises some interesting questions. The Forty
Rours' Devotion celebrated the real presence of Christ in the Blessed
Sacrament. Over aperiod of three days a consecrated Rost was exposed in a
monstrance placed in an elaborate stage-setting or apparato while mass was
celebrated, sermons were preached, and devotion al music was performed.
In his study of the Galileo affair, Pietro Redondi attempted to reconcile the
far-from-universal condemnation of heliocentrism-regarded in some cir-
cles (including the pope's own,judging from the Sacchi's fresco in Palazzo
Barberini) as a venial offense-with Urban VIII's repeated statements that
Galileo had touched the most perverse material possible, and with the
pope's delaying action to keep the matter out of the hands of the Roly
Office. Redondi suggested that the whole question of Copernican heliocen-
trism was a smoke-screen thrown up to block a much more serious charge;
the pope was in fact sentencing Galileo to a slap on the wrist for Coper-
nicanism to avoid a possible death-sentence for advocating the forbidden
atomism that undermined the whole doctrine of the Eucharistie Sacrament.25

25 Redondi, GaliIeo eretico, pp. 289-344.

82 FREDERICK HAMMOND

The celebration of a Quarantore was nothing unusual in seventeenth-

century Rome; each Advent the devotion began in the papal chapel and
continued in succession around the churches of the city. However, a
surviving drawing by Pietro da Cortona for Cardinal Francesco's apparato,
coordinated with the surviving expense records from the Barberini papers,
shows that the 1633 occasion was unusually splendid (Plate 4), its solem-
nity further enhanced by the fact that the pope hirnself celebrated the closing
mass. 26 Thus the 1633 Quarantore affirmed symbolically the sacramental
orthodoxy of the Barberini in the wake of Galileo's condemnation.
The secular event balancing Cardinal Francesco's Quarantore, the fairy-
tale opera Erminia sul Giordano, was appropriately staged by the layman
Don Taddeo Barberini, since its chivalric theme presented the Barberini in
their other role as Renaissance princes. The story, a pastiche ofTasso, was
largelyan excuse for Andrea Camassei's sets and Francesco Guitti's won-
drous machines, which fascinated the Barberini. Guitti was introduced to
the Barberini through Taddeo's artistic mentors, Cardinal Guido
Bentivoglio-the Supreme Inquisitor of the Holy Office in the Galileo tri-
bunal-and his brother Marchese Enzo, who lodged Guitti in their palace on
the Quirinal during the preparation of the opera.
The celebrations of 1634, the revised Sant' Alessio and the Piazza
Navona joust, were occasioned by the visit of Prince Alexander Charles
Vasa, brother of new king of Poland. Poland was much in the mind of the
Romans at the time of the Galileo affair. The accession of king Vladislao
had been celebrated in Rome at the end of 1632, and in November of 1633
the entrance of his ambassador had provided an exotic and brilliant spectacle
recorded by Stefano Della Bella. Poland, it will be recalled, was a strongly
Catholic country ruled by cousins of Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden. By
courting Poland the Barberini could reward a Catholic state outside the
Hapsburg alliance. By honoring the Catholic Vasa dynasty the papacy could
tacitly repudiate Urban VIII's embarrassing flirtation with their Protestant
cousin.
The 1634 joust presented by Cardinal Antonio Barberini in Piazza
Navona was intended to relieve the understandable melancholy of the pope
and to distract the Roman populace. It tied together a number of strands in
Barberini policy. The Piazza was Hispanophile territory, adjacent to the

26 On Quarantore in general see Mark S. Weil, ''The Devotion of the Forty Hours and Roman
Baroque lllusions," Journal o[ the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 37 (1974), pp. 218-248; on
Cardinal Francesco's 1633 celebration see Karl Noehles, "Architekturprojekte Cortonas,"
Münchner Jahrbuch der bildenden Kunst, dritte Folge, Band XX (1969), pp. 171-206, and
Hammond, "Girolamo Frescobaldi and a Decade," p. 123, "More on Music," pp. 254-255.
 ~
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~
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~
~

~
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~

PLATE 4: Quarantore in San Lorenzo in Damaso by Pietro da Cortona, 1633 (by gracious permission of H. M. the Queen) es
84 FREDERICK HAMMOND

Spanish national church, and the Marquesa di Castel Rodrigo, the Spanish
arnbassadress, was honored with a box-seat and the homage of the conclud-
ing entry. The event was directed by Enzo Bentivoglio, who had a great
reputation as an entrepreneur for such occasions. Enzo's son Cornelio II
rode as champion in the combat, and the narrative of the occasion is
attributed to Cardinal Guido. The flower of Urban's intellectual establish-
ment-what remained of it after the death of Cesarini and the exile of
Ciampoli and Sforza Pallavicini--contributed conceits and verses. Cardinal
Antonio's favorite castrato, Mare' Antonio Pasqualini, appeared tri-
umphantly as Farne. Francesco Guitti, fresh from his triumph in Erminia,
designed the theatre and the ship full of musicians which entered the Piazza
at sunset to climax the joust. Stefano Della Bella depicted the various entries
of the joust and engraved Andrea Sacchi's painting showing the entrance of
the ship (Plate 5).
For the opera Il Sant' Alessio, Cardinal Francesco' s contribution to the
"prince's Carnival" of 1634, new sets (perhaps the work of the ubiquitous
Della Bella) were designed, and a new Prologue-the easiest element to up-
date-was commissioned from Rospigliosi and Stefano Landi. The
Prologue was addressed to Alexander Charles Vasa, but it may have been
intended as an indireet admonition to his brother, king Vladislao, whose lib-
eral tendencies alarmed the Jesuits. More damning in the eyes of Urban
VIII, Vladislao was an outspoken admirer of Galileo' schampion Giovanni
Ciarnpoli, who had been driven from his office of Secretary of Breves into
exile in aseries of dreary provincial governorships. The Prologue' s em-
phasis on the evangelization of the North was an indirect compliment to the
Jesuits, whose Collegio Germanico held a monopoly on that effort.
The revised Prologue to Sant'Alessio, premiered on 20 January 1634,
opens with a chorus of six slaves, who recount the virtues and travels of
Alexander Charles. They recall his brother Vladislao, whose valor tarned the
barbarians and who also came to Rome (nota bene) to reverence great
Urban. The allegorie al figure of Rome descends on a trophy of military
spoils (Plate 6). To Alexander Charles and Vladislao, examples of secular
heroism, she counterposes the Christian hero, Alexis. Turning to address
Alexander Charles-"You, royal youth"-she compares hirn to Alexis as
another devout pilgrim. Finally, she commands the chains to drop from the
six slaves, "for I desire not a harsh rule but only agende rule of hearts," to
which a slave replies prettily that chains may fall but the ties of love cannot
be undone. The chorus concludes, "Once, proud warrior maiden, you ruled
our bodies. Now, dedicated to Christ, unfurling the great banner of the
 ~
b:l
~
~
~
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~
Cl
~
§
>
~

PLATE 5: The great ship of the 1634 joust in Piazza Navona by Francesco Guitti, Festafatta in Roma (Rome, 1634) ~
86 FREDERICK HAMMOND

Cross, adored conqueror with tranquil rule, to our happy vows you are the
queen of our devout hearts."
This allegory of absolute power tempered by gratuitous c1emency can
be read as an attempt by the Barberini to change the general perception of
their part in the Galileo affair. Was it intended to be such? The Barberini had
lost face above all with the intellectua1 community. Cardinal Francesco's
friend, the venerable and distinguished Nico1as Fabri de Peiresc, wrote the
Cardina1 an eloquent letter at the end of 1634 begging for more 1enient
treatment of Gali1eo, "this good old man in his seventies, in poor hea1th,
whose memory will scarce1y be effaced by the future." The Cardinal an-
swered dry1y, "since I am one, although the least, of the Cardina1s of the
Ho1y Office, you will excuse me if I do not allow myself to rep1y to you in
greater detail." Fabri wrote again more urgently, citing "the honor and repu-
tation of this Pontificate," and adding that his own wishes "conformed to
the desires of the most noble intellects of the century, who so greatly pity
the severity and the prolongation of the punishment," 1ikening it to "the per-
secution of the person and wisdom of Socrates in his own fatherland."27
For a private person to compare the cardina1-nephew of a reigning pope
with the judicial murderers of Socrates and to threaten the most brilliant pa-
pacy of the century with disgrace is breathtaking, especially when we recall
the rage that the mere mention of the Ga1ileo case provoked in Urban VIII.
Not surprisingly, Cardinal Francesco did not answer Peiresc's second
letter.
That the revised Sant' Alessio was a symbolic response to such criti-
cism is suggested by its unusua1 diffusion. The opera was performed in
January and February of 1634; the full score was in press by the following
Ju1y, comp1ete with eight handsome p1ates illustrating the sets and cos-
tumes. (The score of Erminia, the only other Barberini opera to be printed,
took four years to appear and went 1arge1y unnoticed.) Copies of
Sant' Alessio were distributed wide1y. Fabri was sent one at the beginning
of June 1635, and the Cardinal's covering letter seems to have conveyed
that praise from the intellectua1 community wou1d be welcome.
The French musical scholar Marin Mersenne was in the process of
writing his great treatise Harmonie Universelle, whose outline, presented to
Cardina1 Francesco by Jean-Jacques Bouchard, had received the Cardinal's
approval earlier in 1635. In Ju1y of 1635 we find Peiresc writing to

27 Le opere di Galileo Galilei, ed. Antonio Favaro (Florence, 1890-1909) XVI, pp. 169-171,
187, 202; cf. Stillman Drake, "Galileo Gleanings XII: An Unpublished Letter of Galileo to
Peiresc," Isis 53 (1962), pp. 201-211, p. 202. I am indebted to Professor Drake for this
reference.
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88 FREDERICK HAMMOND

Mersenne: "I wished to take up my pen to write you along with a book of
new music for the comedies sung in the ancient style in Italy that the Most
Eminent Cardinal Barberini has sent me, to see if you might not find it the
subject for some small chapter in your great work ... And if you could take
some small occasion of speaking of it and of giving a bit of praise to this
good cardinal, that would not at all hurt your work." The patronizing un peu
d' eloge a ce brave cardinal suggests that Francesco was indeed anxious for
reassurance. Mersenne obliged by praising "the great Cardinal Barberini,
most worthy nephew of his Holiness, to whom every science and particu-
larly harmony will be obliged, as long as will last the excellent account that
he has had made and printed at Rome of the heroic deeds of S. Alexis,
whose life is recounted by excellent voices."28
An otherwise inexplicable fact can be fitted into this puzzle. Girolamo
Frescobaldi spent the years 1628-1634 in Florence, in the service of
Galileo's patron the Grand Duke; indeed, his collection of Arie musicali
dedicated to Ferdinando II was printed by Landini, the publisher of the
Dialogo. In 1634 Frescobaldi returned to Rome to enter the service of
Cardinal Francesco Barberini. In addition to a monthly salary, Cardinal
Francesco paid Frescobaldi one hundred scudi for his family's trip from
Florence, subsidized the rent of their house, increased Girolamo's salary at
St. Peter's, and gave hirn occasional gifts of money. In 1635 Frescobaldi
dedicated the reworked version of his instrumental canzoni to the Dominican
Cardinal Desiderio Scaglia. (The first edition of 1628 had been dedicated to
Ferdinando II of Tuscany.) There is no evidence that Frescobaldi ever en-
countered Scaglia, or that that grim prelate had any interest in music. The
only known connection between the two men is Francesco Barberini, with
whom Scaglia served on the Galileo tribunal. It is perhaps not too fanciful
to conjecture that the Barberini, who paid for every other publication by
Frescobaldi from 1634 until his death in 1643, in return for underwriting
the canzoni requested that its dedication be offered to Scaglia.
We could trace the diminishing echoes of the Galileo affair in other
events of Barberini patronage: in Cardinal Francesco's refusal to save the
Lincei on the death of Federico Cesi, and his promotion of his own intellec-
tual and artistic academies in the second half of the 1630s; in Francesco's
publishing activities, filling the gap left by the Lincei; in the festivities for
Ferdinand III as Imperial heir in 1637 and Cardinal Antonio Barberini's ri-
val celebration for the birth of the Dauphin in 1638; in Antonio's brilliant

28 Nicolas.Claude Fabri de Peiresc at Aix to Marin Mersenne in Paris, 23 July 1635, Cor·
resporuJance du P. Marin Mersenne, religieux Minime, ed. Comelis de Waard (Paris, 1933·
1977), vol. V, p. 329; the Harmonie Universelle is quoted in vol. VI, p. 84.
 THE BARBERINI AND THE GAULEO AFFAIR 89

commemoration of the Jesuit centenary in 1639. But let us rather end in

1634 where we began, at the high point of Barberini patronage of the arts
and, whatever its causes, the saddest moment of Urban VIII's papacy as a
human institution.

BARD ColLEGE
 VICTOR COELHO

MUSICAL MYTH AND GALILEAN SCIENCE IN GIOVANNI

SERODINE'S ALLEGORlA DELLA SCIENZA*

M YTH'S STRONGHOLD ON HIS TORY is not easily weakened. Hans Blu-

menberg argues in his Arbeit am Mythos (1975) that myth has withstood
scientific progress and Enlightenment rationality precisely because myth is
"a ritualized body of text. .. [that] in its core resists modification and, in the
latest stage of dealings with the myth, provokes it."1 Hence, myth works on
itself. The reliance on myth neutralizes the absolutism of one theory over
another since myth does not direct itself towards a particular goal, nor does
it seek to answer a particular question, though it has been used that way
through allegory. It aims for a totality by which it expresses order: "The
fundamental patterns of myth are simply so sharply defined, so valid, so
binding, so gripping in every sense, that they convince us again and again
and still present themselves as the most useful material for any search for
how matters stand, on a basic level, with human existence."2 But myth "had
to be renounced" to the desire for scientific knowledge, writes Blumenberg,
for "science depends on the abandonment of the claim to totality."3
The perpetuation and denial of myth have played important roles, re-
spectively, in the evolving relationship between music and science. The
cosmology of Medieval science, dominated for the most part by Aristotelian
physics and astronomy, had its musical counterpart in the equally vague no-
tions of heavenly harmony-Boethius' Musica mundana-which formed
one of the bases of the Platonic tradition. 4 It was the highest form of music
and, like any other myth-indeed, the classical formulation of heavenly

• Some of the ideas in this artide were first presented in my paper, "Sine musica scientia nihil
est: The Lute as Instrument of Scientific Discovery," presented at the Fifty-Sixth Annual
Meeting of the American Musicological Society, Oakland, Califomia, 1990, and at a seminar
~iven while a Fellow at the Aston Magna Academy, Rutgers, New Jersey, 1991.
Hans Blumenberg, Work on Myth, trans. R. M. Wall ace (Cambridge, MA., 1985), p. 150. A
panorama of this weighty and densely-packed, but brilliant work is perhaps best seen from the
perspective of William J. Bouwsma' s review, "Work on Blumenberg, " Journal of the History of
[deas 48 (1987), pp. 347-54.
2 Blumenberg, Work on Myth, pp. 150-51.
3 Blumenberg, Work on Myth, p. 175.
4 For an excellent and beautifully illustrated account of the Pythagorean-Platonic tradition, see
S. K. Heninger, Jr., The Cosmographical Glass: Renaissance Diagrams of the Universe (San
Marino, CA., 1977), pp. 81-143. See also Jamie Kassler, "Music as a Model in Early Science,"
History of Science 20 (1982), pp. 108-110.
91
V. Coelho (ed.), Music and Science in the Age ofGalileo, 91-114.
© 1992 Kluwer Academic Publishers.
92 VrCfOR CoEUIO

harmony appears in the Myth of Er, at the end of Plato's Republic-it was
unverifiable, irreducible, unquantifiable, and out of reach. The dependence
on Classical and Christian models (in the case of music, Boethius was con-
sidered a 'Classical' author) within the scholastic tradition required the un-
critical acceptance of myth in the fields of medieval science and music.
That the scientific revolution of the early seventeenth century, with its
systematic and rational methods of inquiry, coincided with acelebration of
mythological topoi in literature and music, is a paradox that demands some
careful attention. As science moved away from Aristotelianism during the
late Renaissance, the need for verifying facts required an abandoning of
myth in order to explain physical properties. Musical scientists generally
followed the scientists, not the musicians. Their works "undermine the
myths and literary topoi that surround the wondrous and mysterious power
of music, the ethos implicit in the ancient Greek modes, and the harmony of
the spheres and its effect on the human heart."5 The humanistic tendencies
of late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century music, on the other hand,
sustained the stories and images of ancient myths and dramatized them on
stage in early operas and other vocal forms. A veritable obsession with
myth was incubated at the Medici court in Florence from the time of Cosimo
I Medici, whose vision of a new Medici dynasty demanded a revised
mythology that was consistent with his overall plan. And it is no small irony
that this reached a height during Galileo's appointment as mathematician and
philosopher under Cosimo 11 Medici, with Galileo even advancing certain
important aspects ofthis mythology. As Biagioli has remarked, "Galileo did
not become philosopher and mathematician to the grand duke because of his
contributions to the acceptance of the Copemican hypothesis. The Medici
court was not the Nobel Prize headquarters avant la lettre, and Cosimo 11
was no Copemican."6
The Medici used myth in an emblematic fashion, mainly but not exclu-
sively as a way to project a unified and powerful image of the family. These
myths were incorporated within the musical and dramatic productions that
were mounted to recognize important events in the Medici calendar. The
most important of these during Galileo' s lifetime were the 1589 I ntermedi to
celebrate the marriage of Christine of Lorraine and Grand Duke Ferdinand

5 Lorenzo Bianconi, Music in the Seventeenth Century, trans. David Bryant (Cambridge,
1982), p. 53.
6 See Mario Biagioli, "Galileo the Emblem Maker," Isis 81 (1990), p. 231. On Galileo as a
cultural symbol, see Alistair C. Crombie, "Galileo in Renaissance Europe," in Firenze e la
Toscana dei Medici nell'Europa dei '500, II: Musica e spettacolo, Scienze dell'uomo edella
natura (Florence, 1983), pp. 151-72.
 MYTH, SCIENCE, AND SERODINE'S ALLEGORIA DELLA SCIENZA 93

I,7 the 1608 Intermedi, which were staged for the festivities surrounding the
marriage of Maria Magdalena of Austria and Galileo's future patron Cosimo
H, and, of course, the fIrst operas by Jacopo Peri and Giulio Caccini, which
took place in Florence in 1600.8 To these must be added theBarriera during
the Camival of 1613, in which the four moons of Jupiter discovered by
Galileo and preserited to Cosimo H as the "Medicean Stars" were incorpo-
rated within the mythological plot of the production. 9 All of these works
relied (or worked on) recognizable mythologicallegends and characters-
the Harmony of the Spheres (1589), Arion rescued by the dolphin (1589),
the legend of Orpheus and Euridice (1600), Jason and the Argonauts
(1608), the Judgement of Paris (1608), and, of course, the inspiration of
the muses, to mention just a few of the themes-in a perfect Arcadian
world. 10 It should be remembered, too, that all of this music, from inter-
medi to operas, is also, in asense, political music, and political rulers such
as the Medici had a civic responsibility to project themes ofunity, for which
mythology was, and still is, an appropriate vehicle.
These mythologies and their use constitute what Biagioli has called the
"master narrative" that influenced all aspects of the artistic and political pro-
duction of the Florentine court. 11 It supports what Blumenberg has claimed
about myth providing a "breathing space" in order to reduce the absolutism
of reality by transcending it;12 Nagler has similarly called these Medici
events "escapes from the pressing realities of politicallife."13 More impor-
tantly, in the pastoral myths that abound in the musical programs of the
larger Florentine events, the mythology revolves around the themes of cre-
ativity and inspiration-the egg and the seed, really, of artistic fertility:

7 For a summary of this gerne during the period in question, see Nino Pirrotta, Music and
Theatre [rom Poliziano to Monteverdi. trans. Karen Eales (Cambridge, 1975), pp. 173-236.
See also Alois Nagler, Theatre Festivals o[ the Medici. 1539-1637 (New Haven, 1964/rpt. New
York, 1976).
8 See Pirrona, Music and Theatre [rom Poliziano to Monteverdi. pp. 237-80.
9 The Barriera is chronicled in Nagler, Theatre Festivals o[ the Medici. pp. 119-125. See also
Biagioli, "Galileo the Emblem Maker," pp. 249-53.
10 For descriptions of these scenes, see Nagler, Theatre Festivals o[ the Medici. pp. 70-115.
The main study on the 1589 intermedi is D. P. Walker, La musique des intermedes de "La pelleg-
rina" (Paris, 1963); see also Claude Palisca, Humanism in ltalian Renaissance Musical Thought
(New Haven, 1985), pp. 187-90. On the 1608 intermedi. see Tim Carter, "A Florentine
Wedding of 1608," Acta Musicologica 55 (1983), pp. 89-107, and Victor Coelho, "A Lute
Book for 'Giulio Medici and his Friends' and Music at Court in Seventeenth-Century Florence,"
to appear in a collection of essays by the same author entitled Studies in Seventeenth-Century
ltalian Lute Music.
11 Biagioli, "Galileo the Emblem Maker," p. 235.
12 Blumenberg, Work on Myth. translator's introduction, p. xi.
13 Nagler, Theatre Festivals o[ the Medici. p. 4.
94 VlcroR CoElliO

"In that Utopia-Uchronia-still unspoiled by the artificial needs

and mIes of social life and still blessed with innocence, natural-
ness and freedom-men and women, that is, shepherds and
nymphs, were not only happier than in the world we know, but
also endowed with a spontaneous feeling for artistic expression,
poetry and music."14

This was the idealizedJatto of these musical myths, of which the represen-
tation of the Orphic power of music, stemming from the inspiration of the
muse, was its Grundmythos. 15 Like other "fundamental" myths, it repre-
sents a reduction of previous1y re1ated musical myths (the harmony of the
spheres, the moral qualities of certain modes, the harmonious rapports
between the soul and the heavens, etc.), and a variation of them. The operas
on the Orpheus legend by Perl (L' Euridice, 1600), Caccini (L' Euridice,
1600), and Monteverdi (L'Orjeo, 1607), trace, in the 1argest sense, the
search for moral purlfication by moving through an underworld towards
heaven. 16 They can be therefore considered as examples of a fundamental
myth, falling square1y within B1umenberg's definition:

"The characteristics of a fundamental myth can be seen from at-

tempts to imitate the qualities of myth with the means of art.
Here, in the 'art myth' too, it never seems to be pure imagination
that is at work, but rather the elaboration of elementary fundamen-
tal patterns. If-to clarify this by the example of Plato's myths-
men are in any case thought of as emerging from the earth, as the
Greeks largely did think of them, then the imaginative representa-
tion of their cultivation up to their highest potential, in the simile
of the cave, is supported by this basic idea, as an extension buHt
into the 'fundamental myth' that this can be schematized as
'emergence from the earth into the light' ."17

14 Pirrotta, Music and Theatre from Poliziarw to Monteverdi, p. 264.

15 On the Orphic tradition and its attributes, see D. P. Walker, "Orpheus the Theologian and
Renaissance Platonists," Journal o[ the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 16 (1953), pp. 100-
20; for a summary, see Paolo Gozza's excellent introduction to La musica nella rivoluzione sci-
entifica dei seicento, ed. P. Gozza (Bologna, 1989), pp. 16-18.
16 In Monteverdi's setting the obvious parallel to Dante's Commedia is made clear in Orpheus'
aria "Possente spirto" (Act 111), in which the verse structure shifts to the archaic terza rima
(tercets rhyming aba beb cdc, etc.), used in the Divine Comedy. In Orphic teaching the
underworld was a place of punishment leading to the soul' s purification; see Betty Radice,
Who's Who in the Ancient World (London, 1973), p. 180.
17 Blumenberg, Work on Myth, p. 176.
 MYTH, SCIENCE, AND SERODINE'S ALLEGORIA DEUA SCIEN7A 95

The elements of the fundamental myth, of course, cannot be rationalized,

and herein lies the problem for the seventeenth-century mind. The muse's
power cannot be quantified (or harnessed) and Orpheus' rhetorical and
playing skills are rather difficult to localize. But so long as composers used
these myths within the program of or inspiration for their works, whether as
a libretto to an opera, a text for a madrigal, or by evoking them in the pref-
aces to their printed works, we must accept the centrality of myth to musical
creativity and inspiration of this period. By the very nature that imaginary
(or mythical) beauty (or sound) cannot be based on scientific observation
alone, artistic creations are not susceptible to the same truths that are re-
quired for science. 18
So what is the value, to paraphrase Alistair Crombie, in both science
and the arts, of having precise notions of what is, with its risk of limiting
things to only wh at is quantifiable, versus the openness of a mind that is
unconstrained by the need for verification?19 Let us pose this question in
another way: seventeenth-century scientists were successful in formulating a
new methodology for scientific work and revising the entire theoretical
framework towards a field based on rational and verifiable scientific exper-
iment and inquiry. The new compositional procedures in music ofthe early
seventeenth century, however, wh ich were every bit as 'revolutionary' in
their own time as they are to us today, did not receive a systematic codifica-
tion in the theoretical work of the day. The most precious sources we have
in this regard are Monteverdi' s formulation of the "Seconda Prattica" in re-
sponse to attacks on his treatment of dissonance and text setting by the
theorist G. M. Artusi,20 carefully-worded comments about music in
Monteverdi's letters (which deal more with aesthetics than procedure,
really),21 and occasionally detailed prefaces regarding performance found in
the printed works of Caccini (Le nuove musiche, 1602), Frescobaldi
(Toccate, 1615), Piccinini (Intavolatura di liuto, et di chitarrone, 1623) and
Monteverdi (Madrigali, 1638).22 In short, no precise theoretical formulation

18 See Jarnes S. Ackerman, "Science and Visual Art," in SeventeenJh-CentlUY Science and the
Arts, ed. H. H. Rhys (Princeton, 1961), p. 82.
19 A. C. Crombie, "Science and the Arts in the Renaissance: The Search for Truth and Certainty,
Old and New," in Science, Optics and Music in Medieval and Early Modern Thought (London,
1990), p. 171.
20 The controversy is surnrnarized in Claude Palisca, ''The Artusi-Monteverdi Controversy," in
The New MonJeverdi Companion, ed. D. Amold & N. Fortune (London, 1985), pp. 127-58.
21 A modem edition and translation of Monteverdi's extant correspondence appears in Denis
Stevens, ed., The Letters o[ Claudio MonJeverdi (London, 1980); selected letters from this edi-
tion appear in The New MonJeverdi Companion.
22 A reliable translation of the prefaces by Caccini and Monteverdi appear in Oliver Strunk, ed.,
Source Readings in Music History (New York, 1950), pp. 377-92 and 413-15, respectively.
96 VrCfOR CoElRO

of the 'Second Practice' was made. While many of the contrapuntal works
of the time (such as Frescobaldi's Fantasie of 1608, for example23 ) do
adhere to the usual ruIes given by Renaissance theorists and stay within the
established modal categories, these rules, as Bianconi says, were

"unable to explain the oscillations or sudden changes of 'affection '

of a Frescobaldi toccata, the freakish progressions and scales of a
fantasias by Sweelinck or the contrapuntal 'inertia' of recitative
(theatrical or da camera). In other words, there is an ever-increasing
area in the fieId of compositional practice which, though not di-
rectIy contradicting the tenets of contrapuntal theory, no longer
comes under its control and is thus neglected in contemporary the-
oretical writings."24

Though dedicated to scientific inquiry, early seventeenth-century theo-

rists and musical scientists offered littIe in the way of a rapprochement
between theory and practice. (Giovanni Battista Doni's attempt to bridge the
gap with his Lyra Barberina is a notabIe exception. 25 ) The systematic and
dense classifications by Kircher, Descartes, and Mersenne, to name but
three of the most important, were successful mainly in explaining musical
sound in a rational, scientific fashion. These accounts scrutinize 'primary'
qualities that lend themselves to scientific scrutiny and measurement: sound,
vibrations, the size, shape and tuning of instruments, wave motions of in-
tervals; they only rarely confronted the 'secondary' qualities of musical
form, text setting, treatment of dissonance, and conceptual procedures. 26
Indeed, the limits of musical science are glaringly noticeable at this time
when composers were striving towards the more visceral goal of 'moving
the affections'. When Artusi attacked Monteverdi' s treatment of dissonance

The main portions of Frescobaldi's preface are quoted in Bianconi, Music in the Seventeenth
Century, pp. 95-96. Tbere is unfortunately no reliable translation of the lengthy preface by
Piccinini, but a facsimile of the book appears by Studio per Edizioni Scelte 50 (Florence,
1983).
23 On these works, see Frederick Harnmond, Girolamo Frescobaldi (Carnbridge, MA., 1983),
~f. 125-33.
Bianconi, Music in the Seventeenth Century, p. 59.
25 See Claude Palisca, "G. B. Doni, Musicological Activist, and his 'Lyra Barberina," in
Modern Musical Scholarship, ed. Edward Olleson (Stocksfield, 1980), pp. 180-205.
26 See Jarnie Kassler, "Tbe 'Science' of Music to 1830," Archives internationales d' histoire des
sciences 29-30 (1979-80), p. 132. A succinct account of the difference in theoretical per-
spectives between the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries is in Claude Palisca, "Scientific
Empiricism in Musical Tbought," in Seventeenth-Century Science and the Arts, pp. 91-137.
Isaac Beckmann must be singled out as one musical scientist for whom musical practice was a
very strong influence in his work; see H. F. Cohen Quantifying Music: The Science o[ Music at
the First Stage o[ the Scientific Revolution, 1580-1650 (Dordrecht, 1984), pp. 116-61
 MYTH, SCIENCE, AND SERODINE'S ALLEGORIA DELLA SCIENZA 97

on rational and mathematical grounds, Monteverdi "advanced the claims of

the passions of the soul,"27 which involve a system of musical poetics and a
retention of mythical notions about music that move contrary to the syntacti-
cal rigor demanded by theory and musical science. This is not to minimize
the importance of musical science in the early seventeenth century, but
simply to point out its shortcomings in explaining the substantive composi-
tional issues of the day. Only by the time of Rameau was the musical
science of the seventeenth century finally related to a theory of harmony and
made relevant to contemporary musical practice. 28
These are central issues with which to gauge the impact Galilean sci-
ence actually had on the arts. The relationship between the two fields in the
early seventeenth century has been evoked by some art historians in terms
of a crisis, or "re-compartmentalization" from wh ich"science, purified of all
magical and mystical connotations, emerged as [al strict1y quantitative inter-
pretation of nature."29 There is no question that the proof Galileo had
marshalled in favor of the Copernican system had areaction from the arts,
as we shall soon see in Serodine's Allegoria della scienza. Similarly,
Kassler has attributed the difference between the musical scientists who
thought about music in a mechanistic way (Le. the measurable and physical
properties of sound) and those composers and certain theorists who wrote
about the compositional and stylistic principles of music (i.e. the music it-
self) to "the direct result of the estrangement between natural and moral
philosophy arising from the work of Galileo."30 A famous example of
Galileo's influence on the visual arts is in Ludovico Cigoli's Assunta
fresco, in Santa Maria Maggiore in Rome. Cigoli, a friend of Galileo and
painter at the Medici court, painted the Virgin standing not on a perfectly
spherical, glistening, white moon, as artists had previously seen with their
naked eyes, but on a craggy, half-shadowed, crater-filled rock. Cigoli had
assisted Galileo with his telescopic observations and painted the Virgin
standing on the real moon, as Galileo had observed up close, not on the
idealized orb that had been a source of mystery, inspiration, and lunacy for

27 See Gary Tomlinson, Monteverdi and the End o[ the Renaissance (Berkeley and Los Ange-
les, 1987), p. 25.
28 Palisca, "Scientific Empiricism," p. 94.
29 Erwin Panofsky, "Artist, Scientist, Genius: Notes on the 'Renaissance-Dämmerung," in The
Renaissance: Six Essays (New York, 1962), pp. 182, 177. Similarly, Panofsky regarded the
unity and singular purpose of the arts and sciences during the Renaissance as a "de-com-
partmentalization." Panofsky ignored the continuing impact of magic on science, which has
been dealt with recently by Brian P. Copenhaver in The Cambridge History o[ Renaissance
Philosophy, ed. Charles B. Schmitt (Cambridge, 1988), pp. 264-300.
30 Kassler, "The 'Science' of Music to 1830," p. 132.
98 VICfOR CoEUIO

centuries. 31 In the Barberini opera Diana schernita, perfonned in Rome in

1629, there are passages that make fun of Galileo's 'invention' of the tele-
scope;32 and, as Frederick Rammond argues in these essays, the trial of
Galileo had a direct impact on the artistic program of Barberini patronage.
But to view Galileo as an uncomprornising rationalist who was responsible
for breaking up the symbolic affinities between the arts and sciences, as
some historians in the arts have held, is short-sighted,33 and it minimizes
the importance of Galileo' s training as a musician.
It does not seem unreasonable to suggest that Galileo, the son of a fa-
mous and prolific lutenist, did not reject myth as much as did his scientific
colleagues, many of whom were not trained primarily as musicians. Even
though myth works against scientific progress by its unverifiability, it plays
a large role within the Platonic tradition that Galileo inherited, and Galileo
hirnself alluded occasionally to what has been described as "a pseudo-
Platonic cosmological myth."34
Galileo was trained in music and in playing the lute by his father,
Vincenzo Galilei. 35 Vincenzo's activities with the Florentine Camerata were
dedicated towards restoring the power of music according to the claims and
practices of ancient authors. I have earlier identified this theme as the musi-
cal Grundmythos of the age. Galileo was seventeen years of age when
Vincenzo published his Dialogo della musica antica edella moderna in

31 Other, more technical, connections between science and art within the context of Galilean
science are presented in Martin Kemp, The Science o[ Art: OpticaI Themes in Western Art [rom
Brunelleschi to Seurat (New Haven. 1990). pp. 53-99.
32 Cited in Pirrotta. Music and Theatre [rom Poliziano to Monteverdi, p. 273. n. 113.
33 Panofsky. for example. laments that "what had been a unity in the Renaissance is now.
again. a complex diversity; and there are those who were not, are not. and never will be satis-
fied with this state of affairs. There is a type of mind. and not necessarily of an inferior order.
which finds it impossible to accept the sum of parts as a substitute for the whole. the quantita-
tive as a substitute for the qualitative. aseries of equations as a substitute for significance; and
there is no denying that the reduction of nature to a system of numerical relations. so uncom-
promisingly demanded and put into practice by Galileo. was bound to leave a psychological
vacuum." Quoted from "Artist. Scientist. ..• " p. 181. In Joscelyn Godwin's intriguing
Harmonies o[ Heaven and Earth: The Spiritual Dimension o[ Music [rom Antiquity to the
Avant-Garde (London. 1987). he, too. sees heliocentricity as working "toward the devaluation
of Spirit and Soul and the destruction of Man as microcosm" (p. 60). even though these
Pythagorean concepts continued. in some cases. to exercise their influence on intellectual
thought. On these and other continuing influences. such as the Aristoxenian. see J amie
Kassler. "Music as a Model in Early Science."
34 See Gary Hatfield. "Metaphysics and the New Science." in Reappraisals o[ the Scientific
Revolution, ed. D. C. Lindberg & R. Westman (Cambridge. 1990). p. 119.
35 On the similarity in scientific procedures between father and son. see Stillman Drake.
"Vincenzio Galilei and Galileo." in Galileo Studies: Personality, Tradition and Revolution
(Ann Arbor. 1970). pp. 43-62.
 MYTH, SCIENCE, AND SERODINE'S AILEGORIA DEUA SCIENZA 99

1581,36 and his musical instruction at the hands of his father may well have
contained an element of Vincenzo's current work on ancient sources. In
both the Dialogo as weH as in his important lute treatise Il Fronimo
(1568/rpt. 1584), Galilei draws upon stories about the power of music from
ancient myth and lore in order to make a point or strengthen an argument. In
Fronimo, Galilei evokes the Greek poet and musician Timotheus Milesius,
who was driven out of the country by the Spartans "as being a violator of
the true and sacred laws relating to the peace of their state since he had been
daring enough not only to add two strings to the Kithara and to the Lyre,
but abandoning the Enharmonic as being very artificial, and the old Diatonic
as harsh, he introduced the chromatic genus, which, because of its effemi-
nate and lascivious nature gready harmed the souls of the young, imbuing
them by such means with these same qualities."37 Later in Fronimo, Galilei
recalls the legendary poet and the myth of his musical prowess when he
"accompanied his voice with no instrument other than the lute, or one simi-
lar to it, when he incited Alexander the Great to batde and recalled him from
it."38 And in the Dialogo, Vincenzo works on the myth once more to illus-
trate his powerful statement that "if the musician has not the power to direct
the minds of his listeners to their benefit [as did Timotheus], his science and
knowledge are to be reputed null and vain, since the art of music was insti-
tuted and numbered among the liberal arts for no other purpose."39
The ability of music, or musical training, to preserve and continue as-
pects of myth is worth considering when carving out an intellectual profile
of Galileo Galilei. Galileo was known as an excellent lutenist, and we can
ass urne that a thorough musical training in counterpoint and intabulation
was acquired from his father. 40 Galileo's employment ofmyth within a sci-
entific context is, not surprisingly, most apparent when music is used in an
analogous way. His use of myth-and its offshoot, iconology-is power-
fully demonstrated in a passage from Il Saggiatore (Rome, 1623), in which

36 Excerpts from the Dialogo are in Strunk, Source Readings, pp. 302-22.
37 All translations from II Fronimo are from Carol McClintock's translation, in Musicological
Studies and Documents 39 (American Institute of Musicology, 1985), p. 27.
38 II Fronimo, p. 88.
39 Strunk, Source Readings, p. 319.
40 According to Galileo's biographer, Viviani, Galileo was an excellent lutenist, whose play-
ing "surpassed in beauty and grace even that of his father, and had a suavity which he never lost
until his dying day," in Edizione Nazionale delle Opere di Galileo Galilei, ed. A. Favaro
(Florence, 1890-1909/rpt. 1929-39), vo!. XIX, p. 602. The large lute manuscript in
Vincenzo's hand, Florence, Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale, Ms. Ga!. VI, is a didactic anthology
that may weil have been compiled for Galileo's own study of the lute. Interestingly, practically
each gagliarda of a set of fifty-five that appears in the second half of the manuscript is headed
by the name of mythological figures, including muses.
100 VlcroR ÜJEllIO

myth is employed precisely to demonstrate that an element of unquantifia-

bility exists in everything, most of all in music. Galileo's musical allegory
(sometimes called the Parable of Sounds) reveals his philosophy as a musi-
cian, for whom intangibles are always present, and as someone who
recognizes the outer limits and possible danger of scientific scrutiny.
As part of the answer to his critics' allegations (mainly those of the
Jesuit mathematician Orazio Grassi) that he was unable to determine the
origins of comets, Galileo spun an intricate tale about the mystery of finding
the origins of musical sound.41 It is quoted at length here, in the translation
by Stillman Drake:42

Once upon a time, in a very lonely place, there lived a man en-
dowed by nature with extraordinary curiosity and a very penetrating
mind. For a pastime he raised birds, whose songs he much enjoyed;
and he observed with great admiration the happy contrivance by
which they could transform at will the very air they breathed into a
variety of sweet songs.
One night this man chanced to hear a delicate song elose to
his house, and being unable to connect it with anything but a
small bird he set out to capture it. When he arrived at a road he
found a shepherd boy who was blowing into a kind of hollow stick
while moving his fingers about on the wood, thus drawing from it
a variety of notes similar to those of a bird, though by quite a dif-
ferent method. Puzzled' but impelled by his natural curiosity, he
gave the boy a calf in exchange for this flute and returned to soli-
tude. But realizing that if he had not chanced to meet the boy he
would never have learned of the existence of a new method of
forming musical notes and the sweetest songs, he decided to travel
to distant places in the hope of meeting with some new adventure.
The very next day he happened to pass by a small hut within
which he heard similar tones; and in order to see whether this was a
flute or a bird he went inside. There he found a small boy who was
holding a bow in his right hand and sawing upon some fibers
stretched over a hollowed piece of wood. The left hand supported
the instrument, and the fingers of the boy were moving so that he
drew from this a variety of notes, and most melodious ones too,
without any blowing. Now you who participate in this man's
thoughts and share his curiosity may judge of his astonishment.
Yet fmding himself now to have two unanticipated ways of produc-
ing notes and melodies, he began to perceive that still others might
exist.

41 A thorough and brilliant examination of the history surrounding the publication of Il

Saggiatore is in Pietro Redondi, Galileo Heretic, trans. R. Rosenthal (Princeton, 1987), pp.
28-67.
42 Discuveries and Opinions 0/ GaliIeo, trans. Stillman Drake (New York, 1957), pp. 256-258.
 MYTH, SCIENCE, AND SERODINE'S ALLEGORIA DEUA SCIENZA 101

His amazement was increased when upon entering atempie he

heard asound, and upon looking behind the gates discovered that
this had come from the hinges and fastenings as he opened it.
Another time, led by curiosity, he entered an inn expecting to see
someone lightly bowing the strings of a violin, and instead he saw
a man rubbing his fmgertip around the rirn of a goblet and drawing
forth a pleasant tone from that. Then he discovered that wasps,
mosquitoes and flies do not form single notes by breathing, as did
the birds, but produce their steady sounds by swift beating of their
wings. And as his wonder grew, his conviction proportionately di-
minished that he knew how sounds were produced; nor would all of
his previous experiences have sufficed to teach hirn or even allow
hirn to believe that crickets derive their sweet and sonorous
shrilling by scraping their wings together, particularly as they can-
not fly at aIl.
WeIl, after this man had come to believe that no more ways
of forming tones could possibly exist-after having observed, in
addition to all the things already mentioned, a variety of organs,
trumpets, fifes, stringed instruments, and even that little tongue of
iron that is placed between the teeth and which makes strange use
of the oral cavity[ ... ] when, I say, this man believed that he had
seen everything, he suddenly found hirnself once more plunged
deeper into ignorance and bafflement than ever. For having captured
in his hands a cicada, he failed to diminish its strident noise either
by closing its mouth or stopping its wings, yet he could not see it
move the scales that covered its body, or any other thing. At last
he lifted up the armor of its chest and there he saw some thin hard
ligaments beneath; thinking the sound might come from their vi-
bration, he decided to break them in order to silence it. But nothing
happened until his needle drove too deep, and transfixing the crea-
ture he took away its life with its voice, so that he was still unable
to determine whether the song had originated in those ligaments.
And by experience his knowledge was reduced to diffidence, so that
when asked how sounds were created he used to answer tolerantly
that although he knew a few ways, he was sure that many more ex-
isted which were not only unknown but unimaginable.

In the examples he gives, Galileo is apparently drawing upon some of

his own investigations of sound; the allusion to rubbing a moist finger along
the rim of the glass, for example, was reported as an experiment in deter-
mining frequeneies of vibration in his Two New Sciences of 1638.43
Therefore, the tale might be modelled in a general fashion after Galileo's
own methodologies. Indeed, the tale beeomes almost a manual of how sei-
entifie results are produeed through investigation. The man thus beeomes

43 See Stillman Drake, "Vincenzio Galilei and Galileo," p. 59.

102 VlcrOR CoELHO

the symbol of seience, who with his "extraordinary curiosity," moves from
the "lonely place" of ignorance towards knowledge by "travelling to distant
places in the hope of meeting with some new adventure." The man finds
that a plurality, perhaps even an infinite variety, of methods exist for
making musical sounds that constantly defy his expectations. Hearing that
birds produce sound by breathing, he later finds to his increasing astonish-
ment that sounds can also be made by the activities of blowing, sawing,
[creaking], rubbing, bowing, beating, and scraping. These possibilities in-
troduce some wonderful oppositions about music making: they can be made
by nature or by an artificial means; they can be played on a violin or on the
rim of a glass; after hearing bowed string sounds in a hut, the man hears
sounds made by a creaking door in atempie. Each time, his expectations of
how sounds are produced are dashed by the polarities of the situation,
which reach a climax when the man finally "believed he had seen every-
thing" but "suddenly found hirnself once more plunged deeper into
ignorance and bafflement than ever." In the end of his story, then, Galileo
attains the ultimate paradox: the eicada is the most impenetrable in revealing
its source of sound, yet the needle penetrates too deeply.
In Cesare Ripa's widely-read mythography Iconologia, the cicada is
described as a symbol of music. 44 It is unthinkable that Galileo would not
have known of this book, as it was considered an essential tool for the un-
derstanding of historical, mythological, philosophical and allegorical
meaning in the visual arts. Ripa's sources, moreover, were drawn not only
from ancient authors, such as Homer, Aristotle, and Ovid, but from the
popular corpus of sixteenth-century emblematics, bestiaries, encyclopedias,
egyptologies, and the like. 45 In the last of Ripa's five personifications of
musica, he describes a woman playing the eittem on which there is a broken
string, and in the string's place is a eicada. A nightingale appears promi-
nently on her head; at her feet are a cask of wine and a lira [da braceio] with
its bow. According to Ripa, the cicada symbolizes an event that occured to a
certain Eunomio, who one day played in a music contest against
Aristoxenus. Despite the sweetest playing, one of his strings snapped, and
quickly a cicada flew onto the eittem. With its voice the cicada replaced the

44 Ripa (ca. 1560-ca. 1623) published the first edition of his book in Rome in 1593; a second
edition, this time with illustrations, was pub!ished in Rome in 1603. Numerous editions of this
work were reprinted and edited unti! the late eighteenth century.
45 On the importance of this material to the field of natural history, as weH as a sturdy survey of
Renaissance emblematics, see William B. Ashworth, Ir., "Natural history and the emblematic
world view," in Reappraisals o[ the Scientific Revolution, pp. 303-32. For an introduction to
Ripa and his sources, see the Dover edition, entitled Ces are Ripa, Baroque and Rococo Pictorial
lmagery, ed. E. A. Maser (New York, 1971), pp. vii-xi.
 MYTH, SCIENCE, AND SERODINE'S ALLEGORIA DEUA SC1EN7A 103

sound of the broken string, and this is how the musical contest was won. In
the 1611 edition, Ripa adds that for the benefit of the eicada, and in memory
of this feat, Aristoxenus erected astatue to Eunomio with his eittem, on
whieh sat the eicada.46
Galileo scholars have not previously commented on the ieonologieal
signifieance of the last part of the story, in which the man is unable to de-
termine how the eicada produces its sound. 47 By choosing this tried and
true symbol of musie as the one generator of sound to resist seientific ex-
planation, Galileo reveals both his awareness of the mythological and
ieonologieal symbolism that was attributed to the insect, and his ability to
work on this myth in a powerful fashion.
Based as it is on myth and emblems, Ripa's Iconologia integrates mu-
sie and science in a harmonious manner. 48 This Platonie idea, however,
with its notions of world harmony and divine inspiration, had been reduced
to a rhetorieal framework by musical and pure seientists by the seventeenth
century.49 As the new astronomie al discoveries and proof of a heliocentric
universe became unchallengeable, Ripa's muses and personifications be-
came disenfranchised and expendable, particularly with regard to the theme
of the power of musie.

46 Ripa, lconologia (Padua, 1611), p. 367: "Musica.! Donna che suoni la cetra, la quale habbia
una corda rotta, & in luogo della corda vi sia una cicala; in capo habbia un Rosignuolo uccello
notissimo, a' piedi un gran vaso di vino, & una Lira col suo arco. La cicala posta sopra la cetra,
significa Ia Musica, per un caso avvenuto d'un certo Eunomio, al quale, sonando un giomo a
concorrenza con Aristoseno Musico, nel piu dolce sonare si ruppe una corda, & subito sopra
quella cetera ando volando una cicala, la quale col suo canto suppliva al mancamento della
corda, COS! tu vincitore della concorrenza musicaie. Onde per beneficio della cicala, in memoria
di tal fatto, Ii Greci drizzomo una statua al detto Eunomio con una cetera con Ia cicala sopra ... "
The complete text is in the Paduan edition of 1611, reprinted in facsimile by Garland, with an
introduction by Stephen Orgel (New York, 1976). The Dover edition in English, based on the
Hertel edition of 1758-60, does not contain this description.
47 Gary Tomlinson cites this text in his articulate "case study" of Galileo, but he does not
discuss its iconological significance; see Monteverdi and the End 0/ the Renaissance, pp. 14-
15.
48 Ripa's first and longest personification of Musica, for example (lconologia, p. 366), shows
a young woman seated on a colored sphere, her eyes fixed on a sheet of music she is holding.
Next to her are scales, and behind her are an anvil and some tools made of iron. Ripa explains
that the sphere represents that all musical harmony on earth is dependent on the harmony of
the spheres, as told to us by Pythagoras; the anvil, of course, represents the famous story of
how Pythagoras determined the ratios of musical consonances by hearing the sounds of the
hammers on anvils. The scales represent the balance between the accuracy (giustezza) of the
voice and the judgement (giudicio) of the ear and the other senses.
49 See Kassler, ''The 'Science' of Music to 1830," p. 121.
 ~

:s:
~
~

PLATE1: Giovanni Serodine, Allegoria della scienza, ca. 1630 (Milano, Pinacoteca Ambrosiana, lnv. 134)
 MYTH, SCIENCE, AND SERODINE'S AuEGORIA DELLA SCIEN7A 105

In his painting known as the Allegoria della scienza (Milan, Pinacoteca

Ambrosiana), Giovanni Serodine develops an intricately-braided mythology
around these themes (see Plate 1).50 Serodine was born in Ascona in 1594
and probably moved to Rome around 1615. 51 He is one of the least well
known of the Roman Caravaggisti, though the speed at which he gained bis
extraordinary technique is often compared to that of Caravaggio hirnself. 52
Serodine's total authenticated output is small, amounting to only around
twenty-one paintings before he died in 1630,53 but his themes show a re-
markable unity of purpose. Many of them feature an aHegorical figure seated
at the table, with books and other objects lying about in a minor disarray.54
Although the theme of scientific conflict also occurs in his Aristarchus of
Samos, the Allegoria della scienza is the only painting by Serodine in which
music and science are the central subjects. 55
The painting is quite rich in allegory, but clear in intent. A striking
woman is seated at a table, against a plain background of what appears as
flickering light and shadows. Because of her uneven weight distribution
clearly favoring the right side and the disillusioned position of her head, the
aHegorical figure assurnes the classic posture of someone in distress or
melancholy. Her left arm is fairly limp and hangs on a long staff, almost as
if she is too weak to support herself. Moving across the horizontalline of
her large shoulders, we can see her right arm, still sleeved, and her right
hand squeezing her right breast. Since the blouse on her left side has already
been pulled off her arm and gathered weH below her left breast, it appears
that she has already squeezed the left breast, and has now moved, dissa-
pointingly, to her right. On the table in front of the woman are the objects
that complete the allegory. On her left, next to the staff, is an armillary
sphere whose base has slipped off the table. Only the left hand of the alle-
gorical figure is preventing the entire sphere from crashing down to the

50 The title of the painting is by no means standard in all of the citations of this work. I use the
title that appears in the visiting guide of the Pinacoteca Ambrosiana.
51 Information on Serodine' s life is scarce, but his life and work has been confronted in two
full-scale works: Roberto Longhi, Giovanni Serodine (Florence, 1954) and Walter
Schoenenberger, Giovanni Serodine, in Bäsler Studien zur Kunstgeschichte 14 (Basel, 1957).
52 Rudolf Wittkower, Art and Architecture in ltaly 1600-/750 (Middlesex, 1958), p. 45.
53 For the most recent catalogue of Serodine's works, see Benedict Nicolson, Caravaggism in
Europe, 2nd ed., vol. 1 (Torino, 1989), pp. 176-78. Seventeen of these works are reproduced in
vol. 2, pI. 135-51 of the same series.
54 As in the Portrait 01 his Father (Museo Civico, Lugano), St. Peter in Prison (Züst Collection,
Rancate), Evangelist (GaUeria Estense, Modena) and Aristarchus 01 Samos (Dresden,
Gemäldgalerie).
55 The Allegoria has been studied in some detail by Pame1a Askew, "A Melancholy Astronomer
by Giovanni Serodine," The Art Bulletin 47 (1965), pp. 121-28.
106 VICfOR O>EUlO

floor. Moving to the middle of the table we see books, of which a elose
inspection of the open pages reveals some geometrie drawings. Moving to
her right even more, a cittem lies directly under the breast that is being
squeezed. Finally, behind the neck of the cittem, we notice a square and a
compass.
Schoenenberger has proposed that the female figure in this allegory
may have been Serodine's mistress, for she reappears, he claims, in two
other paintings of his: the Boly Family (after 1626) and the Coronation 0/
the Virgin (1628), the latter being the only other painting by Serodine that
features a musical instrument. elose inspection reveals that the similarity in
likeness between the three women is not strong, however. At any rate, the
identity of the woman is less important than her actions. The allegorical fig-
ure is involved in what can be called a laeteal baptism of the musical
instrument that is in front of her; that is, she is trying to baptize the eittem,
which lies just below her right breast, with her nourishing milk. The subject
matter, though slightly bizarre, is quite common, and the depiction of alle-
gorical feminine figures baptising instruments, books, and nature with
breast milk links up with both mythological and iconological themes that we
have already mentioned. As early as the twelfth century, Herrad von
Landsberg's Bortus Deliciarum shows the personification of philosophy
pictured in the middle of a cirele, while seven streams of milk come from
her breasts, eaeh one representing one of the seven liberal arts that are in-
scribed around the eirele. 56 In the famous Patera martelli, dating from the
early fifteenth century, the breast milk of a muse is being squeezed into a
drinking hom, as an offering to the satyr in front of her. 57
The image of women baptising with breast milk has its distant origins
in Dante's Purgatorio, where it is written that the ancient poets, Homer par-
ticularly, suekled at the breast of the muse,58 although the theme goes back
much farther in the manifestation of the Maria Lactans. 59 Since then, repre-
sentations of lacteal inspiration on music have become an iconography in it-
self. In the sixteenth-century Flemish painting, the Allegory 0/ In-

56 This is reproduced in Günter Bandmann, Melancholie und Musik: Ikonographische Studien.

Wissenschaftliche Abhandlungen der Arbeitsgemeinschaft für Forschung des Landes Nordrhein-
Westfalen 12 (Cologne, 1960), pI. 52.
57 See Emanuel Wintemitz, Musical Instruments and their Symbolism in Western Art (New
Haven & London, 1979), pp. 205-08 & pI. 89a.
58 Dante, Purgatorio, xxn, 97-102: "dimmi dov'e Terrenzio nostro antico,' Cecilio e Plauto e
Varro, se 10 sai: 'dimmi se non dannati, e in qual vico," ,"Costoro e Persio e io e altri assai," ,
rispuose il duca mio, "siam con quel Greco , che le Muse lattar piu ch'altri mai ... "
59 See Warren Kirkendale, "Circulatio-Tradition, Maria Lactans, and Josquin as Musical
Orator," Acta Musicologica 56 (1984), pp. 66-92.
 MYTH, SCIENCE, AND SERODINE'S AILEGORIA DEUA SCIENZA 107

spiration, 60 a muse crowned with wine leaves ennobles and empowers the
lira da braccio held by the youth by squeezing breast milk on his
instrument-a substitute for Dante's "suckling."61 A 1592 emblem used for
the city of Naples similarly shows a siren squeezing milk on a lira da
braccio (see Plate 2). Ripa's Iconologia contains several representations of
women with breasts full of milk. In the personification of Poesia, they
represent "the fecundity of conceits and inspiration which are the soul of
poetry. "62 Ripa adds in his description of Natura that full breasts signify
development (jorma) and nourishment; Nature's breast milk sustains all that
is created, just as a woman' s full breasts nourish children. 63

PLATE 2: From G. C. Capaccio, Trattato delle imprese (Napies, 1592, p. 23).

For Capaccio's description of this emblem, see Wintemitz, p. 206, n. 3.

60 From a private collection, reproduced in Wintemitz, pL 90.

61 On the humanistic symbolism of the lira da braccio, see Wintemitz, pp. 86-98.
62 Ripa, Iconologia, p. 431: "Le manunelJe piene di latte, mostrano la fecondita de eoncetti, &
dell' inventioni, ehe sono I'anima della poesia."
63 Ripa, Iconologia, p. 375: "L'attivo si nota con le manunelJe piene di latte, perehe la forma e
ehe nu[t]risce, & sostenta tutte le cose create, eome con le mammelJe la donna nutrisce, &
sostenta li fanciulli." See also the 1522 woodcut by Hans Springenklee, in which a bacchante
is represented with wine leaves in her hair and a cluster of grapes in her left hand (remember
that a cask of wine appeared with Ripa's Musica with the cicada). She is squeezing milk from
her left breast as a symbol of nourishment, or perhaps as a symbol of mother nature. For a
reproduction see W. L. Strauss, ed., The Illustrated Bartsch 12 (New York, 1981), p. 127.
108 VIcroR CoEUlO

We can now return to Serodine's allegory with greater powers of inter-

pretation. The female figure is a muse who, as in Dante's Purgatorio, is
attempting to nourish creativity by breast feeding the einern-an instrument
with strong humanistic associations. 64 Unlike the previous images we have
seen, however, no milk: streams forth from the breast she is squeezing, and
it is c1ear that she has already tried her other breast as weH. The symbols of
unfruitfulness and lack of creativity are quite strong here, and this is the
reason for the melancholy and sorrow in the woman's face and gesture. In
Günter Bandmann's Melancholie und Musik, he states that the motif ofmilk:
issuing from the breast is associated with the power of conceptual thought
and invention, and therefore, with education and the arts. This figure
squeezes her breast in vain: she is unfruitful and has lost her gift of inspira-
tion. Unlike the muses in Dante, she cannot nourish the poets, or in this
case, music, with her milk.
Serodine's use of the cittem to represent music is, of course, similar to
Ripa's use of the instrument as a symbol of musical sound. It presents a
powerful image, since the cittem, even more than the lira da braccio, was
considered to have the c10sest affinity with the aneient Greek instruments as
a result of its corporeal evolution from the kithara (see Plate 3).65 Wintemitz
has traced the development of the instrument from the sixth century, and
noticed certain aspects of its ancient construction retained into the sixteenth
century. The instrument is painted with accuracy in proportion, though it is
not nearly as beautifully crafted as many other eittems that were bullt during
the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. 66
Representations of the eittem also link up with themes of seience. In
the fifteenth-century intarsia study of Federigo da Montefeltro (the 'Gubbio
Studiolo'), now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, instru-
ments, books, seientific instruments, arms, and other items are depicted in
the wood-carved study.67 In Section 9 of the study (see Plate 4), we find a

64 Aecording to Askew ("A Melaneholy Astronomer ... " p. 128), the woman is "not an antique
muse, but simply a female figure whose melaneholy thoughts are given apreeise content
through a gesture whieh traditionally refers to the muses, and therefore, the arts."
65 See Winternitz, pp. 57-65. On the eomplieated diatonie and ehromatie frening of the eittern,
see Louis Peter Grijp, "Fret Patterns of the Cittem," GaIpin Society Journal 34 (1981), pp. 62-
77.
66 For example, the exquisite eittems in Paris, Musee du Conservatoire National de Musique,
Musee Instrumental E. 1271, made by Girolamo Virehis of Breseia (ca. 1570), and in New
York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Vineent Astor Foundation Gift and Rogers Fund
1985.124, made by Joaehim Tielke (ca. 1685).
67 See Wintemitz, pp. 120-28.
 MYrH, SCIENCE, AND SERODINE'S AILEGORIA DElLA SCIENZA 109

PLATE 3: Giovanni Serodine, Allegoria della scienza, detail of einem.

eittern, together with a compass, pendulum, and an hourglass-in short,

practically the same instruments that are found on the table in front of
Serodine's female allegory. Winternitz connects the musical with the scien-
tific instruments as examples of quattrocento rationalization, "sweeping
through all branches of natural science, aiming at calculation and control of
nature by establishing its laws,"68 as wen as to the more fundamental rela-
tionship between music and the seiences in the quadrivium. Moreover, the
intarsia study achieves its aesthetic through geometric means and linear per-
spective. Therefore, the instruments themselves are symbols of the seience
inherent in theirrendering. Finally, Serodine's use ofthe eittern strengthens
the connection between the allegorical painting and Dante's Commedia. In
Purgatorio, we remember, Dante spoke of the poets, espeeially Homer,
who suckled at the muse's breast. In Paradiso, however, Dante evokes the
eittern as a way of explaining the sound that comes from the eagle's neck,

68 Wintemitz. p. 122.
110 VICfOR CoElliO

PLATE 4: Gubbio Study of Federigo da Montefeltro, seetion 9 (New York,

The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Rogers Fund, 1939 [39.153]).
 MITH, SCIENCE, AND SERODINE'S AILEGORIA DELLA SCIEN7A 111

as one produces the sounds on the eittem by stopping the frets on the
neck. 69
The last key to unlocking the meaning of Serodine's allegory is in the
symbolism behind the instruments lying on the table in front and to the side
of the allegorical figure. It is clear that science-given that the dividers,
square, sphere, and books are all of a seientific nature 7o-has interfered
with the mothering of music by nature. The eittem awaits nourishment and
inspiration from the milk of the muse, but does not receive it. To the
woman's left the sphere is about to crash to the floor, while on her right
there lies a compass a symbol of geometry and time, as well as of the planet
Satum, which brings melancholy. From the time of the Copemican
revolution in the early sixteenth century, artists have depicted images of
melancholy with seientific instruments and single female figures, perhaps as
a representation of mother nature. The iconographical prototype of melan-
choly as a single female figure must be Dürer's "Melancholia," engraved
around 1514.7 1 The depth of symbolism in this work is far too profound
for us to be able to summarize quickly here, but a few of the connections
between this and Serodine's allegory can be pointed out: the compass, being
held in the woman's right hand, the woman's drooping head, the sphere
lying in front of the calf, and the geometric shapes in the background.72 As
in Serodine's painting, the conflict here is between the soul and the mind.
The seientific instruments that abound in this engraving are not being used,
and, as in Serodine's allegory, form the underlying reason for the
melancholy. According to Panofsky, "Dürer himself had condensed in the
magnificent symbol of his 'Melancholia' the whole predicament of a mind
which deeply feit, but was as yet unable to resolve, the tension between
seientific truth ... and the neo-platonic gospel of super rational inspiration."73
The tradition derived from Dürer's Melancholia makes this point
increasingly dear, particularly with regard to music's role within the conflict
between the mind and tpe soul.

69 "Eccome suono al eoll della eetra I Prende sua forma, e si eome al pertugio I Della sampogna
vento ehe penetra; I Cosi, rimosso d'aspettare indugio, I Quel mormorar dell'aquile salissi I Su
ror 10 eollo, eome fossi bugio"; see Winternitz, p. 57.
o Aeeording to Ripa, the eompass, sphere and triangle are part of the ieonography of
Mathematies and Seienee.
71 Reprodueed, among many other plaees, in Panofsky, "Artist, Seientist.. .. ". p. 177.
72 For a detailed study of this theme in the eontext of Dürer's engraving. see Raymond
Klibansky. Erwin Panofsky & Fritz Saxl, Saturn and Melancholy (Nendeln, 1979), pp. 284-
375. For a different interpretation of the same work. see Dame Franees Yates, "Arehiteetural
Themes: Chapman and Dürer on Inspired Melaneholy." AA Files 1 (1981),46-53.
73 Dürer. like Galileo. feit that while mathematies eould provide eertainty, there were many
things beyond its possibilities; see Panofsky, "Artist. Seientist. ... " p. 175.
112 VICfOR CoElliO

PLATE 5: Giovanni Benedetto Castiglione (1609-64), La Melanconia (Rome, Istituto

Nazionale per Ja Grafica, Gabinetto dei Disegni e delle Stampe [p. C. 31904])
 MYTH, SCIENCE, AND SERODINE'S ALLEGORIA DELLA SCIENZA 113

The presence of the compass in virtually every representation of melan-

choly, including Serodine's, deserves some explanation. The compass
represents mathematics, science, and geometry, which are ruled by Satum
in Renaissance cosmology. Satum is also the dark, introverted planet that
govems melancholy. Similar to images of melancholics, representations of
Satum usually show hirn with his head in his hands, and almost always
with a compass. In the Melanconia engraved by Serodine's Roman
contemporary Giovanni Benedetto Castiglione (1609-64), we are presented
with a very close parallel to Serodine's allegory, headed by the title Ubi
inletabilitas, ibi virtus-"where there is grief there is virtue" (see Plate 5).74
Castiglione's engraving shows melancholy again as a single female figure,
along with instruments of seience-sphere, compass, and zodiac-and,
most importantly, alute, which, like the eittem in Serodine's allegory, is
unplayed. Behind and above the female figure is a large sphere, resting
precariously on crumbling walls-a symbol of the crumbling Ptolemaic
universe. In the Iconologia, Ripa depicts the sense of hearing with a woman
playing the lute.7 5 By extension, the unplayed lute in Castiglione's
engraving, combined with the crumbling walls and sphere, represents the
inaudibility of the harmony of the spheres, which also brings on
melancholy. In Serodine's allegory this idea is expressed by the armillary
sphere hanging over the edge of the table, and ready, it seems, to fall at any
moment. Made out of wooden or metal rings, these spheres represented the
essential form of the Ptolemaic system. At the center is a black ball
representing earth, and the Sun travels along the outer band on its oblique
path-the ecliptic-which is marked with the signs of the zodiac.
Serodine's representation of the Ptolemaic system crashing down, causing a
sileneing of music as a result of an impotent muse, could not be made more
obvious.
I have attempted in this essay to develop three lines of thinking that are
dedicated towards exploring the relationship between musical practice and
scientific progress of the seventeenth century. The first concerns the
centrality of the mythical tradition to composers of the late Renaissance, and
the representations of this mythology in musical practice. Myth provided the
composer with inspirational and irredueible models, and can be considered

74 Born in Genoa in 1609, Castiglione is doeumented in Rome by 1632. Castiglione was in-
terested in themes having to do with magie as weil as astronomy. The Melanconia was proba-
bly engraved before 1647 in Genoa, and was published by Giovanni Domenieo De Rossi in
Rome in 1677. See Paolo Bellini, ed., The Illustrated Bartsch 46, pt. 1 (New York, 1982), p.
39, and pt. 2 (New York, 1985), pp. 39-40.
75 Ripa, /conologia, p. 475: "Udito./Donna ehe suoni un Liuto, & a canto vi sara una Cerva."
114 VICfOR CoEUIO

integral to the development of early seventeenth-century musical culture.

For science, however, myth was seen as a "prejudice" that needed to be
moved aside. 76 The idea of cultivating an Orphic power of music may be
considered the fundamental myth of this time.
The second point concerns the unverifiability and unquantifiability of
myth. If myth is at the root of musical inspiration and is an 'ideal' influence
in compositional procedure, it would follow that any attempt at a rational
explanation of musical composition is bound to miss the mark. I have sug-
gested that as a result of his own extensive training in music, Galileo was
aware of the mythical and iconological traditions of music. 1t was Galileo
speaking as a musician and acknowledging myth, I believe, that led hirn to
assert, in his story about the cicada, that there are some aspects about music
that are unverifiable, even by science. We can summarize this point by
saying that the field of musical science, important as it was towards under-
standing the physics of sound, was rather ineffective in explaining musical
change. Trained to hunt down answers about music within rational and
carefully-controlled conditions, musical scientists missed targets in the field
of musical practice that moved outside those staked-out spots on which they
had trained their sights.
Finally, Serodine's Allegoria, painted in Rome just a few years before
Galileo's trial in the same city, questions the compatibility between the
mythology of the harmony of the spheres, and the new cosmology of
Copernicism. For Serodine, the affinities between music, astronomy, math-
ematics, and geometry-the quadrivium-were in peril of being broken. 1t
has always been difficult to ascertain the response (or whether there even
was a response) of artists and musicians to the scientifc discoveries of their
time. Whether or not Serodine's Allegoria reflects current thinking among
musicians and artists, it does urge us to take notice of a philosophical con-
frontation between a fundamental musical myth and the new science.
Contemporary thinking on the scientific revolution by historians of
science has stressed the continuing influence of the hermetic and 'magical'
traditions,?7 Likewise, future investigations into music and science might
consider the mythical tradition more seriously in seeking to understand why
musicians and scientists of the time, such as Monteverdi and Galileo, could
move forward, yet could not deny the past.

THE UNNERSITY OF CALGARY

76 Blumenberg, Work on Myth, translator's introduetion, p. vii.

77 See Brian P. Copenhaver, "Natural Magie, hermetism, and oeeultism in early modem sei-
enee," in Reappraisals 0/ the Scientific Revolution, pp. 261-302.
 ROBERT E. BurrS

TICKLES, TITILLATIONS, AND 1HE W ONDERFUL

ACCIDENTS OF SOUNDS: GALILEO AND 1HE CONSONANCES

B Y WAY OF PREAMBLE LET ME SAY that I very much appreciate Stillman

Drake's presentation of Galileo as what I would call a logical empiricist (this
volume, pp. 3-16). Although I think that metaphysics plays a larger role in
the development of scienee than does Drake, I am inelined to agree that
Galileo was not very mueh interested in fathering a new metaphysics.
Galileo diseovered some exaet laws of nature. He aeeepted those laws as
laws. When one accepts a law on empirie al grounds, metaphysics becomes
gratuitous, a point that led the great Kant to single out the signifieanee of
Galileo's eontribution in the Prefaee to the 2nd edition of the Critique of
Pure Reason and to model his own philosophical method on what he eon-
sidered Galileo' s method to be. 1
Agreeing to the extent that I do with Drake's attempt to isolate the gen-
uinely important eharaeteristics of Galileo's scienee, I will not in what
follows endeavor to vindicate those who argue that philosophical changes
provide the vital nerve of the seientific revolution. As a philosopher of

I Immanuel Kant, Critique o[ Pure Reason (1787), trans. Nonnan Kemp Smith (London, 1950),
Bxüi: "When Galileo caused balls, the weights of which he had himself previously determined,
to roll down an inclined plane ... , a light broke upon all students of nature. They leamed that
reason has insight into that which it produces after a plan of its own, and that it must not allow
itself to be kept, as it were, in nature's leading strings, but must itself show the way with prin-
ciples of judgment based upon fixed laws, constraining nature to give answer to questions of
reason's own detennining." Of course, as Kant also urged, the historian of science, and the
philosopher as weIl, needs to take metaphysics seriously-it is dangerous.
On the question of empiricism, if one is unable to fmd the time to master Kant's Critique
o[ Pure Reason, one can do no better than to consult the classic paper of Rudolf Camap,
"Empiricism, Semantics, and Ontology," in Semanrics and the Philosophy o[ Language, ed. L.
Linsky (Urbana, 1952), pp. 208-28, wherein it is argued that one must distinguish between
internal and external ontological questions. Internal questions have to with acceptance of a
language that describes certain scientific entities: electrons, genes, and the like. Acceptance of
that language amounts to no more than accepting that theoretical statements about such enti-
ties are weIl confirmed. On the other hand, external questions raise typically metaphysical
issues: Is there a world of physical things? Can that world be characterized as detenninistic or
not? Did that world begin in time? and the like. Camap called such questions non-cognitive;
Kant thought they involvcd dialectical confusions that made answering them impossible. 1
think that Kant and Camap are on the side of Galileo, whose ontology is a completely internal-
ist one. I am indebted to my brilliant young colleague Robert DiSalle for reminding me that at
some stage anyone who takes science seriously is a logical empiricist.
115
V. Coelho (ed.), Music and Science in the Age o[Galileo, 115-127.
© 1992 Kluwer Academic Publishers.
116 ROBERTE. BUlTS

science, I will instead be chiefly interested in learning something about the

nature of Galileo's science, its methodology, its logic, and its style of expla-
nation. As it will turn out, attention to such features of his science also has
implications-in the case of his views on music-for psychology and
cognitive science.
Let us look first at one of Galileo's thought experiments. As is the case
with all such experiments, we will fortunately not need any apparatus, and
the experimental controls will be the limits of our own imaginations and the
constraints of logic. On my right stands a man, barefooted, wearing shorts
and naked to the waist. On my left, astatue of this man, made as much in
the image of the man as is possible (including the shorts!). First, I pass my
right hand over the exposed parts of the statue, being careful especially to
touch the soles of the feet, the area under the right knee, and the right
armpit. What can we observe? We see my hand moving, and touching vari-
ous places on the surface of the statue. There is nothing else. I now make
the same motions with my hand and touch the man in the same places. What
can we observe? Again we see the hand moving and touching. But in this
case, when I touch the man under his knee, on the sole of a foot, and on an
armpit, he giggles, squirms, and tries to avoid my touch. He evinces astate
we call "tickled"; his actions express wh at we call "embarrassment."
Tickling occurs when the man is touched; the statue is not tickled.
I next pass a feather over the statue, and then over the man, being care-
ful in both instances to touch an eye, the nose, and the upper lip of each.
Again, wh at do we observe? In the two cases the motions and touches can
be as much alike as my geometrical skills can make them. The statue does
not react. The man, on the other hand, moves away from the feather when it
touches the selected places. His behavior indicates that he is experiencing a
sensation we call "titillation." It appears that statues are not tickled and
titillated, only living bodies are. We seem to have evidence for the common-
place fact that statues do not feel sensations.
Ask yourself: why would Galileo dream up such experiments? What is
at stake? Scientists, and Galileo seems to have been one of the fIrst to realize
this explicitly, do not undertake even thought experiments unless something
is at stake, unless something is anticipated. Charles Darwin reminded us
that unless something is expected there is no good reason for undertaking an
experiment. But he conceded that every scientist should be allowed to
perform one "damned-fool" experiment, on the off chance that something
unexpected might happen. He blew a trumpet at a bed of tulips. Nothing
happened. Is the thought experiment 1 have just described Galileo's one
damned-fool experiment? It is tempting to think so, because what Galileo
 GALILEO AND THE CONSONANCES 117

produces is only a dramatic rendering of a commonplace distinction between

animate and inanimate things, and we all know that distinction. But this re-
sponse is too quick, too facile. Galileo indeed does have something rather
deep in mind, something that by implication will conceptually isolate the
science of physics, and will suggest the need for a totally new science: the
science of psychology.
Return then to reconsider the thought experiment. It is c1ear in our
thought experiment that the living man experienced sensations. He told us
that by means of familiar reactions to touchings. We have all been tickled
and titillated. How are we to account for the capacity to feel sensations? In
Galileo's day the received ancient doctrine taught that we feel, say, heat,
because there are in the world some bodies (in this case fire) possessing the
faculty of warmness. When we come in contact with fire objects, they trans-
fer this warmness (in whatever degree they are warm) to us. It is the same
for all qualities of sense. The wine tastes acidic because it possesses acidity.
The apple is seen as red because (to use the platonic rhetoric) it participates
in redness. The sound is heard by men because (the term is Galileo's) it
possesses "sonority." And so on.
This theory entails that it should be the case that in our thought experi-
ment both my hand and the feather possess certain qualities that they
transfer to the statue and to the man. My hand possesses the quality
"tickling," the feather, the quality "titillating." But Galileo's thought exper-
iment shows tbis conc1usion to be absurd. If tickling resides in my hand and
is transferred when I touch certain places, then the statue should giggle,
squirm and attempt to withdraw from the stimulus of my hand. If titillation
resides in the feather, then the statue should react as the living man does. 2
What the thought experiment shows is that sensations are not trans-
ferred from other objects to us in the sense that those objects have the
capacity to relate their forms to us (in some mysterious and usually unexpli-
cated way). The plain implication is that the geometry and the mechanics of
moving and touching are indifferent with respect to the two cases of action
over a living body and over a statue. Motion and congruity receive exactly
the same mathematical description in both cases. The conc1usion is that tick-
ling and titillation are in us, and not in the object initiating these sensations.
What Galileo says in conclusion about titillation applies equally to all
sensations:

2 The circularity of such Aristotelian explanations of sensation is now weIl known, with our
understanding helped in no small measure by Moliere's suggestion in Le malade imaginaire
that opium induces sleep because it possesses a dormative "virtue ...
118 ROBERTE. BlTITS

This titillation belongs entirely to [the man] and not to the feather;
if the live and sensitive body were removed it would remain no
more than a mere word. I believe that no more solid an existence
belongs to many qualities which we have come to attribute to
physical bodies-tastes, odors, colors, and many more. 3

[At this point, the statue becomes restless. The following dialogue ensues:

Statue: According to Galileo, you're just like me. So if you feel

ticlded and titillated, why can't I?
Man: You 're not real.
Statue: I can leam.
Man: You can't leam to be real; leaming to be real is like leaming
to be a midget. Some of us are real and some aren 't.4

I am inclined to think that this dialogue expresses all that there is of meta-
physics in Galileo's distinction between the two kinds of qualities.
Ontology is not really at issue here.]
Galileo is offering us not only a new explanation of the causes and
nature of sensation, but also a new theory of proper explanation. We need
to turn to details of the text under consideration, the essay The Assayer, of
1623. The chief points that need emphasis are 1) Galileo thinks that the sen-
sations are in the live and sensitive being, and 2) any explanation that holds
for all observable external motions and states of objects must have reference
to quantifiable properties of things. These points clearly indicate a new con-
ceptualization of the nature of matter. We need to study two well-known
texts of Galileo, one concerned to define material objects [hereafter, text M],
the other, to indicate the causal nature of transactions involving material
objects [hereafter text Me]. Both passages introduce Galileo's norninalism
of sense qualities.

[M] ... I think that tastes, odors, colors, and so on are no more than
mere names so far as the object in which we place them is con-
cemed, and that they reside only in the consciousness. Hence if the
living creature were removed, all these qualities would be wiped
away and annihilated. But since we have imposed upon them
special names, distinct from those of the other and real qualities
mentioned previously [mechanical properties of corporeal objects:
boundedness, shape, size, place at a time, contiguity, number, state

3 The passages under consideration are in Galileo's The Assayer of 1623. The translation is
taken from Stillman Drake, Disc(J\Jeries and Opinions 0/ Galileo (New York, 1957), pp. 273-
79.
4 Apologies to Woody Allen. The dialogue is adapted from his movie, The Purpie Rose 0/
Cairo.
 GAULEO AND THE CONSONANCES 119

of motion or rest], we wish to believe that they really exist as ac-

tually different from those.

[Me] To excite in use tastes, odors, and sounds I believe that noth-
ing is required in external objects except shapes, numbers, and slow
or rapid movements. I think that if ears, tongues, and noses were
removed, shapes and numbers would remain, but not odors or tastes
or sounds. The latter, I believe, are nothing more than names when
separated from living beings, just as tickling and titillation are
nothing but names in the absence of such things as noses and
armpits.

Text [M] teUs us that we need only mechanical (and some dynamical)
properties in order to conceptualize matter. We no longer need to add facul-
ties or forms or virtues, because sense qualities are in us, and thus are
idiosyncratic episodes in the private life history of living beings with sense
organs. For example, the word 'sweet' picks out one of these episodes.
Apart from this appropriate application, the name 'sweet' is a mere name.
This means that when I call an apple or asound 'sweet', I do so purely by
courtesy of language; 'sweet' does not properly apply to any real quality of
the material object apple or to the source of some heard sound [tremulations
of the air striking the tympanum of the earl Choose any sense quality you
like. To take the object that originates the sensation to possess the quality
that is referred to by the name of the quality is to engage in a mere fa~on de
parler.
Nominalism with respect to sense qualities reigns supreme. The real
properties of objects are quantitative; names of sense qualities are names for
transient sensations occurrent in consciousness. This does not complete
Galileo's radical "deconstruction" of the ancient explanatory circularities.
Passage [MC] teUs us that the nominalism extends to apply to the causal
relationship between material objects and subjective sensations. We can do
no better that to consider his own example: motion as the cause of heat.
Bodies producing heat in us do so because the large number of minute
particles making up a body (for example, fire) pass through our bodies with
differing velocities, touching us in such ways as to produce the various
kinds of sensations of heat. The fire, or any heat inducing material medium,
operates by moving to penetrate aU contiguous bodies, causing them to dis-
solve either slowly or quickly, in proportion to the number and velocity of
120 ROBERTE. Burrs

the rrre particles and the density of the bodies. So it is that motion is the
cause of heat. 5
Galileo's explanation of how felt heat is caused (and a similar kind of
explanation would be required to account for the production of all of the
various kinds of sensations) is fairly typical of what come to be called
mechanical explanations. In such explanations some form of motion is CfU-
cially involved, and all relevant factors are measurable. In addition, there is
always some form of contact or impact involved in a mechanical transaction.
There is epistemological merit in this new kind of explanation. Even if we
regard explanations like Galileo's explanation of the production of heat as
having a merely heuristic importance, efforts at mechanical explanation such
as his of heat eventually yield quantitative laws, which have applications,
and which invite the invention of instruments. All of this is of course char-
acteristic of the science Galileo was engaged in; it is also characteristic of
what we later come to define as the exemplary science: mathematical
physics.
However, we also know that, for good and sufficient philosophical
reasons, we purchase mechanical forms of explanation at a very high price.
Replacement of the older qualitative kind of explanation introduces the no-
torious mind/body problem which so plagued Descartes, Leibniz and other
seventeenth-century figures-but apparently not Galileo. Just consider the
following. On the older account, I feel sleepy when I drink too much wine
because the wine possesses a dormative quality. That quality "causes" my
sleepiness by sharing itself with me. The sleepiness-inducing quality is on-
tologically just like my sleepiness. Like causes like. How is it, on the new
account, that sizes, shapes, motions and quantities can cause my sensations,
especially given that the two kinds of qualities-those of bodies and those
of my private states of consciousness-are apparently irreducibly different,
are both ontologically fundamental? In this case, we have to think that two
unlike properties are causally re1ated, and good metaphysics and good logic
cannot tolerate a mixed ontology. It was Descartes's ontological sin to think
that the universe can be made up of two basically different substances.
Galileo appears to commit the very same sin.
However, whereas Descartes and Leibniz struggle to overcome the
dualism of mind and body, Galileo offers only his nominalism of the sense
qualities, and thereby makes certain kinds of explanatory connections im-
possible. For hirn, the causal connections will all be between extemal

5 This ingenious suggestion will, if followed to its implications, give us ascale of degrees of
heat, a measure of the amount of heat feIt. This is a fundamental point: for Galileo the best ex-
planations give us measures, hence invite ways of measuring by means of instruments.
 GAULEO AND THE CONSONANCES 121

bodies and my body, between mathematically describable external stimuli

and my sense organs. What, then, are we to say on behalf ofthe contents of
consciousness? My seen yellow is not in the eye in any literal sense: where
are my sensings? If states of consciousness are ontologically irreducible to
bodily states, how can anything bodily cause them? The differences we
thought to have discovered between our statue and our man are no longer
intelligible differences. If Galileo was aware of this problem, he does not
tell uso Instead, he offers only his nominalism of the sense qualities.
Galileo's discussion of sense qualities has profound implications for
the sense qualities we are here mainly interested in: the heard sounds we
sense as musical, the consonances. Indeed, we would expect Galileo to deal
with heard sounds in the same way in which he deals with other sensations.
In the essay of 1623, he does inc1ude sounds in his analysis of the status of
sensations. Just as fire was selected as the medium causing heat, so air is
chosen as the medium for transmitting sounds. 6 Air displaces itself equally
in all directions. The human ear is most adapted to receiving impressions
from all positions in space. Sounds are caused in us and heard when the air
" .. .is ruffled by a rapid tremor into very minute waves and moves certain
cartilages of a tympanum in the ear." Galileo notes that this happens without
the possession by the air of a special property of "sonority" or
"transonority." There are many ways in which the air may be so "ruffled,"
but this usually happens when some trembling body pushes the air, thus
propagating air waves very rapidly, producing high tones if the waves are
frequent, low tones if the waves are sparse.
Again, another mechanical explanation, this time, of the production of
sounds. The explanation, of course, applies to any sounds, whether those
sounds be merely noises or musical, dissonant or consonant. How, we
might ask, is the mechanical production of sounds in us related to those
special experiences we have when we take pleasure in hearing certain
sounds, and not others? The implications of the mindlbody problem are as
evident here as they were when we discussed tickles and titillations. What
Galileo refers to as "the Wonderful Accidents of Sounds" [the consonances]
are heard with pleasure. This is not true of all received sounds. How to
mark the dissimilarity?7

6 One vestige of ancient ways of thought that GaJileo never divested himself of is the pre-
Socratic idea that there are four and only four basic elements: earth, air, fire and water. The
chemistry of the seventeenth-century mechanists was still alchemy.
7 H. Floris Cohen, in his brilliant book, Quantifying Music (Dordrecht, 1984), provides a
fascinating account of the parallel careers of the mind/body problem and the problem of
explaining the consonances. Much that follows in this essay is indebted to his remarkable
command of interrelated themes in science, music and philosophy.
122 ROBERTE. Burrs

Galileo's major discussion of musie is limited to the last ten or so pages

of the First Day of his masterpiece of 1638, Discourses and Mathematical
Demonstrations concerning Two New Sciences pertaining to Mechanics and
Local Motions.s On the basis of"some easy and Sensible experiments," he
promises to "deduce Reasons of the W onderful Aeeidents of Sounds." The
use of language is worth a moment's pause. Remember that sounds are per-
eussions on the ear drum; the heard sound is produeed purely meehanieally.
Some heard sounds are pleasant, some are unpleasant, still others are
downright offensive. These modalities of heard sound are not the
"aecidents" to whieh Galileo refers. Rather, they are sensory seeond-Ievel
reaetions to tones, whieh have referenee to the piteh, quality and strength of
asound. It is tones that eonstitute the aecidents of the heard sound or the
substanee sound. The problem of aeeounting for the eonsonanees is then
one of explaining how tones, or more speeifieally pitehes, affeet the
listener.
The problem ean also be stated with reference to what we might eall the
"simple arithmetie" of the consonanees. Pythagoras is thought to have been
the first to diseover that melodie and hannonie pitehes (the eonsonanees)
have a mathematieal regularity that ean be expressed by means of the first
four positive integers. The piteh of a tone is detennined by the frequeney of
vibration of some objeet. It can be a stretched string, as it was for
Pythagoras, or a tuning fork, as is more common today.9 Pitch has nothing
to do with the nature of the vibration-different vibrations do not possess
different pitches-but only with its regularities of occurrenee. The conso-
nances turn out to be those pleasant regularities expressible as ratios of the
numbers 1,2,3 and 4: unison as 1/1, the octave as 1/2, the fifth as 2/3, and
so on. The numbers represent frequencies of vibration of two sounds oc-
curring either sueeessively or simultaneously.

8 The phrase "Wonderful Accidents of Sounds" is taken from Stillman Drake (trans.), Galileo
Galilei, Two New Sciences (Madison, 1974).
9 Galileo does not talk about tuning forks, but tries to devise other ways of "deducing" the facts
about regularities of the consonances: vibrating strings or pendulums; indeed any kind of
vibrating stretched string. The easiest way to illustrate these regularities of vibration is to at-
tach a light record-playing stylus to one end of a vibrating tuning fork, then to pass a piece of
smoked glass under it in a perfectly straight line and at a perfectly steady speed. The waves
traced on the glass will always be perfectly smooth recordings of the vibrations. Galileo seems
to have anticipated this illustration in his discussion of running a sharp iron chiseI over a
brass plate. The chisel produced whistling sounds that varied according to the speed with which
the chisei was drawn over the surface, ..... but always [varied) in such a way as to remain sharply
defined and equidistant," which is exactly the result exemplified by the waves represented on
the glass plate. The translation is from Henry Crew & Alfonso de Salvio, Dialogues Con·
cerning Two New Sciences (New York, 1954), p. 102.
 GAULEO AND THE CONSONANCES 123

Galileo did not dispute the simple arithmetic of the consonances.

Indeed, in the seventeenth century no one did. However, unlike Galileo,
some theorists about music did trouble themselves with the implications of
mathematical facts about music for the rnind/body problem. For we can ask:
what does the mathematics of frequencies of vibrations have to do with our
experience of sound as pleasant? There are a number of possible kinds of
answers to this question. Let me quickly outline the answers of some mem-
bers of an interesting farnily of earlier theories.
The first and obvious answer occurred to Pythagoras: everything that is
is number. If my inner experiences are just numbers, then there is a like
causes like relationship between mathematically describable sounds and
aesthetically appreciated sounds. This answer shares something with an
answer a Platonist rnight give. The Platonist believes that all of my possible
inner experiences are in some sense innate. All possible melodies and har-
monies are thus permanently stored in mind and are simply matched to the
heard melodies and harmonies: regularities of heard sound simply call up to
the screen of my awareness the recognition patterns previously stored in my
mind. Both the Pythagorean and the Platonic proposals share features of the
seemingly wild speculations of Kepler, who thought that the soul was a
processing faculty with capacities of comparison and relation. When sounds
hit the eardrum, the soul ponders their fate. If they harmonize with its ex-
pectations, or instance its archetypes, it admits them (they compute). This
happens only for the consonances. Dissonances are compared with expecta-
tions of the soul and are rejected (they do not compute).l0
Computer imagery comes naturally to mind when one is talking about
this farnily of theories. The mind is "hard-wired" with a huge variety of
patterns (of numbers, or recognition patterns, or patterns of expectation). If
Galileo were the Platonist some have claimed he is, then any one of these
solutions might have satisfied hirn. He does not even raise them as pos si-
bilities. Instead, fully in keeping with his program of mechanism, he
proposes another solution altogether, and provides experiments thought to
bol ster this solution.
Let us look then at how Galileo manages the relationship between the
simple arithmetic of sound frequencies and our experience of some such
frequencies as pleasant. He first acknowledges wh at is not in dispute,
namely, that the ratio of the tonal intervals is not "immediately determined
either by the length, size or tension of the strings, but rather by the ratio of

10 I am of course greatly oversimplifying the three innatist theories of the reception of conso-
nance. All that is needed here is a kind of identification of the central core of such theories.
124 ROBERTE. Burrs

their frequencies."l1 This means that a given interval consists of a number

of vibrations of sound moving through the air, percussing the eardrum,
which then vibrates with the same frequency. So far, so good. Faithful to
his preferred mode of explanation, Galileo has introduced no variables
except mathematizable ones: measurable temporal intervals, measurable vi-
brations or motions (in the air and of the eardrum). These variables are the
uniquely basic ones of all physics: measures of distances and time.
Everything else results from calculation. 12
Now Galileo asserts that this "established fact" "may possibly" explain
why some pairs of notes, of different pitches, cause a pleasant affect or sen-
sation. Such are the sensations of the consonances. Dissonance is
experienced when the vibrations of the two different pitches are discordant,
striking the ear "out of time." The greatest experience of dissonance occurs
when the frequencies of the notes are incommensurable. Galileo conc1udes:

Agreeable consonances are pairs of tones which strike the ear with
a certain regularity; this regularity consists in the fact that the
pulses delivered by the two tones, in the same interval of time,
shall be commensurable in number, so as not to keep the eardrum
in perpetual torment, bending it in two different directions in order
to yield to the ever-discordant impulses. 13

We thus have a causal explanation of how it is that we experience

pleasant sound and call it so, which, note, in the absence of the eardrum,
would turn out, like tickles and titillations, to be a mere name. Regular and
commensurable percussions of the eardrum cause pleasant sensations,
irregular and incommensurable ones cause painful sensations. The explana-
tion of derived pleasure and pain fits exacdy the model provided by Galileo
for explaining any sensations. Indeed, the explanation must have seemed to
hirn to be exceedingly plausible, for it agrees with the then widely-accepted
coincidence theory of the consonances. 14

11 Crew & de Salvio, Dialogues Concerning Two New Sciences, p. 103.

sound them, are ac-
12 It is interesting to note that musical intervals, although it takes time to
tually measured by geometrical lengths, and thus are measured spatially. Tonal intervals
expressed as ratios between two pitches give this result. If the Pythagorean ratios are correct,
there is a place where the consonant tone must appear in a given set of strings or other
appropriate instrument. It does not matter whether that place is reached successively or
simultaneously with another tone. I am indebted to my colleague Thomas Lennon for pointing
this out to me in ademonstration using his guitar. That tonal intervals should be spatial, not
temporal, is grist for Galileo' s mi11; for hirn, mathematics is geometry.
13 Crew & de Salvio, Dialogues Concerning Two New Sciences, p. 104.
14 The discussion of this theory, and of its evident shortcomings, is to be found in Cohen,
Quantifying Music, pp. 90-114. It is an account that would be difficult to improve upon.
 GALILEO AND THE CONSONANCES 125

Briefly, that theory teaches that coincident percussions of a longer and

a shorter string produce consonance. So for the octave, where one string is
twice the length of the other, at each percussion of the longer string there are
two of the shorter one, so that every one percussion or the longer string
coincides with two of the shorter one. Such wonderfully regular coinci-
dences work out mathematically for all of the consonances, and supposedly
not for dissonant sounds, ones produced by lack of coincidence when the
vibrations of the two different pitches interfere with one another. Galileo
gives a good account of how such coincident vibrations of the air produce
corresponding pleasant sounds in the listener by hitting the eardrum in just
the right regular ways. His explanation of the fifth is charrning, and will do
as representative of the kinds of explanations Galileo would have to give for
all of the consonances:

Thus the effect of the fifth is to produce a tickling of the eardrum

such that its softness is modified with sprightliness, giving at the
same moment the impression of a gentle kiss and of a bite. 15

Look at what has become of the wonderful accidents of sounds. We

need only compare his explanation of the causes of musical pleasure with
his explanations of the causes of tickling, titillation, and feit degrees of
warmth. What is striking is how faithful Galileo is to his own stringent de-
mands on explanation. Just as explaining tickling needs both a moving
object and a receptive sense organ that can itself be moved, so consonant
sound can be explained by reference only to moving air percussing the
eardrum and moving it. But notice just how problematic such a form of ex-
planation iso Air moves; when it comes in contact with an eardrum, the
eardrum moves. Then what? My pleasure in hearing the fifth cannot move,
is not readily identifiable in time, cannot be weighed and measured. 16

15 Crew & de Salvio, Dialogues Concerning Two New Sciences, p. 107.

16 Galileo misses an important presupposition of the experience of musical sound. It is impor-
tant to the experience of musical pleasure that we not realize that the intervals of the tones take
time. My experience of a beautiful piece of music "detemporalizes" the notes played succes-
sively as a theme. My experience of pleasant music thus eliminates the possibility of its being
measured. Consider Mozart's evidently cryptic statement: "Nor do I hear in my imagination,
the parts successively, but I hear them, as it were, all at once ..... (From a letter reproduced in B.
Ghiselin, The Creative Process [New York, 1952, p. 45].) Hearing a symphony all at once is
quite a trick, since the performance of a symphony, or the reading of the score of the sym-
phony, takes time. But ask yourseif: does a symphony take time? Is a symphony a performance
of a symphony or the reading of a musical score? If we are to countenance this extreme nomi-
nalism, is there then any such thing as Mozart's Symphony #40 in G Minor? Can it be true that
there are only as many symphonies #40 in G Minor as there are performances or readings of the
score? Performances and readings of what? We do say, don't we, that some performance of this
126 ROBERT E. BUlTS

Notice that Galileo says that the "effect of the Itfth is to produce a tick-
ling of the eardrum." Can this be true? What is the fifth? Galileo would not
have put it exactly this way, but the fifth is an interval between any two
notes measuring five diatonic degrees on some scale. To sound the fifth
obviously requires producing it by some instrument or other. But the Itfth is
not the two sounds measured in a certain way, it is rather a mathematical
construct used to provide a standardized way of classifying musical inter-
vals, however produced. It is just the same with respect, say, to
temperature. '0 degrees Celsius' does not measure a physically produced
quantity of heat, it is a mathematical construct used to provide a
standardized way of classifying temperatures, however produced.
Intensive quantities, qualities that vary only by degrees, including heat
and sound, but also other sense qualities, are not conceptualizable in the
same ways in which we think about, and name, extensively quantitative
objects, things like tables and chairs, mountains and statues. Our concept of
the musical interval we call the 'fifth' lacks a denotation, lacks reference to
anything we could seek in the world that is "one of the fifths." 'Table' does
pick out tables, and 'mountain' picks out mountains. To say that the fifth
lacks denotation is not to say that it is a meaningless phrase, for the fifth
does havejelt or affective meaning. That meaning, strangely, is only acti-
vated when someone hears the sound we call the 'fifth'. Although 'fifth'
lacks denotation or reference, we can illustrate the fifth. That can be done by

symphony is better than some other? How can we mean this, if we don't compare several per-
formances to some non-performance symphony? It won't do to say that we compare the
performance only with another performance, because that one would then also have to be com-
pared to others, and so on. Which performance exhibits the real symphony?
There is something to what Mozart claims. He does not imagine the notes coming one af-
ter another in time in the sense that he hears them privately; rather he has an atemporal map of
the music, which he can be said to "hear" only by courtesy of language. The notes he chooses
either fit ar faH to fit this mental map. If this is not so, how can we explain the composition of
music? Is it, as some romantics would have it, a visitation from the gods, a form of irrational
possession? If the composer is to be given credit for having made his composition (in just the
same way in which a fibre artist makes a fabric wallhanging), then we must surely concede the
point that he knows what he was doing, that he, not the spirits, composed the music. But be-
fore the actual composition, some heard-all-at-once structure of the music existed as a form to
be actualized in the actual composition. We cannot measure or time that structure. Performances
take time, symphonies do not. Accounting for the relationship between sounds heard over time
and the experience of beauty in the music seems to require that the aesthetically appreciated
music be identified in something like the way Mozart suggested. The same analysis would have
to be given far understanding the ontology of any artistic object. Where is Dostoevsky's
Crime and Punishment (the novel, not any single copy of the book)? How much time does
Goethe's Faust take (the play, not any single reading of it or performance of it)? Where is EI
Greco' s View of Toledo (the aesthetically appreciated object, not the painted surface, which is
to be sure somewhere)? How much time does Stravinsky's Le Sacre du printemps take (the bal-
let, not any single performance of it)?
 GALILEO AND THE CONSONANCES 127

sounding it in any of a variety of ways, by using stretched strings, vibrating

tuning forks, or by playing a bit of music on a well-tuned instrument. As
we have seen, 'being a fifth' is a mathematical construct employed as part of
a system for classifying consonant sounds; if it corresponds to anything it
corresponds to a degree of feit sound, to asensation of such and such
strength (here construed as a pitch). What Galileo ought to have written-to
preserve consistency with his own distinction between physical and sensory
qualities-is that independently ofbeing heard, 'fifth' is a mere name.
However, preservation of consistency with his nominalism only
permits reformulation of Galileo's form of the mind/body problem. How
can a mathematical construct, a nominal device used for purposes of instru-
mental standardization, cause anything at all? Physical sound can only be
part of what causes pleasure in the consonances; mathematical notions, it
would seem, cannot cause anything except perhaps the thought of them.
What all of this comes to is that Galileo cannot explain the consonances as
episodes of pleasant experience, just as he cannot explain tickling, titillation,
and experienced warmth. Even if we concede that part of what makes us
appreciate music has to do with mechanical transactions in the ear, we are
then in no position to say anything at all about why we take some music to
be more than just pleasantly consonant, but beautiful. Mechanical explana-
tions cannot connect physical events with judgments of beauty. Galileo's
cause is lost. But then who can blame hirn? His preferred mode of explana-
tion produced some of the first really important physics. Moreover,
attention to the distinction between physical qualities and qualities of sense,
in just the terms proposed by Galileo, invites creation of a science
conceptually different from physics that will account for the operation of
sense qualities in consciousness: the science of psychology. His
experimental work created two new sciences; his conceptual analysis of
qualities suggested creation of a third.

TIIE UNlVERSITY OF WESTERN ÜNTARIO

 WILLIAM JORDAN

GALILEO AND 1HE DEMISE OF PYrnAOOREANISM

.... .in deep of night when drowsiness

Hath lock'd up mortal sense, then listen I
To the celestial Siren harmony,
That sit upon the nine infolded spheres,
And sing to those that hold the vital shears,
And turn the adamantine spindie round,
On which the fate of Gods and men is wound.
Such sweet compulsion doth in music lie,
To lutl the daughters of Necessity,
And keep unsteady Nature to her law,
And the low world in measur'd motion draw
After the heavenly tune, which none can hear
Ofhuman mold, with gross unpurged ear."1

WITH THESE LINES FROM THE OREADES (1617), Milton set in verse a
passage from the climactic Myth ofEr at the end of Plato's Republic. The
"Siren Harmony" is the music of the spheres, which in the Pythagorean
cosmology was believed to embody the very basis of structure and order
throughout all creation; this music was inaudible to the human ear, yet it
was demonstrable on the basis of observation and mathematics. The influ-
ence of the Pythagorean tradition was strongly feIt throughout the history of
Western culture and thought, from the sixth century B.C. right through the
age of Gali1eo, and was particularly potent within those intellectual move-
ments which may be described as neo-Platonic, for the simple reason that
Plato's Timeaus was one of the chief sources for Medieval scholars com-
menting on Pythagorean lore. Throughout the reign of the Pythagorean
tradition two basic elements were present which served together to prove
that the nature of all things is number: the first of these was the idea of
"harmony," conceived in terms of proportion, which could be observed
both in the structure of the heavens and in the relations between musical
tones; and the second was the idea of "microcosm," which enabled the
philosophical scientists of the Pythagorean tradition to conclude that the
presence of harmony in the heavens and in music was no mere coincidence.

I John Milton, Oreades, line 6lff. Cited in Leo Spitzer, "Classical and Christian ldeas of World
Harmony," Traditio 2 (1944), p. 419.
129
V. Coelho (ed.), Music and Science in the Age ojGalileo, 129-139.
© 1992 Kluwer Academic Publishers.
130 Wn.,UAM JORDAN

Both of these elements seem to be entirely speculative to us today, in-

sofar as the connections between music and the heavens, and those between
microcosm and macrocosm cannot be proved given the rubrics of modern
physics. But it must be remembered that Pythagoreanism was not a special-
ized science, like modern physics, for it included elements of mysticism,
political theory and ethics. Furthermore, the underlying purpose of the
mathematical proofs of Pythagoreanism appears to have been more theolog-
ical than scientific; those who adhered to the Pythagorean views meditated
on these proofs in order to develop spiritual awareness. The proofs were
designed to demonstrate that the soul was rational, by virtue of its capacity
to recognize the coherence of numerical proportion; they served as a correc-
tive measure against unbounded, irrational phenomena such as could be
seen in the relationship between the diameter and circumference of a circle.
In these respects Pythagoreanism resembles more a religion than a science.
However, in the discussion that follows we shall consider that the ideas of
"harmony" and "microcosm," used to support the claim that the nature of all
things is number, is sufficient evidence of Pythagorean thinking. My pur-
pose here is to discuss the ways in which Galileo's contributions to modern
physics helped to undermine the Pythagorean tradition, taking into account
ideas about music which prevailed at the time of Galileo, his own thoughts
on the matter, and the implications of his discoveries for future thinkers.
In his preface to the Dialogue on the Great World Systems, Galileo
refers to the decree of 25 February 1616, which placed Copernican doctrine
on the index, as the imposition "of a seasonable silence upon the
Pythagorean opinion of the mobility of the Earth."2 Galileo here explicitly
associates Copernicus with the Pythagoreans, doubtless in contradistinction
to the peripatetic view held by the Church. This association made perfect
sense, for Copernicus had acknowledged the influence of Philolaus, whom
he knew from Plutarch, in his dedication of Revolutions of the Heavenly
Spheres to Pope Paul III. Furthermore, in his famous statement that "the
book of the universe is written in mathematicallanguage," Galileo clearly
aligned himself with what he took to be the Pythagorean position. What he
could not have known was that his own contributions to physics and as-
tronomy were to call the into question the very habits of thought that lay at
the base of the Pythagorean tradition.
What were the factors that led to the dissolution of the old tradition, so
long revered and so quickly set aside? Let us consider two general points
pertaining to astronomy and to the scientific temper of the time, before

2 Galileo Galilei, Dialogue on the Great World Systems, Irans. T. Salusbury (Chicago, 1955),
p. 1.
 GALILEO AND THE DEMISE OF PITHAGOREANISM 131

going on to look at the Pythagorean tradition itself. In the first place, the
situation within pre-Copernican astronomy had become so complex that ob-
servations no longer made much sense from within the older system.
According to Thomas Kuhn, this resulted in a "breakdown of the normal
technical puzzle-solving activity" which was fundamental to the success of
the Copernican revolution. 3 Kuhn cites the growing complexity of the
Ptolemaic system and its inability to withstand the mountains of amend-
ments that had been imposed upon it by the time of Copernicus. While
acknowledging the immense importance of what he calls "external factors,"
Kuhn considers these technical problems to be of primary importance. The
thrust of the Copernican revolution, in his view, has nothing much to do
with the Pythagorean tradition. Copernicus may have retained some aspects
of that tradition; Kepler may even have been guided by it. But these vestiges
of Pythagorean thinking contributed nothing to the new scientific paradigm.
In the second place, we may see in Galileo's Dialogue on the Great
World Systems a contrast of two different attitudes toward what is impor-
tant in science, which reveals the impact of experimentation on the
prevailing traditions of culture and belief. Whitehead described the differ-
ence in this way:

Galileo keeps harping on how things happen, whereas his adver-

saries had a complete theory as to why things happen.
Unfortunately the two theories did not bring out the same results.
Galileo insists upon 'irreducible and stubborn facts,' and
Simplicius, his opponent, brings forward reasons, completely sat-
isfactory, at least to himself. It is a great mistake to conceive this
historical revolt as an appeal to reason. On the contrary, it was
through and through an anti-intellectualist movement. It was the
return to the contemplation of brote fact; and it was based on a re-
coil from the inflexible rationality of medieval thought.4

Whitehead's analysis shows us that Galileo was prepared to throw out all
the prevailing traditions of speculation, no matter how carefully reasoned
and no matter how deeply ingrained in the habits of thought at the time, in
order to put across his point of view.
These two points-the complication of the geocentric cosmology and
the experimental temper of recent science-were important factors in the de-
velopment of modern science. But in themselves they do not make clear
why the Pythagorean tradition was unable to carry on. After an, many of the

3 Thomas Kuhn, The Structure 01 Scientific Revolutions (Chicago, 1962), p. 69.

4 Alfred North Whitehead, Science and the Modern World (New York, 1967), p. 8.
132 WILUAM JORDAN

earlier Pythagoreans had believed that the earth moved; and the position of
Simplicius in Galileo's Dialogue is that of Aristotelian tradition, not the neo-
Platonic, or Pythagorean tradition. So we must ask the question direct1y:
what were the elements of the Pythagorean tradition that made it so vulner-
able to the encroachment of the new science? The question is particularly
vexing when we consider that Kepler, Newton and Leibniz as weH as
Galileo considered themselves to be heirs of the Pythagorean tradition. As
Whitehead put it, "the history of seventeenth-century science reads as
though it were some vivid dream of Plato or Pythagoras,"5 yet by the eigh-
teenth century the Pythagorean tradition was entirely played out.
I would like to make three points in considering this question, organiz-
ing each point in terms of the contrasts between the old Pythagorean
tradition and the new modern science. I shall begin by considering the state
of music in the time of Galileo, from the point of view of the humanists,
inc1uding Galileo's own father Vincenzo Galilei. Next, I shall discuss the
implications that Galileo's work with falling bodies, and the development of
dynamics had for the old tradition. Finally, I shall describe areversal of the
roles of music and mathematics in the service of science.
In the Timeaus , Plato writes that music enables us to perceive the
motion of intelligences in the heaven, and apply them to our own souls
"which are akin to them." He adds that we can "imitate the absolutely
unerring courses of God and [thereby] correct any discord which may have
arisen in the courses of the soul." He conc1udes that harmony is not for
"irrational pleasure, which is deemed to be the purpose of it in our day," but
exists for these loftier purposes. 6 This is the basic doctrine of the purpose
of music for the Pythagorean tradition. The speculative thinking within this
tradition proposed a fourfold analogy between, 1) the harmonies of the
strings of musical instruments, 2) the body and soul, 3) the state, and 4) the
heavens. This set of analogies can be seen wherever the tradition established
itself, in Plato's Timeaus, Cicero's Republic and Macrobius's Commentary
on the Dream 0/ Scipio, which is a gloss on Cicero's text, and in the works
the Renaissance humanists. There is in this tradition a continuous flow of
metaphors from the human sphere to music, nature and the cosmos, and
back again to human activities. It is "a c1early idealistic conception of the
world," opposed to the materialism of Aristotle's philosophy.7
In the sixth book of the De Musica, Augustine brought these ideas into
the Christian tradition, although for Augustine the "harmonies" are metrical,

5 Whitehead, Science and the Modern World, p. 32.

6 Plato, Timeaus, trans. B. Jowett (New York, 1892/rpt. 1937), II, pp. 27-28.
7 Spitzer, "Classical and Christian Ideas," pp. 414-415 (n. 1).
 GALILEO AND THE DEMISE OF PYfHAGOREANISM 133

having to do with time-spans rather than with intervals between pitches.

This shift in emphasis enabled Augustine to use the different time-Iengths of
musical rhythm as the basis of an understanding of the structure of creation.
He argued that temporal dispersion is prior to spatial dispersion, i.e., that
the continuity of creation over time is required in order for there to be differ-
ent places for different things. For Augustine as for all the others, the
relationship of microcosm to macrocosm hinges on music; the same musical
proportions could be discerned in the rhythms of singing and dancing as are
found in the revolutions of the heavenly spheres. Because of its perfection,
the music of the spheres was taken as a model to which human music
should aspire. This is not to say that composers were admonished to do as
John Cage has done in the Freeman Etudes for violin, that is, transcribe
star-charts into musical notation; rather, it was to be an enterprise of the in-
tellect, whereby the realization that celestial mechanics and music could have
a common measure was sufficient to compel the listener's attention away
from corruptible, sublunary nature and focus it upon things spiritual and
eternal. The ultimate value of music was thought to be this power to direct
the attention of the listener to spiritual matters. In order to obtain this value,
the listener must be disposed to aspiritual effort; music merely provides the
framework within which the effort is realized. 8
But at the beginning of the seventeenth century, the purpose of music
was no longer considered in these terms. In the sixteenth century, the
humanist music theorists had become preoccupied with the problem of
"achieving the effects" of ancient music described in classicalliterature.9
This preoccupation can be seen in two developments, the first having to do
with the subjugation of polyphony to the clear projection of text, and the
second having to do with the reform of intonation. D. P. Walker cites as
examples of the first development musica reservata, the Protestant and
Counter Reformation insistence on the audibility of text, the vivid expres-
sionism of the later madrigalists, the Pleiade's attempt to bring lyric verse
and music closer together, musique mesure, and the Florentine Camerata.1 0
He argues that this attitude toward text and music resulted from the
Renaissance humanists' desire to imitate the music of the ancients which
was described as having a powerful ethical and emotional force, able to
produce miraculous effects on the listener. Because they were unable to

8 Spitzer, "Classical and Christian Ideas," p. 418.

9 D. P. Walker, "Musical Humanism in the 16th and Early 17th Centuries," Music Review 2
(1941); 3 (1942), pass im.
10 Walker, Musical Humanism 2, p. 8.
134 Wn..uAM JORDAN

conceive that these kinds of effects could occur on the strength of the music
alone, they concluded that these effects were due to the text. 11
However, the musical culture of the sixteenth century was quite remote
from that of antiquity, and the humanist theorists, for all their efforts, could
not bridge the gap. To begin with, it would be amistake to equate the
"wondrous effects" of antiquity with the Pythagorean tradition; for example,
the carthartic effects that Aristotle describes in bis Poeties were, in a general
sense, the sort of thing likely to be deplored by the Pythagoreans.
Nevertheless, Marsilio Ficino made precisely this mi staken association. In
Spiritual and Demonie Magie jrom Ficino to Campanella,12 Walker gives
Ficino's mies for fitting songs to heavenly bodies:

1) Find out what powers and effects any particular star has in itseIf,
what positions and aspects, and what these remove and produce.
And insert these into the meaning of the text, detesting what they
remove, approving what they produce;
2) Consider which star chiefly mIes which place and man. Then ob-
serve what modes and songs these regions and persons generally
use, so that you may appIy similar ones, together with the mean-
ing just mentioned, to the words which you wish to offer to these
same stars;
3) The daily positions and aspects of the stars are to be noticed:
then investigate to what speech, songs, movements, dances, moral
behaviors and actions most men are usually incited under these
aspects, so that you may make every effort to imitate these in your
songs, which will agree with the similar disposition of the heavens
and enable you to receive a similar influx from them.

This passage reveals a basic confusion of two kinds of musical thought;

music is related to the heavens, but not by the process of meditation under-
stood within the Pythagorean tradition. Rather, the correspondences are
presumed to be effective on the basis of astrological influences supporting
the meaning of the text. For the Renaissance humanists, the presence of
music was largely an emblem of order; it symbolized the old tradition with-
out actually continuing it, not unlike the Masonic pyramid on the American
dollar bill. While they were familiar with the serious purpose of the old
tradition, they often regarded the text as the bearer of meaning.
The second way in which sixteenth-century theorists sought to revivify
the old tradition can be seen in their preoccupation with temperament. These

Walker, Musical Humanism 2, pp. 8-9.

11
12D. P. Walker, Spiritual and Demonic Magic from Ficino to Campanella. Studies of the
Warburg Institute 22 (London, 1958), p. 26.
 GAULEO AND THE DEMISE OF PYrHAGOREANISM 135

theorists certainly knew enough about the subject to realize that the music of
the ancients was tuned in different ways, and to speculate on the possible
results of alternative tuning systems for their own music. But here too we
find confusion between the idea of the music of the heavens and the other
ideas of music described in ancient sources. As Gombrich puts it, "we see
the Renaissance Platonists searching eagerly for the tradition of the 'music
of the ancients' which must have embodied the laws of the universe and
which was therefore reputed to have produced such miraculous effects,"13
yet as we have noted, the music which "embodied the laws of the universe"
was seen by the ancients as a corrective to the kind of seduction associated
with these "miraculous effects." Galilei and Mei were the only theorists who
sought to reform intonation on humanistic grounds. They tried to introduce
the Pythagorean system of intonation, believing "that one of the chief
reasons why modem music failed to produce the effects was because tem-
pered intonation was used"14 In doing so they satisfied the letter but not the
spirit of Pythagorean tradition; tuning intervals according to the Pythagorean
scale was no more likely to succeed in "achieving the effects" than the
method proposed by Ficino. It is interesting to note here that Kepler, who
was perhaps most true to the essence of the Pythagorean tradition, preferred
the modern, tempered intonation over the Pythagorean system-just as he
preferred the polyphony over monody-because it supported his conclu-
sions about the elliptical orbits of the planets. But by the eighteenth century,
in the words of John Hollander, "the old musica speculativa had largely
given way to legitimate acoustical studies based on the joint development of
classical physics and mathematical analysis." 15
We turn next to a consideration of the implications that Galileo's work
with falling bodies ultimately had for the Pythagorean tradition. Prior to
Galileo, the sciences of music and astronomy had much in common; music
treated discrete quantity in motion, and astronomy treated continuous quan-
tity in motion. The remaining sciences of the quadrivium, arithmetic and
geometry, treated stable quantities, discrete and continuous respectively.
Hence, music and astronomy couldbe subsumed under the study of motion
in general. The view of music as a branch of mathematics originated, of
course, with Pythagoras, and enabled thinkers to construct analogies
between the behavior of heavenly bodies and that of sounds. With the
beginnings of a dynamic celestial mechanics, however, this enabling mech-

13 E. H. Gombrich, "Icones Symbolicae-The Visual Image in Neo-Platonic Thought," Journal

0/ the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 11 (1948), pp. 177-78.
14 Walker, Musical Humanism, 2, p. 121.
15 lohn Hollander, The UnJuning 0/ the Sky (New York, 1970), p. 381.
136 WllliAM JORDAN

anism coIlapsed. Galileo's work with falling bodies convinced hirn that the
structure of the universe could not be uncovered by working simply with
measurements of motion; what was required was the measurement of
changes of motion. His discovery is formalized in Newton's first law:
Every body continues in its state of rest, or of uniform motion in a straight
line, except so far as it may be compelled by force to change that state. As
Whitehead says, "this formula contains the repudiation of a belief which had
blocked the progress of physics for two thousand years."16 We may add
that it repudiates as weIl the long-standing affinities between music and
astronomy. For there was no way that music theory could possess the
sophistication to deal with changes in musical motion in a way that approx-
imated the new mechanics. Galileo hirnself would have had no apologies for
these unintended consequences of his theory; in fact, he might have
embraced them. As we remarked earlier, he was far more comfortable with
assertions about how things are than with reasons why they should be that
way.
But despite his apparent willingness to jettison the unproductive ele-
ments of the older traditions when it came to science, in his remarks on
music Galileo appears in a very different light. Panofsky's article centers on
a letter sent by Galileo in 1612 to his friend Cigoli, which contains the fol-
lowing remarkable passage:

"The farther removed the means of imitation are from the thing to
be imitated, the more worthy of admiration the imitation will
be ... Will we not admire a musician who moves us to sympathy
with a lover by representing his sorrows and passions in song
much more than if he were to do it by sobs? And this is so because
song is a medium not only different from but opposite to the
[natural] expression of pain while tears and sobs are very similar to
it. And we would admire hirn even more if he were to do it
silently, on an instrument only, by means of dissonances and
passionate musical accents; for the inanimate strings are [of them-
selves] less capable of awakening the hidden passions in our soul
than is the voice that narrates them."17

What is perhaps most striking about this passage is its anticipation of mod-
ern aesthetics, in which means are frequently chosen on the basis of their
incompatibility, or even their hostility to the desired ends with a view to
further challenging the imagination of the percipient. Galileo's argument on

16 Whitehead, Science and the Modern World, p.46.

17 Galileo, Opere, vol. 11., p. 355, 362. Cited in Erwin Panofsky, Galileo as a Critic 0/ the
Arts (The Hague, 1954), p. 9.
 GAULEO AND THE DEMISE OF PYrHAGOREANISM 137

the disparity of means and ends was fulfilled in what may be called the
modern Pythagorean aesthetic, which was realized in the serial composi-
tions of Schoenberg and his disciples. While serialism does not connect
analogically with astronomy, it behaves as if it did, by systematically
deploying mathematical techniques of order which result in a disparity
between organization and perception. With the advent of serialism we see
again one of the old values of Pythagoreanism returning; the requirement of
meditative effort on the percipient to regulate his senses to the Nous under-
lying the composition.
Let us consider now our third and final point, which has to do with the
reversal of the roles of music and mathematics in the service of science. The
seventeenth century may be seen as the watershed century, during which
science evolved from an idealistic to an experimental mode of inquiry. Prior
to the seventeenth century, what was known of mathematics was limited to
what could be illustrated by means of its branches; geometry and arithmetic,
music and astronomy. Mathematics existed essentially as a background to
these four sciences; it cast them into relief without existing independently of
them. Geometry, arithmetic, music, and astronomy were images of mathe-
matics. To know mathematics was to know the quadrivium, to perceive
those similarities and analogies that exist among these four sciences.
Following the achievements of Galileo and his generation of scientists,
mathematics was no Ionger in need of such an image; mathematics was the
image of the universe, the very means by which cosmic structure was
revealed. The notion of microcosm is crucial for this point; for the
Pythagorean tradition, the principle of order underlying both music and the
cosmos was proportion, and music and astronomy were thought to be illus-
trations of this principle in motion. The aim of Pythagorean science had
been the liberation of the soul by means of the intellectual perception of
proportion in all things. The aim of the new science was quite different; it
sought to determine the principles of order underlying the cosmos, and used
mathematics to express or illustrate these principles.
The microcosm was no longer relevant to the enterprise. Mathematics
no longer required music in order to develop an image of the uni verse;
rather, physics required of mathematics that it provide an explanation of the
new image of the universe observable through the telescope. In order to
fulfill this task, mathematicians were obliged to develop new techniques
which obviated the need for musical illustrations; Whitehead mentions
algebra as the foremost of these. 18 And in the meantime, the humanists had

18 Whitehead. Science and the Modern World, p. 29.

138 Wll..llAM JORDAN

prepared a new role for music to play in civilization, in which the basis of
aesthetic judgement was not the corrective image of the "harmony of the
heavens," but the correspondence between music and human emotions. The
older tradition had been set aside, seemingly for good.
In closing, let us consider what all of this may mean to us today.
Looking back, we can see that as the astronomers of the seventeenth century
cast their eyes heavenward, as they detected the craters of the moon and the
moons of the other planets and concluded that the heavenly bodies were no
different in substance than the earth, as they shattered Milton's "adamantine
spindle" with their telescopes and silenced the music of the spheres, they
deprived the modern world of an intuitive mode of thought which had for
ages proved the relation between humanity and the universe. Pascal was
frightened by the "eternal silence of the infinite spaces," and was forced into
a kind of cosmic intellectual solitude: "It is not from space that I must seek
my dignity, but from the government of my thought. .. By space the universe
encompasses and swallows me up like an atom; by thought I comprehend
the world."19 In order to feelless frightened in the cosmos, many people
today have continued to cling to some of the most meaningful threads in the
old fabric of thought, believing insistently in cosmic intelligences, or life on
other planets.
But in the 1960s, telescopes were trained back onto the Earth for the
first time, and it is interesting to note that the images that came back to us of
our own planet have been influential in reformulating certain aspects of the
old Pythagorean tradition, applied this time not to our stars but to ourselves.
What we have learned from these images may bring hope to some, despair
to others, but there is no doubt that our lives have changed in response to
them. Specifically, we have seen that the Earth is like a living organism
which can sicken and die; this view resonates with the animistic theories of
the Pythagoreans, who believed that living intelligences guided the motions
of the planets. We have been invited to construct an analogy between the
health of the individual human being and the health of our environment,
which resonates with the old theory of microcosm. We look at our
"sublunary" world and see it to be spoiled and corrupted; we look beyond
the moon to the heavens and see them to be pristine, just as the ancients did.
And finally, like Augustine we are learning to consider the consequences of
our collective political and economic decisions in time-spans which tran-
scend our individuallives, compelling us to dance to the rhythm of decaying
radioactive particles. Perhaps one day we as a species will be led back to a

19 Blaise Pascal, Pensees, trans. W. F. Trotter (New York, 1941), pp. 116, 348.
 GALILEO AND THE DEMISE OF PYTHAGOREANISM 139

sense of musica mundana freed from the abomination of pollution; the only
certain knowledge we can have of that day is that it will be a long time
coming.

THE UNIVERSITY OF CALGARY

 PART III:
The Musical Background of
Seventeenth-Century Science:
Theory, Practice, and Craftmanship
 CLAUDE V. PALISCA

WAS GALILEO'S FATHER AN EXPERIMENTAL SCIENTIST?

W HETHER VINCENZO GALILEI MADE EXPERIMENTS was questioned not

long ago by the late D. P. Walker. Writing ofGalilei's rule that the volume
ofpipes that produced an octave were in the proportion 8:1, Walker stated:

Here it is evident that Galilei did not do any experiments, since the
pitch of a pipe is a function of its length and not of its cubic
capacity.'

It is not clear whether Walker meant to say "It is evident that here
Galilei did not do any experiments," or what he actually wrote, namely:
"Here it is evident that Galilei did not do any experiments." Indeed, what
experiments Galilei did or did not perform is not always evident. He tended
to state conclusions, saying they were based on "esperienze," rather than
give the supporting data, as Marin Mersenne and others in the seventeenth
century were to do. But it was certainly Galilei's investigative method to
observe carefully through the senses and to test his theories by experiment.
At the very beginning of bis Dia/aga of 1581-82 he declares his prefer-
ence for the truth of sense perception as opposed to authority in matters that
involve sensory experience. In the dialogue the interlocutor Piero Strozzi
says to Giovanni Bardi:

Before your Lordship begins to untie the knot of the proposed

questions [concerning the nature of the diatonic practiced today], I
wish in those things which sensation can reach that authority al-
ways be set aside (as Aristotle says in the Eighth Book of the
Physics), and with it the tainted reason that contradicts any [sense]
perception at all of truth. For it seems to me that those who for the
sake of proving some conclusion of theirs want us to believe them
purelyon the basis of authority without adducing any further
arguments are doing something ridiculous, not to say (with the
Philosopher) acting like silly fools. 2

1 D. P. Walker, Studies in Musical Science in the Late Renaissance (London & Leiden, 1978), p.
24. H. Floris Cohen, Quantifying Music (Dordreeht, 1984), pp. 83-85, takes the position that
GaIilei was an experimentalist, though a half-hearted one.
2 Vincenzo Galilei, Dialogo della musica antica edella moderna (FIorenee, 1581), p. 2: "Prima
ehe V.S. eominei a seiorre il nodo dei dubbio proposto, desidero ehe in quelle eose dove arriva
il senso, si lasei (eome dice Arist. nell ottavo della Fisica) sempre da parte non solo I'autorita;
143
V. Coelho (ed.), Music and Science in the Age ojGalileo, 143-151.
© 1992 Kluwer Academic Publishers.
144 CLAUDE v. PAUS CA

Strozzi goes on to say that this kind of unquestioned deference to authority

was bestowed on Pythagoras by his followers, but Strozzi does not feel
that he owes it to Bardi, whom he will question freely, as is proper in the
quest for the truth of things.
Gali1ei opts here for the evidence of the senses as against authority, but,
as everyone knows, the senses are easily deceived. Later Gali1ei makes c1ear
that it is not simply sense experience that is his guide but, if I read hirn
right, experiment.
Galilei uses the word sperienza and esperienza in several ways. He de-
c1ares, for example, that the fifth in the 3:2 proportion is the most perfect,
sweeter than it is in any other ratio, "as I have judged by ear after many
many experiences [sperienze] (for I know no better means for attaining
certitude)."3 Here it is not so much a matter of experiment as attentive
observation, and the judgment is not of fact but of aesthetic satisfaction, of
perfection and sweetness of sensation.
At other times esperienza refers specifically to experiment. For
example, in denying credence to the story that Pythagoras determined that
weights suspended from strings in the ratio 2: 1 produced the octave, Galilei
says he learned the truth by means of experiment:

In connection with [tbe theories of Pytbagoras] I wish to point out

two false opinions of wh ich men have been persuaded by various
writings and which I myself shared until I ascertained the truth by
means of experiment [esperienza], the teacher of all things.4

According to the Vocabolario della Crusca, sperienza and esperienza are

synonymous. Both can be equivalent to the Latin experimeuntum or experi-
entia and they can mean either "experience" or "experiment." The context of
the last quotation tells us that there Galilei intended esperienza to mean

ma la eolorata ragione ehe ci fusse eontrario eon qual si voglia apparenza di verita. perehe mi
pare ehe faecino eosa ridieola (per non dire insieme eol Filosofo, da stolti) quelli ehe per prova
di qual si sia eonclusione loro, vogliono, che si creda senz' altro, alla semplice autorita; senza
addurre di esse ragioni ehe valide siano." Trans. in Claude V. Palisca, Humanism in Renaissance
Musical Thought (New Haven and London, 1985), p. 269.
3 Galilei, Discorso intorno aU' opere di messer Gioseffo Zarlino da Chioggia (Florence, 1589),
p. 117: "com'io per il mio udito dopo molte & molte sperienze (poiehe con altro mezzo
migliore non so potersene haver eertezza) ho giudieato."
4 Galilei, Discorso, pp. 103-04: "nel qual luogo voglio avvertire due false openioni nate negli
huomini, persuasi dagli seritti di alcuni, nelle quali sono stato aneor'io, di che sendomi
ultimamente aeeertato con il mezzo dell'esperienza delle cose maestra ... " Trans. by Claude
Palisca in "Scientific Empiricism in Musical Thought," in Seventeenth-Century Science and
the Arts, ed. H. H. Rhys (Princeton, 1961), p. 128.
 WASGAULEO'sFATHERANEXPERIMENTALSClENTIST? 145

"experiment," for he had to perform experiments in which he measured

weights to judge the falsity of the Pythagorean legend. In an experiment that
many others (and I too) have validated, Galilei attached different weights to
a string to vary its tension and discovered that to produce an octave, weights
had to be in the proportion 4: 1, not 2: 1. Galilei was the fIrst to state this rule
in a publication. He could not have arrlved at the conclusion otherwise than
by experiment.
In another passage Galilei clearly spoke of repeated trials involving the
same materials and procedures.

For among coins of the same goodness of material, of the same

weight, cavity, thickness, and height, and also among little copper
beIls poured from the same mold, I have often found a difference of
a whole tone. This same variety of the mtios of the diapason may
be found also among strings of the same material, equality of
length, and goodness, but of uneven thickness, when the same
quantity of weight is suspended, and in other ways that I have ex-
perimented with many times [da me piu volte esperimentate].5

In his counterpoint treatise, Galilei made an important distinction

between the knowledge of the senses and the knowledge gained through ex-
periment. The senses know the external appearance of things, but through
experiment we can leam about their intrinsic propenies.
For the senses apprehend precisely differences in forms, colors, fla-
vors, odors, and sounds. They know moreover the heavy from the
light, the harsh and hard from the soft and tender, and other superfi-
cial accidents. But the qualities and intrinsic virtues of things, with
respect to whether they are hot or cold, humid or dry, only the
intellect has the faculty of judging, through becoming convinced
by experiment [persuaso daU' esperienza] and not simply by the
sense through the medium of the diversity of the forms and colors
or other circumstances.6

Galilei distinguishes here between the experience of superficial sensa-

tions, differences between which the senses can detect without diffIculty,
and the knowledge that comes from the analysis of these sensations studied
in experiments in which, one assumes, a particular effect is isolated so that

5 V. Galilei, A Special Discourse Conceming the Diversity o[ the Ratios o[ the Diapason.
trans. in Claude Palisca, The Florentine Camerata: Documentary Studies and Translations (New
Haven and London, 1988), p. 185; ltalian text on p. 184.
6 V. Galilei, Discorso intomo all'uso delle dissonanze. Florence, Biblioteca Nazionale
Centrale, MS Galilei 1 fol. 120v; another version, fol. 166v, ed. in Frieder Rempp, Die
Kontrapunkttraktate Vincenzo Galileis (Cologne, 1980), p. 104
146 CLAUDE v. PAUSCA

its cause may be detennined by a process of regression. Galilei, unfortu-

nately, did not theorize about method.
1t would be appropriate here, in this volume dedicated to Galileo, to
note that Galileo made a statement similar to his father's:

.. .I for this reason think that these flavors, odors, colors, etc., as
regards the subject in which they seem to us to be resident, are
nothing but pure names and reside only in the body which per-
ceives them, so that when you take away the animal you have
removed and annihilated all of these qualities. Since we have
imposed particular names upon them that are different from those
first and real accidents, we should always want to beJieve that these
qualities are truly and really diverse from these first accidents.7

At the time Vincenzo Galilei was writing the essays from which I have
quoted, his son Galileo was apparently not yet committed to the experimen-
tal method. Charles B. Schmitt has shown that in the early treatise De motu,
completed in Pisa between 1589 and 1592 before Galileo left for Padua in
1592, he frequently used the tenn experientia but not in the sense of exper-
iment. The tenn experimentum does not occur in these early writings,
although the idea of "testing nature" is occasionally expressed in the phrase
periculum jacere.8
Vincenzo did describe a number of experiments. Here is an example:

If I place on a lute one gut string and one steel string and stretch
them to be in unison in their way; then if, for example, I position
seven frets and I pluck the open strings, or if I position twelve frets
[and then pluck the open strings], they will not be in unison. It
will follow necessarily that they were not in unison when I heard
them with seven frets. Because if you add or take away equal parts
from any two things, if before they were so elose to equal that the
sense could not tell the difference, they should seem so after as
well. 9

7 Galileo Galilei, Il Saggiatore (Rome, 1623), in Le opere di Galileo Galilei, ed. Antonio
Favaro (Florence, 1890-1909) VI, pp. 347-48.
g Charles B. Schmitt, "Experience and Experiment: A Comparison of Zabarella's View with
Gali1eo's in De motu," Studies in the Renaissance 16 (1969), pp. 80-138. Stillman Drake has
found evidence of Galileo's use of experiment as early as 1608: "Galileo's New Science of
Motion," in Reason, Experiment, and Mysticism in the Scientific Revolution, ed. M. L.
Righini Bonelli and William R. Shea (New York, 1975), p. 142.
9 V. Galilei, A Special Discourse Concerning the Unison, trans. in Palisca, The Florentine
Camerata, pp. 203-05; Italian text on pp. 202-04.
 WAS GAULEO'S FATHER AN EXPERIMENTAL SCIENTIST'l 147

Galilei employed the lute here not as a musical instrument but as a piece
of laboratory equipment on which he placed strings of a mixture of materials
and in a configuration that he would never have played upon as a lutenist.
He performed various operations on these strings, such as placing first
seven, then twelve frets at determinate distances from each other. He
observed the results with the hearing and reported how the variable factors
affected the results. The rule that the experiment demonstrates is not
explicitly stated, but it is implied: strings of different material tuned to the
unison will not produce unisons when the strings are plucked while stopped
at the various frets. This experiment was part of a broader investigation into
the nature of the unison. Galilei's experience and experiments taught hirn
that unisons were not easy to achieve, that every variable must be controlled
and minimized. Galilei did not explain why he chose to compare twelve and
seven frets, but it is likely that he did so because he wanted to compare
twelve frets placed in geometrie proportion to yield equal temperament and
seven frets placed according to the ratios of true fifths and fourths,
producing a Pythagorean tuning.
I recently set out to replicate this experiment using a lute built in the
seventeenth-century by an unknown maker, now in the Yale Collection, a
gift of the University of Pennsylvania made in 1953, catalog number
4560.53. 10 The present condition of the instrument required the use of
some substitutions for the materials originally used by Galilei in his experi-
ment; however, these did not affect the basic tenets of the experiment.
We discovered that a steel string (that is, a high-carbon iron such as
Galilei would have used) approximating the diamater of a gut string would
require so much tension to achieve an unison that it would damage the lute.
So a brass string of 90% copper, twenty-six-thousandths of an inch in dia-
mater, close to the thirty-thousandths of the diameter of the gut string, was
used. The brass and gut strings were tuned in unison, but as Galilei experi-
enced, they do not make a smooth unison.
To produce the highest notes of the octave above the open string would
have required stopping the string past the fingerboard of the instrument and
onto the belly of the instrument. (The octave is produced by dividing the
distance of the vibrating string length-that is, between the nut and the
bridge-in half.) This would have necessitated gluing frets onto the belly,
something we did not want to do on a museum instrument. So we

10 For this experiment I enlisted the help of a player of fretted string instruments, Lawrence
Zbikowski (a doctoral student in music theory at Yale) and Professor Richard Rephann, Director
of the Collection of Musical Instruments at Yale. [The dating of this particular instrument
cannot be precisely determined owing to its rather complicated acquisition history-Ed.}
148 CLAUDE v. PAUSCA

positioned just fOUT frets, enough to demonstrate sufficiently what Galilei

evidently set out to prove.
We tried to apply the "rule of eighteen" that Galilei proposed in his
Dialogo for laying out the frets in equal temperament. This prescribes that
the distance of the vibrating string length be divided by eighteen. The flrst
fret is then placed at l7118ths of the distance, yielding an equal-tempered
semitone above the open string. Then the distance from that fret to the
bridge is divided by eighteen, and the second fret is placed at l7/18ths, and
so forth. However we found that on this lute this method did not give a
good equal temperament. Therefore we resorted to an electronic tuner
("sight-o-tuner") used by keyboard tuners to ac hieve equal temperament.
We also found that the gut frets that we tied did not lie flat, so we used ny-
lon string for the frets.
We replicated only the flrst part of the experiment Galilei described, in
which the frets were laid out in equal temperament. 1t was clear that, though
the open strings made satisfactory unisons, when the strings were stopped
at each of the frets, the pitches produced were no longer in unison.
The second part of the experiment, in which the frets were supposedly
measured according to the Pythagorean scale, is superfluous, since it was
obvious that no matter wh at tuning were used, despite the best unison in the
open strings, the pitches produced by stopping the strings at the frets would
not be in unison.
In OUT experiment, after the frets were tied, we flrst tuned the open gut
string in unison to the open metal string. The player then stopped the strings
at the flrst fret and plucked first the gut, then the metal string. Returning to
pluck the open strings to show that they were still in unison, the player then
tested each of the other frets in the same way. (Given the frequency that lute
strings slip out of tune, it was judicious of Galilei to return to the open
string after each fret was tried.) After testing the four frets, the lutenist
played the flve-note chromatic sc ale first on the gut, then on the brass
string. The scale on the brass string was outrageously out of tune. 11
However incompletely Galilei described this experiment, it is clear that
he adequately designed an experiment to test the hypothesis that two strings
of unlike material tuned to an unison will not yield unisons when stopped at
frets. The results that he obtained were corroborated by our experiment. The
metal we used probably magnifled the difference between the pitches pro-
duced by the two strings at the frets, and this difference was proportionately
greater as the distance from the nut increased. But qualitatively the results

11 At the conference, a tape of the experiment was played.

 WAS GAULEO' S FATHER AN EXPERIMENTAL SCIENTIST? 149

were similar.
Although Galilei did not idolize numbers or attribute to them magical
qualities, as did some of his predecessors who were of the Pythagorean or
Neo-Platonic persuasion, he believed very much in reducing phenomena to
numerical relationships. At the beginning of A Special Discourse
Concerning the Diversity 0/ the Ratios 0/ the Diapason, he promised to
provide demonstrations in which measurements would be applied to the
objects studied. "There are few things that cannot be weighed, numbered,
and measured," he said. 12 When studying sound, numbers must not be ab-
stracted from the objects they measure, as Zarlino did in theorizing about the
numeri sonori-the "sounding numbers." Thus, with respect to sounding
bodies, numbers may be applied in three ways, analogous to measurements
of lines, of surfaces, and of enclosed spaces (or, as he calls them, "concave
bodies"). Depending on which of these categories is involved, a given set of
numbers will not always attend the same consonances and dissonances.
(This line of reasoning is introduced partly to counter Zarlino's fixation
upon the senario or the numbers 1,2,3,4,5,6 as the only source ofratios
that determine consonances.)13
There are three ways of obtaining a diapason or octave:
1) Through linear measurement, when a stretched string is divided into
three equal parts, and first one-third, then two-thirds of the string are
struck. Or through linear measurement when two strings made of the same
material, having equallength, thickness, and goodness are stretched to the
same tension to an unison and then one string is divided in half and that half
is struck and compared to the whole other string. I have translated the term
bontel as "goodness,,, because I am not sure exactly what Galilei meant. In
its chemical usage, bonta refers to the purity of a metal and to whether the
alloy is successfully made, with good ingredients. Thus the bonta of a pre-
cious metal depends on the proportion of that metal in the alloy. Galilei was
not necessarily speaking of metal strings, however, so bonta probably
refers to the uniformity of the material. 14
2) In measurements analogous to surfaces, the octave may be obtained
by hanging weights from two strings whose material, length, thickness, and
goodness are equal, but in which the weights are in the ratio 4: 1.
(Incidentally, it should be noted that in this experiment Galilei did not use a

12 Galilei, A Special Discourse Concerning the Diversity 0/ the Ratios 0/ the Diapason, in
Palisea, The Florentine Camerata, p. 181.
13 Galilei, Discourse Concerning the Diapason, p. 187. He refers to Zarlino, lnstitutioni
harmoniche, Bk. I, eh. 16, p. 27.
14 Galilei. Discourse Concerning the Diapason, p. 183.
150 CLAUDE V. PAUS CA

musical instrument but hung weights to strings attached at only one end,
like a pendulum.) The quadrupIe ratio also prevails when comparing the cir-
cumferences of pegs of a stringed instrument. 15
3) The third way to obtain the octave is through concave bodies, when
the volumes of the two concavities are in the octuple proportion. Two organ
pipes in which both diameters and lengths are in duple proportion will
sound an octave. Thus, doubling both the length and diameter will octuple
the volume. Indeed, the formula for the volume of a cylinder, V = nr2 h,
will give this result. If the two cylindrical pipes are 16 and 8 feet respec-
tively, and the radii 6 and 3 inches, we get 4n for the larger volume and n/2
for the smaller volume, or a proportion of 8: 1.
Marin Mersenne in his observations of organ pipes reported a similar
result, that the volumes of two pipes an octave apart should be approxi-
mately in the ratio of 8:1.1 6 In modem organ-building practice the scaling of
cylindrical metal pipes is somewhat different from that reported by
Mersenne. The diameter is halved at the upper tenth rather than the octave,
and, of course, the length is halved at the octave. George Ashdown Audsley
in his The Art 01 Organ Building (1905), cites Marie-Pierre Hamel in his
Nouveau manuel complet dulacteur d' orgues (Paris, 1849) as advocating
the halving of the diameter at the upper ninth rather than the octave. 17
It is insufficient for two pipes to be in duple proportion, Galilei asserted
(p. 195); this will give the major third of Aristoxenus (smaller than true);
nor is quadruple proportion sufficient when comparing volumes, for this
will sound a minor sixth. Galilei here did not specify which dimension was
in duple proportion. But he must have meant diameter or width of pipes,
rather than length. Because two pipes otherwise equal that are in duple
proportion of length will sound approximately an octave. Mersenne also
investigated the influence of diameter on pitch when other dimensions were
equal. He found that a pipe twice another in diameter sounded a minor third
below, though he noted that blowing the shorter pipe harder made that a
major third, which agrees with Galilei's result. A pipe four times another
produced a diminished seventh or major sixth. This again is not far from
what Galilei observed. 18 Vincenzo did not speak in this passage of the ratio
of lengths, perhaps because he set out to prove that the duple ratio was not
the only one that produced the octave.1 9 If the duple proportion were the

15 Galilei, Discourse Concerning the Diapason, pp. 185-87.

16 Marin Mersenne, Harmonie Universelle (Paris, 1636-37/rpt. Paris, 1963), Book 6, prop.
14, p. 335.
17 George Ashdown Audsley, The Art ofOrgan Bui/ding II (New York, 1905), p. 573.
18 Mersenne, Harmonie Universelle, Book 6, prop. 12, pp. 331-32.
19 In another place in the Discourse Concerning the Diapason, pp. 189-90, Galilei apparently
 WAS GAULEO'S FATHER AN EXPERIMENTAL SCIENTIST? 151

absolute determinant, it should always produce an octave, whether the

dimension were diameter, length, or volume. Galilei was adamant in
denying this possibility.
The question I asked at the outset of this paper-Was Galileo's father
an experimental scientist?-may, therefore, be answered decisively in the
affIrmative. He experimented with strings of various materials to determine
whether an unison could be achieved between them and whether at a fixed
tension and length two unison strings of different material produced unisons
when stopped at equal segments of the length of the open string. He hung
weights to strings of different lengths, diameters, and quality to determine
what factors determined the consonance of the octave and what numerical
ratios resulted from measuring each dimension when the octave was pro-
duced. He experimented with pipes of various lengths and diameters and
resultant volumes to determine the ratios of these dimensions necessary to
produce the octave, and inversely to discover what consonances were
produced when any of the dimensions were in duple proportion. These
investigations constituted more than attentive observation of natural events.
They required setting up carefully structured conditions that tested the
variables under examination.
Vincenzo's inquisitiveness was partly stimulated by practical problems
of tuning the lute and keyboard instruments, but equally it was a quest for
scientific truth in response to false allegations in the music-theoreticallitera-
ture that associated particular numerical ratios absolutely and invariably with
panicular consonances. So not only did Vincenzo experiment, as every in-
strument builder and player does constantly, but he did so for the purpose
of what can properly be considered scientific inquiry.

Y ALE UNIVERSITY

made a slip when he asked the question: "what sort of interval would two pipes make that have
the same diameter but duple length? A major third of the intense tuning of Aristoxenus, which,
in fact, is the third part of the octave, whereas if they are in quadrupIe proportion, they would
sound a minor sixth of the same intense tuning." The question should have read: "have the same
length but duple diameter." Mersenne's table corroborates Galilei's findings with respect to
volume, since twice the diameter will produce twice the volume. For the major third in the 5:4
proportion the table gives the proportion of volumes as 125:64 (1.95); increasing the length
slightly would make it the bigger third of the Aristoxenian system. Similarly, his ratio for the
minor sixth, 8:5 (incorrectly printed as 6:5), is 512:125 (4.09). Cutting the length slightly
gives Galilei's result of 4:1 for the Aristoxenian minor sixth.
 HOWARD MAYER BROWN

VINCENW GALILEI IN ROME: HIS FIRST BOOK OF

LUTE MUSIC (1563) AND ITS CULTURAL CONTEXT

W REN VINCENZO GALILEI, GALILEO'S FATHER, HAD HIS first book of

lute music published by Valerio Dorico in Rome in 1563, he was in his late
thirties or early forties. He had not yet been sent by Count Giovanni Bardi
of Florence to study music theory with Zarlino in Venice; there is no reason
to suppose that he had as yet engaged in extensive discussions with Bardi
about aesthetics and music his tory; and he had not yet begun his long corre-
spondence with the Roman humanist Girolamo Mei about the nature of
ancient Greek music. Those discussions, of course, eventually led to the
works that give Vincenzo Galilei a place in his tory books: above all the
Dialogo della musica antica edella moderna, but also his polemic with
Zarlino, and his manuscript treatises on counterpoint and other subjects. 1
His first book of lute music, containing both intabulations and ricer-
cars, was published before Gali1ei had yet expressed his opinions about any
of the questions that would engage him during most of his working life, and
almost certainly before he had begun to think about the aesthetic and histori-
cal problems that later became the focal point of the Camerata's attention.
The volume reveals Galilei's intellectual and musical orientationjust as he
was beginning his career. Indeed, it is the chief document from those early
years, and it is apt to tell us most of what we shall ever know about just
who Vincenzo Gali1ei was as a young man, what his basic musical assump-
tions were, and what his education had been. The abbreviated table of con-
tents that appears as Table I shows that the book does not differ

I The brief summary of Galilei's career is culled almost entirely from the studies of Claude
Palisca: bis articles on Galilei in Die Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart, vol. 4, cols. 1265-
70, and The New Grove Dictionary 01 Music anti Musicians, vol. 7, pp. 96-98; "Girolamo Mei:
Mentor to the Florentine Camerata," Musical Quarterly 40 (1954), pp. 1-20; "Vincenzo
Galilei's Counterpoint Treatise: a Code for the Seconda pratica, " Journal 01 the American
Musicological Society 9 (1956), pp. 81-96; "Vincenzo Galilei and Some Links between
'Pseudo-Monody' and Monody," Musical Quarterly 46 (1960), pp. 344-60; Girolarrw Mei:
Letters on Ancient anti Modern Music (American Institute of Musicology, 1960); "Vincenzo
Galilei's Arrangements for Voice and Lute," in Essays in Musicology in hooor 01 Dragan Pla-
menac on his 70th Birthday, ed. Gustave Reese and Robert J. Snow (Pittsburgh, 1969), pp.
207-32; "The 'Camerata Fiorentina': A Reappraisal," Studi musicali 1 (1972): 203-36;
Humanism in Italian Renaissance Musical Thought (New Haven and London, 1985); and, The
Florentine Camerata: Documentary Studies anti Translations (New Haven and London, 1989).
153
V. Coelho (ed.), Music anti Science in the Age olGalileo. 153-184.
© 1992 Kluwer Academic Publishers.
154 HOWARD MAYER BROWN

significantly from other similar volumes of lute music from the mid
sixteenth century, save that its contents are limited to madrigals and ricer-
cares. 2 As a gentleman lutenist (if that is, in fact, what Galilei was) he
evidently was less concerned with sacred than with secular music of a
certain cultural orientation.The volume lacks the arrangements of motets and
even Mass movements that appear in other such anthologies of the period,
and it does not contain any of the social or stylized dances or sets of varia-
tions that may have been more exclusively associated with professional
instrumentalists and virtuosi. Galilei 's lute book contains thirty pieces for
solo lute: two dozen madrigals and six ricercars by the great lute virtuoso
Francesco da Milano, who worked for most of his known career at the
papal court in Rome until his death in 1543, twenty years before Galilei's
volume came out. 3

TABLE 1
Vineenzo Galilei, Intavolature de lauto ... libro prima (Rome, 1563)

1-5. Ahi bella liberte [sie] Alessandro [MerIo] Romano

Petrarch, no. 97: sonnet, fIrst quatrain

2. Pur mi eonsola

3. Gl'ocehi invaghiro al' hor'

Petrarch, no. 97: sonnet, second quatrain

4. Ne mi Ieee ascoltar
Petrarch, no. 97: sonnet, sestet

5. Pur mi eonsola

6. Com' havra vif Amor [Ja vita mia] Vineentio Ruffo

model: /l nuovo Vogel (NY), no. 2475 (1552)
Luigi Cassola: madrigal

2 The contents of Galilei's fIrst book are also listed in Howard Mayer Brown, Instrumental
Music Printed Before 1600 (Cambridge, Mass., 1965), as 1563 7 , p. 205, which, however,
contains a number of errors that are corrected here in Table I. The only study of the volume
heretofore published is Oscar Chilesotti, "ll primo libro di liuto di Yincenzo Galilei," Rivista
musicale italiana 15 (1908), pp. 753-58.
3 On the life of Francesco da Milano, see H. Colin Slim, "Francesco da Milano (1497-
1543/44), A Bio-bibliographical Study," Musica Disciplina 18 (1964), pp. 64-84 and 19
(1965), pp. 109-27. Francesco's works are published in a modem edition in The Lure Music of
Francesco Canova da Milano (1497-1543), ed. Arthur 1. Ness, 2 vols. in 1 (Cambridge, Mass.,
1970). Ness accepts the six ricercares, unique to Galilei' s volume, as genuine works of
Francesco, and publishes them as nos. 68-73.
 VINCENZO GAULEI'S FIRST BOOK OF LUTE MUSIC 155

7. Abi chi mi da consiglio Alessandro [Merlo] Romano

no polyphonic version by Merlo known,
contrary to the information in Brown,
Instrunumtal Music.

8. Baciami vita mia [Domenico] Ferabosco

model: RISM 155428 , p. 10: Ferabosco
anonymous ottava rima
on the poem and various other settings of it, see Don Harran,
The Anthologies of Black-Note Madrigals, 5 vols. in 6
(American Institute of Musicology, 1978-81), 11, pp. xxiv-xxv.

9. Mordimi questa lingua Giovanni dei Cartolaio

anonymous ottava rima
The same text was set by Paolo Yirchi (NY 2929; 1584);
also by Antonio Barre (NY 250; 1552) and Lancelot
Fidelis (NY 980; 1570) as later partes of "Deh, Clori mia gentil."

10. Vel pUD girar Amor a 3 Jan Gero (= Vincenzo Ferro)

model: RISM 1551 10, p. 21: Yincenzo Ferro
anonymous madrigal

11. Chiare fresche e dolci acque a 5 [Jacques] Arcadelt

2a pars. S' egli epur mio destino
3a pars. Tempo verra ancor forse
4a pars. Da' be' rami scendea
5a pars. Quante volte diss'io
model: Arcadelt, Opera Omnia, ed. Albert Seay,
vol. 7 (American Institute of Musicology, 1969),
pp. 94-96 and 162-74.
Petrarch, no. 126: complete Canzone

12. Signor mio caro Vincentio Galilei

Petrarch, no. 266: sonnet

13. Alcun non pUD saper Vincentio Galilei

Ariosto, Orlando furioso, XIX, 1
No polyphonic version of this setting by Galilei known,
contrary to the information in Brown, Instrumental Music.
On the poem and various other settings of it, see Harran,
Black-Note Madrigals, vol. I!2, pp. lxvii-lxviii.

14. Nasce la gioia mia Giovan Nasco

anonymous madrigal
model: NY 2004 (1554)

15. Dove tocca costei Giovan Nasco

anonymous madrigal
model: NY 2004 (1554)
156 HOWARD MAYER BROWN

16. Dapoi che sotto il deI Vincentio Galilei

Petrareh, Triumph of Eternity, terza rima

17. Questo Ieggiadra Vincentio Galilei

18. 10 mi son giovinetta [Domenico] Ferabosco

Boccaccio, defective ballata
model: Harran, Black-Note Madrigals, vol. I/2, no. 28
(see there, pp. Ixi-lxü, for information about the poem,
other settings, and various intabulations).

19. Deh non fuggir Hippolita Cera [Ciera]

20. 0 famelice inique Vincentio Galilei

Ariosto, Orlando furioso, XXXIV, I

21. Cosi nel mio cantar Vincentio Galilei

Dante's Rime petrose: "Cosl nel mio parlar"
For another setting by Galilei of the same text,
see Claude V. Palisca, 'The 'Camerata fiorentina':
A Reappraisal," Studi musicali 1 (1972), pp. 228-31.

22. Giunto m 'ha amor Orlando di Lasso (actually

Gian Domenico da Nola)
model: Nola, Madrigali a 4 e 5 voci. Canzoni
villanesche a 3 e 4 voci, ed. Lionello Cammarota,
2 vols. (Rome, 1973), 2, pp. 308-9.
Petrareh, no. 171: sonnet
On the question of attribution, on the poem, and on various
other settings of it, see Harran, Black-Note Madrigals, vol. II, p.xxxiii.

23. Nella piu verde piaggia Hippolita Cera [Ciera]

24. Zeffiro toma Vincentio Galilei

Petrareh, no. 310: sonnet

25-30. Six ricercares Francesco da Milano

Modem edition in The Lute Music of Francesco Canova
da Mi/ano (1497-1543), ed. Arthur 1. Ness, 2 vols. in 1
(Cambridge, Mass. 1970), nos. 68-73.
 VINCENZO GALILEI'S FIRST BOOK OF LUTE MUSIC 157

To judge from the dedication of his volume, Galilei had already estab-
lished hirnself in Pisa by 1563 (where he had married a woman from a local
noble family).4 The dedication is addressed to Alessandro de'Medici,
cousin to the members of the main Florentine family, and a nephew of the
Alessandro who in 1605 served as Pope Leo XI for one short month before
he died. 5 It is clear just which Medici Galilei means to honor, for he names
Alessandro's father as Bemadetto, whom he thanks for innumerable though
unspecified favors, and to whom, therefore, he owed an enormous debt of
gratitude. Being poor ("sentendomi per la bassezza della fortuna rnia, privo
di altri mezzi"), Galilei claims to have thought of no better way to repay
Bernadetto's kindnesses than by offering his own music to Bemadetto's
son Alessandro. Galilei brags in his dedication that he has included in his
volume ricercares by Francesco da Milano-as though this would give
Alessandro special pleasure-and he promises to publish at some later date
lute intabulations of all the madrigals in Cipriano de Rore's first book, a
promise he never carried out. 6
The two dozen madrigals in Galilei's anthology of 1563 can be divided
into two groups: the eight for which vocal models can be found in contem-
porary printed anthologies, and the sixteen for which no vocal models
survive. The eight intabulations of relatively well-known compositions
make up a small anthology ofrepresentative madrigals from the 1550s, not
the flamboyant, mannered and expressive madrigals that were beginning to
be written in that decade in Ferrara, Mantua and Venice, but rather the far
simpler and more declamatory madrigals especially characteristic of the
composers working in Rome and Naples. 7 Some are madrigals a note nere:
the Roman Domenico Ferabosco' s setting of Boccaccio' s ballata "10 mi son

4 The dedication of the volume is reprinted in Fabio Fano, La Camerata fiorentina: Vincenzo
Galilei, Istituzioni e monumenti deli' arte musicale italiana, vol. 4 (Milan, 1934), p. lxxxiv,
and reproduced in facsimile there, opp. p. lxxxv.
5 Alessandro de'Medici is identified in the genealogical table preceding p. 1 of Furio Diaz, II
Granducato di Toscana: I Medici (Turin, 1976). See there, pp. 290-91, for abrief reference to
Alessandro, later Pope Leo XI.
6 Galilei intabulated a number of Rore's madrigals and published them in his Fronimo (Venice,
1568; 2nd rev. ed., 1584). The 1584 edition is reprinted in facsimile by Fomi Editore
(Bologna, 1978), and translated into English by Carol MacClintock in Musicological Studies
and Documents 39 (American Institute of Musicology, 1985). The contents of both editions of
Fronimo are listed in Brown, Instrumental Music.
7 On these simpler Roman and Neapolitan madrigals, see, among other studies, James Haar,
"The 'Madrigale arioso': A Mid-Century Development in the Cinquecento Madrigal," Studi mu-
sicali 12 (1983), pp. 203-19, and Howard Mayer Brown, "Petrarch in Naples: Notes on the
Formation of Giaches de Wert's Style," in Altro Polo: Essays on Italian Music in the
Cinquecento, ed. Richard Charteris (Sydney, 1990), pp. 16-50.
158 HOWARD MAYER BROWN

giovinetta" (no. 18),8 for example, as well as some of the partes of the most
ambitious composition in Galilei's anthology, Arcadelt's setting of all five
stanzas of Petrarch's canzone "Chiare e'fresche e dolce acque" (no. 11),
first published as a complete cycle in 1555, both by Gardano in Venice and
by Antonio Barre, in the collection that contained the first madrigal cycles
ever to be printed in Rome. 9 Galilei intabulates as weIl one madrigal a 3
(no. 10) by the little-known Vincenzo Ferro, many of whose works appear
in Roman volumes;lO one that appeared in Antonio Barre's third volume of
madrigali ariosi in 1563, Giovan Domenico da Nola's very formulaic setting
of the first quatrain of Petrarch's sonnet "Giunto m'ha amor" (no. 22), a
piece Galilei attributes to Lasso, but which should almost certainly be given
to Nola;l1 and three (nos. 6, 14 and 15) by composers associated with
Verona, Giovan Nasco and Vincenzo Ruffo. 12
Galilei offers as literal a transcription of the vocal polyphony as the
limitations of the lute permit, while adding relatively discreet ornamentation
in the manner altogether characteristic of all those mid-sixteenth-century
lutenists who were not exhibitionistic virtuosi. 13 1t is clear that Galilei has
anticipated the guidelines he hirnself would set down in his later treatises on
lute intabulation, the guidelines that seem to have served as an ideal for all
sixteenth-century lutenists even before Galilei stated them explicitly: that
instrumentalists, including lutenists and keyboard players, should duplicate

8 Ferabosco's other composition in Galilei's volume, "Baciami vita mia" (no. 8), is written for
the most part in the more nonnal mensuration sign ft in RISM 155428 , p. 10 (it opens with mu-
sic under ft 3).
9 "Da' bei rarni scendea," the quarta pars of "Chi are e fresche e dolce acque," was first published
as a single madrigal, not as part of the cycle, in 1542 in one of the anthologies of note nere
madrigals. For further infonnation about the complicated bibliographical history of the cycle,
and for a modem edition of "Da' bei rami," see Don Harran, The Anthologies o[ Black-Note
Madrigals, 5 vols. in 6 (American Institute of Musicology, 1978-81),1/1, pp. xlvii-xlviii and
10-13.
On Barre's collection as the fIrst devoted exclusively to madrigal cycles, see Patricia Ann
Myers, "An Analytical Study of the ltalian Cyclic Madrigals Published by Composers Working
in Rome ca. 1540-1614," Ph.D. diss., University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 1971, and
esp. p. 2ff.
10 For example, two of Ferro's fifteen surviving madrigals appear in the first book of madrigali
ariosi, published by Barre (RISM 1555 27 ), and two more in the new edition of the volume made
r
b Gardano in Venice two years later (RISM 1557 17).
1 On the attribution question, see Harran, Black-Note Madrigals, H, p. xxxiii.
12 On the close musical relationship between Nasco and Ruffo and their connection with the
Accademia Filarmonica in Verona, see George Nugent, "Jan Nasco," The New Grove Dictionary
o[ Music and Musicians 13, pp. 40-41.
13 On the relatively simple omamentation of mid-sixteenth-century Italian lutenists, see
Howard Mayer Brown, "Embellishment in Early Sixteenth-Century Italian Intabulations,"
Proceedings o[ the Royal Musical Association 100 (1973-1974), pp. 49-83.
 VINCENZO GAULEI'S FIRST BOOK OF LUTE MUSIC 159

exactly, insofar as they could, each melodie line of whatever polyphony

they arranged for their instruments. 14 The ideal could not always be met, of
course, and occasionally even Galilei leaves out notes he cannot conve-
niently fit onto the strings of his instrument or within his left hand. We do
not know for certain whether these particular intabulations, or indeed most
of those published in the sixteenth century, served only as solo instrumental
versions of music originally conceived with words, or whether such
arrangements, even with their ornamentation, could also accompany per-
formances by one or more singers. 15 Sixteenth-century lutenists probably
made use of both alternatives, and we shall see that at least some of the
pieces in Galilei's anthologies might well have been conceived with perfor-
mance by solo singer and lute in mind. In any case, the idea seems absurd
that Galilei followed some mysterious set of conventions different from
those governing singers in indicating the accidentals actually to be used in
performance of these madrigals, especially since he himself was the com-
poser of some of them. 16
Whereas the eight intabulations of known vocal compositions comprise
an attractive small anthology of mid-sixteenth-century madrigals, the lion's
share of music in the volume consists of the twenty-two pie ces in it for
which no vocal model survives, nineteen of them by just three composers:
the six otherwise unknown ricercares by Francesco da Milano which elose
the volume; the seven madrigals by Vincenzo Galilei himself, his earliest
extant compositions; and the six madrigals which take pride of place at the

14 Galilei sets out his principles of intabulation in his treatise Fronimo (see note 6 above). The
other principal writer on intabulation technique, Adrian le Roy, advances essentially the same
principles; see lean-Michel Vaccaro, ed., (Euvres d'Adrian le Roy: Les instructions pour le luth
(1574) (Paris, 1977). For further information on the technique of intabulation, see Hiroyuki
Minamino, "Sixteenth-Century Lute Treatises, with Emphasis on Lute Intabulation Technique,"
Ph.D. diss., University of Chicago, 1988. A revised version of Minamino's dissertation is
forthcoming from Cambridge University Press.
15 On the possibility that some lute intabulations could be used either as solos or as accompa-
niments for singers, see Howard Mayer Brown, "Bossinensis, Willaert and Verdelot: Pitch and
the Conventions of Transcribing Music for Lute and Voice in Italy in the Early Sixteenth
Century," Revue de musicologie 75 (1989), pp. 2546. For a description of the pieces intabu-
lated by Giovanni Antonio Terzi and described as suitable either to be solos or accompani-
ments, see Suzanne E. Court, "Giovanni Antonio Terzi and the Lute Intabulations of Late
Sixteenth-Century Italy," 2 vols., Ph.D. diss., University of Otago (Dunedin, New Zealand),
1988, esp. chap. 5: "Performance Practice-Indications and Implications," 1, pp. 210-46.
16 For a different view, see Lewis Lockwood, "Musica Ficta," The New Grove Dictionary of
Music and Musicians 12, p. 807: "There is no reason to assurne that the practices followed by
instrumentalists were carried over into the vocal literature, where the tradition of solmization
and musica Jicta particularly applies." Virtually every writer on the lute who gives details about
intabulations makes use of the concepts of modality or the hexachord system, or explicitly
uses the concepts of solmization in explaining the techniques of lute playing.
160 HOWARD MAYER BROWN

beginning of the volume, all of them attributed to Alessandro Romano, that

is, Alessandro Merlo, who worked at the Sistine Chapel all his known
career.l7 Neither Merlo's nor Galilei's pieces appear among the printed
collections of their madrigals, nor do Francesco da Milano's ricercares turn
up in any other source. It may be, then, that Galilei had personal ties with
one or both musicians, or at least had some private means of gaining access
to their music. In addition, there are three further intabulations of madrigals
that do not appear in any other source: the setting by the otherwise unknown
Giovanni deI Cartolaio-from his name probably an amateur musician---of
one stanza of ottava rima, otherwise composed previously (in a musically
unrelated setting) only by Antonio Barre in his first book of four-voiced
madrigals, and two madrigals by the little-known Hippolito Ciera, a musi-
cian associated with Treviso and Venice.1 8
If we did not know so much about Vincenzo Galilei and his subsequent
career, I would argue on the basis of wh at I have told you already that he
was a Roman musician, in spite of his (and Alessandro Romano' s) associa-
tion with Rore, in spite of the fact that his volume is dedicated to a member
of the Medici family, and in spite of the presence in it of a handful of
Veronese and Venetian madrigals. In the first place, the volume was pub-
lished by Valerio Dorico in Rome, a much more parochial editor than the
cosmopolitan printers of Venice, Antonio Gardano and Girolamo Scotto.
Almost everything that came off Dorico' s presses had chiefly local signifi-
cance; it was music composed in Rome by Roman composers, or music
which had some special importance for musical circles in the city.1 9 Most
important, though, a major part of the music in the volume, notably the
opening and closing seetions, was written by composers associa~ed for their
entire careers with Rome: Alessandro Merlo and Francesco da Milano. And
finally, many of the other compositions in the volume can be associated
with Rome, either because they were composed by Roman musicians, or

17 For a brief summary of MerJo's career, see Patricia Ann Myers, "Alessandro MerJo," The New
Grove Dictionary of Music anti Musicians 12, pp. 185-86, who points out that MerJo was for
three months in 1553 maestro di musica at the Accademia Filarmonica in Verona (where he
might have come in contact with Nasco and Ruffo). Myers also stresses the facts that Merlo
cJaimed to have studied with WilJaert and Rore, and that he set some of the same texts as those
chosen by Rore.
18 On Cartolaio, see also John W. Hill, "Florentine lntermedi sacri e morali. 1549-1622," in La
musique et le rite sacre et profane. Actes du XIIe Congres de la Societe Internationale de musi-
cologie. voJ. 2 (Strasbourg, 1986), pp. 265-301. The little that is known about Ippolito Ciera
is surnmarized in Philip T. Jackson, "Ippolito Ciera," The New Grove Dictionary of Music anti
Musicians 4, p. 394.
19 On Valerio Dorico and the volumes he published. see Suzanne G. Cusick, "Valerio Dorico:
Music Printer in Sixteenth-Century Rome," Ph.D. diss., University of North Carolina, 1975.
 VINCENW GAULEI'S FIRST BOOK OF LUTE Musrc 161

were first circulated in that city, in publieations either by Dorico or by

Antonio Barre. Galilei's possible early association with Rome remains to be
documented from archival sources. But before that is done, we can explore
some of the implications of this hypothesis by a careful look at the music
Galilei included in his first book of intabulations.
To begin at the beginning, the first five compositions in the volume,
those by Alessandro Merlo, surely reveal Galilei's preoccupations in 1563,
since he gave them such a prominent place at the head of his anthology.
They are listed as separate pieces in the index on its last page, but then so
are each of the partes of Arcadelt' s canzone. Table 1 makes clear that in all
prob ability the five pieces by Alessandro form a cycle of a kind that is
otherwise completely unknown to me. Nothing more than the incipit of the
text appears, of course, in Galilei's volume, but enough of each incipit is
given so that the texts of most of the intabulations can be identified with
reasonable certainty. Thus, the incipit of the first piece corresponds with the
first words of the opening quatrain of Petrarch's sonnet 97, "Ahi bella
liberta, come tu m'ai." 1 have not been able to find a text in any sixteenth-
century source beginning with the incipit of the second piece, "Pur mi con-
sola," but the transcription of the intabulation and the reconstruction of the
polyphony from whieh it was taken, whieh is given as Example 2,20 sug-
gests that "Pur mi consola" sets two eleven-syllable lines, the second of
which is repeated, or just possibly three eleven-syllable lines, with the third
sung to virtually the same music as the second.
The third piece in Galilei's anthology has as its incipit the second qua-
train of Petrarch' s sonnet 97, and the fourth piece has the incipit of the
sestet of the same sonnet, apparently with enough music to set all six lines.
Finally, "Pur mi consola" returns as the fifth piece, and Galilei repeats
almost the same music, including the same ornamentation, adding only a
coda at the end which repeats the second phrase yet again, although this
time in triple meter, in the characteristic manner of a peroration. Moreover,
this second statement of "Pur mi consola" brings the music back to cadence
on G, the final of the transposed Dorian mode, the end of the previous
section having closed on D, the fifth sc ale degree of the mode that unifies all
five parts of the cycle. It would seem that we have here an arrangement for
lute of the polyphonie setting of a complete Petrarch sonnet, interrupted,

20 Examples 1 and 2 are transcribed from the unique copy of Galilei, Intavolatura de
lauto .. .libro primo (Rome, 1563), pp. 1-2, in the Österreichische Nationalbibliothek in
Vienna. No text is supplied for the reconstruction of "Pur mi consola" because the source of
G alilei' s intabulation is unknown, and the text has not been identified.
162 HOWARD MAYER BROWN

however, by a non-Petrarchan refrain performed after the flrst quatrain and

after the conc1uding sestet.
In spite of the explicitly stated aim of the sixteenth-century lutenists to
inc1ude all the notes of a vocal piece in their arrangement, it is never easy to
reconstruct a polyphonie version of an intabulation for which no model
survives. 21 I have tried to do just that for Alessandro Merlo's troped sonnet;
the flrst quatrain and the flrst statement of the refrain are reproduced as
Examples 1 and 2. Even if I have erred grossly in some of the details, and
even if I have added the Petrarchan text to Example 1 in ways that miscon-
strue Alessandro Merlo's original intentions, these two examples offer what
must nevertheless come fairly c10se to the version from which Galilei
worked. We can see c1early, for instance, that what we are dealing with is
not a flamboyant and mannered expressive cyc1e typieal of the northem
Italian madrigal of the mid sixteenth century, but rather with a set of
chordal, dec1amatory pieces. The irregular rhythms offer an accurate and
sensitive translation of the text accents into musieal terms. The melodie lines
move within very restricted ranges; indeed, they often merely stay on a sin-
gle pitch or two, evidently to allow the text to be more or less simply
dec1aimed. What little imitation there is marks line beginnings, and Ales-
sandro incorporated almost no textural contrast into his musie. Moreover,
the very lightly-animated homophony produces an effect of aseries of
chords, an effect that is enhanced by the fact that the nature of the chordal
progressions corresponds closely with the kinds of progressions to be
found in the standard recitation formulas of sixteenth-century Italy-the
Romanesca, the passamezzo, the Folia, the Ruggiero, and so on-and with
the harmonie language of the rather freer schemes, often called arias in the
sourees, to whieh native Italian sixteenth-century musicians dec1aimed
poetry, not only the stanzas in ottava rima from Ariosto's Orlando furioso,
but various other popular or popularizing texts. 22 I have in mind such pro-
gressions as the chains of ascending or descending fourths, such as B-flat F

21 The principal difficulties in reconstructing the original polyphony from an intabulation for
lute involve the impossibility of indicating unisons from the original in the intabulation, the
difficulty of recognizing voice crossings, and the necessity to leave out an occasional note
which cannot be made to fit on the instrument. Clearly, then, alternative solutions to my reso-
lution of the compositions are possible; I have had to add a note, for example, in some pas-
sages in order to make sense of the counterpoint.
22 For abrief survey of these standard bass patterns, with a bibliography of earlier studies, see
Jack Westrup and Thomas Walker, "Aria," section 1, The New Grove Dictionary o[ Music and
Musicians 1, pp. 573-74, and the various entries in The New Grove for individual formulas. For
exhaustive studies of two such patterns, see Warren Kirkendale, L' aria di Fiorenza id est II hallo
deI gran duca (Florence, 1972); and John Wendland, '''Madre non mi far Monaca': The
Biography of a Renaissance Folksong," Acta musicologica 48 (1976), pp. 185-204.
 VINCENZO GAULEI'S FIRsT BOOK OFLUTE MUSIC 163

G D, D G F B-flat, progressions around the eirele of fifths, and eertain

standard eadential fonnulas that ean be found in virtually all the pieces in
this repertory .
Indeed, Alessandro's setting of "Ahi bella libena" is so simple and
sehematic, so close in style to the arias of the sixteenth century, that we may
well ask: is the eycle in fact a madrigal at all (as Galilei's title page claims),
or is it rather itself an aria? Nino Pirrotta, among others, has shown us what
a difficult and ambivalent word "aria" is in sixteenth-century usage. 23 Most
narrowly defined, it seems to mean simply a scheme to which to sing any
one of a whole class of poems--all sonnets, or eapitoli, or stanzas in ottava
rima, for example-or else it is a scheme that supplies several phrases of
music that can be repeated to sing some particular sonnet, capitolo, or ottava
rima. Early in the sixteenth centUlY, Petrucci supplied examples of schemes
to fit whole classes of poetry in those frottola books that include "aeri" or
"modi di dire" for sonnets, capitoli and odes. 24 Similar sets of fonnulas,
mostly for stanzas in ottava rima, can be found in the second half of the
sixteenth century in Galilei's own manuscript additions to several eopies of
his lute treatise Fronimo of 1568, in the Bottegari lutebook of 1574, and
among the arias printed in various lutebooks of the 1560s and later, by
Barbetta, Marco Facoli, Orazio Vecchi and others. 25 Such schemes for
classes of poetry appear, too, in the volume of aeri raccolti edited by Rocco
Rodio and surviving incompletely only in a second or later edition published
in Naples in 1577, but eontaining at least some music composed as early as
the late 1550s.26 Most of the Neapolitan volume, though, is taken up with

23 Nino Pirrotta, "Early Opera and Aria," in New Looks at Italian Opera: Essays in Ronor 0/
Donald J. Grout, ed. William W. Austin (Ithaca, N. Y., 1968), republished in Italian as "Inizio
dell'opera e aria" in Pirrotta, Li due Or/ei: da Poliziano a Monteverdi (Turin, 1969; 2nd rev. ed.,
1975), translated into English by Karen Eales as Music and Theatre from Poliziano to Monte-
verdi (Cambridge, 1982).
24 See, for example, the following compositions in Le frottole neU' edizione principe di
Ottaviano Petrucci ... Lwri I, II e llI, ed. Gaetano Cesari, Raffaello Monterosso and Benvenuto
Disertori (Cremona, 1954): "Ben mille volte" (Modus dicendi Capitula) by Michae1e Pesenti,
p. 36; "Ite caldi sospiri" (EI modo de dir sonetti) by Johannes Broccus (Giovanni Brocco), pp.
114-15; and the anonymous "Si morsi donna" (Per sonetti), p. 127.
25 One of Galilei's arias (appropriate for sonnets) is published in a modem edition in Palisca,
"Vincenzo Gali1ei's Arrangements," pp. 223-32.
The lute book of Cosimo Bottegari, Florentine courtier and lutenist-Modena, Biblioteca
Estense, MS C 311-has been published in a modem edition as The Bottegari Lutebook, ed.
Carol MacClintock (Wellesley, Mass., 1965). It is briefly described in MacClintock, "A Court
Musician's Songbook: Modena MS C 311," Journal o/the American Musicological Society 9
(1956), pp. 177-92.
For other arias from the late sixteenth century, see under "Aria" in the index of first lines
and titles in Brown, Instrumental Music.
164 HOWARD MAYER BROWN

examples from my second category: schemes to sing some particular poem,

that is, two phrases of music intended to be repeated for a particular stanza
in ottava rima, two or four phrases to be repeated for the performance of a
particular sonnet, or three phrases to be repeated for a particular set of stan-
zas in terza rima.
Even the most narrow definition of aria should doubtless be broad
enough to include at least these two kinds of formula: schemes for both
whole c1asses of poetry and for particular poems. The one essential element
common to them both is that they offer a musical unit (two, three or four
phrases) that must be repeated in order to sing the entire poem. The musical
unit can either be a traditional scheme--like the Folia or the Romanesca-or
else it can be newly composed, like many of the arias in the Neapolitan col-
lection of 1577. Warren Kirkendale, among others, has reminded us that the
essential character of such schemes is open to debate: whether they should
be construed as consisting of an essential melody, an essential bass, or what
he calls a progression, by which he means a panicular set of chords in a
particular rhythm.27
As important for our understanding of this phenomenon as the nature
of the formulas, though, is the his tory of declaimed narrative; some of the
most important qualities of this music are intimately tied to its history. From
the fourteenth century on, the performance of narrative poetry in ottava
rima, fabulous stories of knights and their heroic deeds recited to musical
formulas, was the exc1usive province of Italian storytellers who enthralled
courtiers and townspeople alike. 28 The schemes to which these early cantari
were sung have been almost completely lost to our view since they were
almost never written down. The character of the formulas probably changed
over the centuries, although we cannot say very surely just how or when
such changes took places, for we understand only very incompletely the

26 The volume of Aeri racolti insieme con altri bellissimi aggionti di diversi, dove si cantano
Sonetti, Stanze e Terze Rime, ed. Rocco Rodio (Napies, Gioseppe Cacchio, 1577) is described
and its contents listed in Howard Mayer Brown, ''The Geography of Florentine Monody:
Caccini at Horne and Abroad," Early Music 9 (1981), pp. 165-66.
27 See KirkendaIe, L' aria di Fiorema, esp. pp. 15-21; and also, Howard Mayer Brown, "Verso
una defmizione deli' armonia nel sedicesimo secolo: sui 'MadrigaIi ariosi' di Antonio Barre,"
Rivista italiana di musicologia 25 (1990), pp. 18-60.
28 The best introduction to the subject of cantastorie remains Ezio Levi, '1 cantari leggendari dei
popolo italiano nei secoli XIV e XV," Giornale storico della letteratura italiana, Supplemento
no. 16 (Turin, 1914). For collections of cantari (without music), see, for example, Ezio Levi,
Fiore di leggende: Cantari antichi (Bari, 1914); Francesco A. Ugolini, I cantari d' argomento
classico (Geneva and Florence, 1933); G. Varanini, ed., Cantari religiosi senesi dei Trecento
(Bari, 1965); and Domenico de Robertis, "Cantari antichi," Studi di [ilologia italiana 28
(1970), pp. 67-175.
 VINCENZO GAULEI' S FIRST BOOK OF LUTE MUSIC 165

techniques of improvisation used by such famous fifteenth-century per-

formers as Pietrobono of Ferrara and Serafino dall' Aquila, when they sang
strambotti and other long lyric poems as well, perhaps, as longer stories in
ottava rima. 29 From the sixteenth century, on the other hand, we have a
sizeable repertory of chordal formulas (melodies, basses, melodies and
basses, or chord progressions), some of them quite standardized, to which
stanzas of Orlando furioso and other poems in ottava rima, as wen as other
kinds ofpoetry were sung.30 In the sixteenth century, it was not only popu-
lar entertainers who sang stanzas of ottava rima, but also ancient gods and
goddesses in those splendid neo-c1assical theatrical spectac1es organized at
so many Renaissance courts; and instrumentalists as well made use of these
stock progressions, by adding to them their purely abstract decorations to
form sets of variations and stylized dances. 31 Lutenists and keyboard play-
ers, as well as improvvisatori and ac tors portraying Orpheus, Apollo,
Venus, and Daphne, demonstrated their virtuosity or declaimed their neo-
c1assicallines over what in most cases we can only imagine were suitably
adjusted versions of standard or newly composed arias.
These cultural signals, associating arias with special kinds of activities
and a special repertory, were confused more than a little bit, when musi-
cians at mid century in Naples and Rome began to sing arias--some of them
arias they had composed themselves rather than adapting standard formulas
for their uses-not only to stanzas in ottava rima or to theatrical songs but
also to examples of the greatest poetry in the Italian language: sonnets and
canzoni by Petrarch and poetry by the most refined of the modems, Pietro
Bembo, Jacopo Sannazaro, Luigi Tansillo, and others. 32 Although the
application of tradition al chordal progressions to poetry of the highest
cultural pretensions may not have started for the first time in southem Italy
at mid century, the collection of Neapolitan arias, published in 1577 (but
reflecting a repertory at least partly twenty years older), is the earliest col-

29 On Pietrobono of Ferrara, see Lewis Lockwood, "Pietrobono and the Instrumental Tradition
at Ferrara in the Fifteenth Century," Rivista italiana di musicologia 10 (1975), pp. 115-33, and
Lockwood, Music in Renaissance Ferrara, 1400-1505 (Oxford, 1984), esp. pp. 96-108. On
Serafino, see Barbara Bauer-Forrniconi, Die Strambotti des Serafino dall'Aquila. Studien und
Texte zur italienischen Spiel- und Scherzdichtung des ausgehenden 15. Jahrhunderts (Munich,
1967).
30 See notes 25 and 26 above.
31 On the association of musical formulas with theatrical gods and goddesses in the Italian
Renaissance, see, among other studies, Brown, "Petrarch in Naples." For an anthology of
mostly instrumental compositions, most of them later than Galilei's volume, based on some of
these patterns, see Richard Hudson, The Folia, the Saraband, the Passacaglia, and the Cha-
conne, 4 vols (American Institute of Musicology, 1982).
32 See Brown, ''The Geography of Florentine Monody," and Brown, "Petrarch in Naples."
166 HOWARD MAYER BROWN

lection known to me devoted entirely to arias, in which the arias are meant
to be sung to refined and elegant lyric poetry.
The title of Galilei' s volume of intabulations notwithstanding, it is quite
possible that not all of the pieces he published were madrigals or ricercares.
Some may, in fact, be arias. Giandomenico da Nola's setting ofmerely the
flrst quatrain of Petrarch's sonnet "Giunto m'ha amor" (no. 22), for ex am-
pIe, could conceivably have been intended as only the flrst seetion of a piece
in which the surviving music is repeated and re-arranged in order to perform
the entire poem (even though fairly drastic revisions would be necessary to
accommodate the second quatrain and the sestet). Similarly, Galilei's own
setting of the flrst stanza, in terza rima, from Petrarch's Triumph 0/
Eternity, beginning "Dapoi ehe sotto il ciel" (no. 16), may have been
repeated for the performance of the entire poem, or at least some more
substantial part of it than merely the first three lines. 33 And it is even con-
ceivable that some or an of the four or more settings of ottava rima in the
volume may have been intended merely as schemes to which to perform
further strophes, although these pieces include slightly more elaborate
counterpoint than that found in Alessandro Romano' s troped Petrarch
sonnet, so the ottava settings may wen have been intended as flxed musical
versions of particular stanzas. 34 In any case, although we cannot be certain,
we should at least keep open the possibility that some of Galilei's intabu-
lated "madrigals" are in fact arias meant to be performed not as they stand
but repeated to more than one set of words.
Alessandro Romano's "Ahi bella liberta," on the other hand, cannot be
described as a scheme for declaiming a particular poem in the same way as
those I have just singled out. In this case, we know exactly how he intended
the second quatrain and the sestet of the sonnet to be sung, and the music
includes no repetitions of any significant melodie material or of any bass
pattern or harmonic progression. Alessandro has composed new music for
each line of the sonnet. But we must be clear about just wh at we mean by
the kinds of repetition we find in such a piece. By definition, of course, the
refrain Alessandro added to Petrareh' s sonnet is to be repeated; and
Alessandro has followed the weIl nigh universal convention of the sixteenth
century in making full formal closures to each seetion of his text-to each
quatrain, to the refrain, and to the sestet-by repeating both the words and

33 On other sixteenth-century settings of seetions of Petrarch's Triumphs, see Brown, "Petrareh

in Naples."
34 The following compositions in Galilei 's book of intabulations set stanzas of ottava rima:
nos. 8, 9, 10, and 20. Some of the other compositions, for which the texts have not yet been
identified, may also set stanzas in ottava rima.
 VINCENZO GAllLEI'S FIRST BOOK OF LUTE MUSIC 167

the last musieal phrase at the end. Moreover, if my reconstruction of the

way he intended the words to be sung is ace urate at all, Alessandro also
repeated segments of text within a line, but these involve repetitions to
extend or develop the musie of a phrase. In spite of all these kinds of repeti-
tion, though, Alessandro's setting of "Ahi bella liberta" cannot be described
as an aria; it is not based on any formal scheme, any melody, bass pattern,
or harmonie progression that underlies the whole structure.
"Ahi bella liberta," in short, is best classified as a madrigal written in
the style of an aria. In view of the fact that its counterpoint and melodie
material are so simple, we might better call it an aria with the form of a
madrigal, but such a description is needlessly confusing and contradictory,
especially since there is a sixteenth-century term for the genre I have just
described, namely, madrigale arioso, a term coined, so far as we know, by
Antonio Barre in 1555 when he published the first of his three volumes of
madrigali ariosi a 4. These anthologies signal the wholesale incursion into
the high an musie of the later sixteenth century of the harmonie progres-
sions and patterns of native Italian arie, an incursion led by Roman and
Neapolitan composers of the mid sixteenth century, and rather surprisingly
seen to be the basis for much of Galilei' s musie in this first book of intabu-
lations-not only Alessandro's troped sonnet, and Nola's setting of a single
quatrain from a sonnet, but also, as we shall see, most of Galilei's own
musie as well. 35
There is yet another point to be made about the character of Ales-
sandro's "Ahi bella liberta" and the relationship of the written version in
Galilei's anthology to the manner in which it was performed. One of the
few things we know about Alessandro Romano is the claim made by
Vincenzo Giustiniani in the early seventeenth century that Alessandro and a
group of other basses in Rome who had phenomenal ranges of more than
three octaves, began a new style of solo singing about 1575.36 The nature
of their performances is suggested more vividly in Giovanni Bardi's dis-
course of about 1578 on ancient music and good singing, addressed to
Giulio Caccini. Bardi recalls having heard such a bass, quite possibly
Alessandro himself or Giulio Cesare Brancacci, in Rome in 1567. Bardi
wrote that

35 On Barre's madrigaLi ariosi, see Haar, "The 'Madrigale arioso'," and John Steele, "Antonio
Barre: Madrigalist, Anthologist and Publisher in Rome: Some Preliminary Findings," Altro
PoLo, pp. 82-112. I am preparing an edition of Barre's three volumes, in collaboration with
John Steele and Giuseppina La Face.
36 See Vincenzo Giustiniani, Discorso sopra La musica, trans. by Carol MacClintock (American
Institute of Musicology, 1962), pp. 69-70.
168 HOWARD MAYER BROWN

he so spoiled nature with art that he broke the lines, indeed shat-
tered them to pieces, making long syllables short and short ones
long, putting runs on the short and stopping on the long, that lis-
tening to him was to witness a massacre of the unfortunate poetry.
The wretched fellow, entreated by adulation, the more he saw eye-
brows arching, the greater was his foolishness to satisfy the igno-
rant public. 37

Alessandro's "Ahi bella libertil" is likely to have been the sort of music the
virtuoso bass sang on that occasion. Bardi's remarks remind us that in the
same Roman and Neapolitan circ1es where singing fine poetry to arias was
cultivated, the simple arias were often not intended to be fixed compositions
at all, but merely vehic1es by means of wh ich a performer could display his
musical personality, a substructure onto which the virtuoso singer grafted
his elaborate passaggi. 38 We should keep open the possibility that Galilei's
anthology contains other such vehicles for virtuoso display, among them
those pieces I have already singled out as potential arias rather than madri-
gals, inc1uding some by Galilei hirnself.
The seven compositions of his own that he inc1uded in his anthology
confrrm his interest in music related in one way or another to recitation for-
mulas and arias, an interest, we now can speculate, that must have been
sparked by contact with Roman composers early in his career. Galilei set
precise1y the sort of 'classical' Italian poetry favored by Antonio Barre in
his anthologies of madrigali ariosi and by Rocco Rodio in the Neapolitan
collection of arias of 1577. Indeed, Galilei's pieces form a small but repre-
sentative sampie of the kinds of poetry with which southem Italian com-
posers at mid century were experimenting in their attempts to combine high
literary values with native ltalian song: two settings of stanzas in ottava rima
from Ariosto, "Alcun non puo saper" (no. 13, reproduced as Example 3)
and "0 famelice inique" (no. 20); two settings of Petrarch sonnets, "Signor
mio caro" (no. 12) and "Zefiro toma" (no. 24); a single stanza in terza rima
from Petrarch's Triumphs; ("Dapoi che sotto i1 ciel," no. 16); a single stanza
of a canzone by Dante ("Cosi nel mio cantar," no. 21); and one poem which
I have not yet been able to identify ("Questo leggiadra," no. 17), because its
textual incipit is too brief and ambiguous.

37 Giovanni Bardi, "The 'Discourse Addressed to Giulio Caccini, CaJled the Roman, on Ancient
Music and Good Singing' ," trans. in Palisca, The Florentine Camerata, p. 123.
38 A point made in Brown, "The Geography of Florentine Monody." Merlo's other composi-
tion in Galilei's anthology, "Ahi chi mi da consiglio" (no. 7), also seems to be a simple piece
more aptly described as a vehicle for declaiming poetry or for virtuoso display than as a finely
wrought example of expressive counterpoint.
 VINCENZO GAULEI'S fiRST BOOK OF LUTE MUSIC 169

These are Galilei's earliest known compositions, on which our assess-

ment of his invention and achievements as a young man must necessarily be
based; but it is not entirely elear that they are aH arrangements for lute of
madrigals conceived in the ftrst place for four or ftve voices; Galilei may
have intended them-at least some-as songs for voice and lute from the
ftrst. Even the opening point of imitation in "Alcun non pub saper," for
instance, and the difference between the opening theme in the altus and the
bassus (compare Example 3, tnm. 3 and 5), raise questions about the nature
of "original versions" and "arrangements." Whatever the original form of
these pieces, though, they may weH have existed at one time in polyphonie
form, and it is instructive for us in trying to understand this music to attempt
to reveal the part-writing beneath the inevitably chordal character of the
version for solo lute. If Alessandro Romano's "Ahi bella liberta" is difftcult
to reconstruct, however, Galilei's intabulations are even harder to turn into
four- or five-part polyphony, less because of apparent vagaries in the details
of part-writing than because Galilei's formal procedures are not elear.
VirtuaHy every musical fragment, for example, seems to incorporate a
cadential formula, and so it is difficult to tell just where the line endings are
supposed to come, or just where the principal points of articulation occur.
Example 3, then, should be accepted with all due reservation as an attempt
to suggest something elose to what may or may not have been the original
polyphonie version of"Alcun non pub saper."
The music sets the ftrst stanza from Book 19 of Orlando furioso, about
true friends, as opposed to those who will desert a roler when times are
bad. The text reads:

Alcun non pub saper da chi sia arnato,

Quando felice in su la ruota siede;
Perb c'hai veri e finti amici a lato,
ehe mostran tutti una rnedesrna fede.
Se poi si cangia in tristo illieto stato,
Volta la turb'adulatrice il piede;
E quel che di cor ama, riman forte,
Et arna il suo signor sin'a la morte.

(A man riding high on Fortune's wheel cannot tell who really

loves hirn, for his true and his spurious friends stand side-by-side
and show hirn equal devotion. But should he fall upon hard times,
his crowd of flatterers will slip away. Only the friend who loves
170 HOWARD MAYER BROWN

frorn his heart will stand by his lord and love hirn when he is
dead.):JJ

The same text was set as a madrigal by various other sixteenth-century

composers, inc1uding Rore, who in setting it placed a repeating melodie
formula in canon, and Galilei hirnself, whose madrigal published in 1587
and not related at all to this earlier version, reuses the music of the first
couplet for the second couplet as weIl, a common mid-century procedure in
setting stanzas of ottava rima as madrigals. 40
Galilei's intabulation of 1563, on the other hand, appears to inc1ude
only enough musie for four of the eight lines of text. In most madrigalian
settings of ottava rima it would not be diffieult to know how many lines of
text were intended to be set, even if the words were missing, since the
settings are usually so syllabie, and the lines invariably have eleven sylla-
bies. In Galilei's version for solo lute, however, the form is not so clear,
because cadences do not unambiguously divide the music into clear-cut
phrases. It may be that Galilei supplied music for five phrases of text, the
third phrase starting with the deceptive cadence in m. 14, or, more proba-
bly, he supplied musie for only four phrases of text, with the second phrase
expanded to last from mm. 8-19. That is, the first phrase c1early cadences in
m. 8, after the fourth presentation of the initial theme that is imitated. The
last phrase equally c1early begins with a point of imitation in m. 26; and the
next-to-last phrase seems to start in m. 20 with a change of texture. The
musie that remains, mm. 8-19, is not obviously interrupted by an artieulat-
ing cadence; it thus appears to be a single phrase, whieh the composer has
extended from mm. 16-19 by moving around the circ1e of fifths. It may be,
too, that this extension was inspired by the words of the stanza, which refer
in the second line to the wheel of fortune, appropriately characterized by the
circular chordal progressions and the sequential melodic line.
That madrigalism, plus the opening point of imitation, suggests that
Galilei's lute piece is actually the intabulation of a genuinely madrigalian
setting of a stanza of Ariosto. On the other hand, there is simply not enough
musie to sing all eight lines of text, and the meaning of the poem cannot
adequately be conveyed by omitting any of them. In Example 3, I have

39 The stanza is quoted after Ludovieo Ariosto, Orlando furioso, ed. Lanfraneo Caretti (Milan
and Naples, 1954), p. 458. The translation is taken from Ariosto, Orlando furioso, trans. Guido
Waldman (London, 1974), p. 216.
40 Rore's setting is published in a modem edition in Cipriano de Rore, Opera Omnia, ed.
Bernhard Meier, vol. 4 (Ameriean Institute of Musieology, 1969), pp. 87-89. Galilei's poly-
phonie setting of the text is published in a modem edition in Fano, La Camerata fiorentina, pp.
140-43.
 VINCENW GAULEI'S FIRST BOOK OF LUTE MUSIC 171

added only the first two lines of text to the music, leaving the last two
phrases untexted; faced with the challenge of performing such a piece,
musicians today would easily be able to find some way to sing all eight lines
of text to the music, but we shall never know, I think, which solution
Galilei intended. We meet similar problems of knowing how to resolve
musical formulas correctly to sing complete poems in many sixteenth-
century arias. Galilei's "Alcun non pub saper" is not in fact so different
from Alessandro Romano's "Ahi bella liberta," except that Alessandro's
composition has the style of an aria and the form of a madrigal, whereas
Galilei's has the style of a madrigal and the form of an aria.
The other pieces by Galilei in his book of lute music resemble "Alcun
non pub saper" in many ways. In style, they might best be described as
loosely polyphonie, with few clear-cut points of imitation; moreover, the
animated homophony that dominates their textures appears to be based on
chordal progressions resembling those of the recitation formulas commonly
used in the sixteenth century to declaim poetry. Most important for our
understanding of the cultural context of Galilei's music, few of his pieces
seem to supply enough musie for a performance of the entire text. Thus his
other setting of an Ariosto stanza in ottava rima, "0 famelice inique" (no.
20), like "Alcun non pub saper," includes only enough music for four lines
of poetry, and it, too, opens with the single clear-cut point of imitation of
the entire piece. Similarly, Galilei offers musie for two stanzas of terza rirna
at most to set the beginning of Petrarch's Triumph of Time (no. 16), and
musie for four lines of the canzone, "Cosi nel mio cantar" (no. 21). Of his
two sonnet settings, one, "Zefiro toma" (no. 24), includes only enough
music for a quatrain at most; "Signor mio caro" (no. 12) is the only possible
composition among Galilei's own for which the music suffices for the entire
poem, and even there it seems more likely that he published only enough
musie for the octave. In short, all the pieces in the volume by Galilei himself
fall somewhere in the middle of a continuum between short standardized
schemes for singing whole classes of poems, on the one hand, and on the
other, through-composed, individual settings, sensitive to nuances of
meaning or image, of partieular poems. They are all either arias with madri-
galian traits, or madrigals stylistieally dependent on the texture, melodie
style and harmonie patterns of arias.
As a young man, Vincenzo Galilei involved himself deeply in a reper-
tory with close ties to the native Italian unwritten tradition, if his anthology
of lute musie of 1563 is to be trusted to reflect his major concerns. His
penchant for simple, aria-like madrigals and the fact that he included in his
book one of Alessandro Romano's unadomed schemata for virtuoso
172 HOWARD MAYER BROWN

singing shows hirn off as the sort of lutenist directly involved in a kind of
performer's music slightly different from the carefully controlled written
artefacts we usually study. Galilei's lutebook of 1563 is in the end not so
different from the commonplace book of the Florentine lutenist-singer
Cosimo Bottegari, written about a decade later.41 Both preserve a repertory
of music intimately tied with the history of virtuoso singers and instrumen-
talists. To be sure, arias and the aria-like madrigals that served (at least in
part) as vehicles for virtuoso singers, were not Galilei' s only interest. Quite
aside from his promise, in the dedication of 1563, to intabulate Rore's fIrst
book of madrigals, he could offer the readers of Fronimo, published fIrst in
1568, a substantial selection offlorid northem Italian madrigals, by Willaert
as well as Rore and others. 42
This view of Galilei as performer coincides with wh at we know of his
later lute music. Palisca has published aselection of the lute songs and arias
that Galilei hirnself wrote into two copies of Fronimo; and the collection of
solo lute music prepared late in his career and included among his collected
papers in the Biblioteca Nazionale in Florence comprises mostly variation
sets and dances based on standard chordal progressions, made to seem
more intellectually impressive by being named after Muses and other,
mostly classical, ladies. 43 These arias and lute songs, along with Galilei's
remarks about native Italian song in several late treatises, led Palisca to
associate Galilei with what he calls pseudo-monody, the sixteenth-century
practice of solo singing that prefIgures the more rhetorical style of solo
singing to the bass, associated with Caccini, Peri and the other Florentine
monodists of the early seventeenth century. Palisca points out that Galilei
encouraged singers and composers to be expressive by keeping their music
simple, by modelling it, in short, on popular Italian song. 44 The

41 The Bottegari Lutebook, ed. MacClintock. On the connections between Galilei and a much
larger Florentine lute manuscript that contains intabulations and arie di cantar stanze, see
Victor Coelho, "Raffaello Cavalcanti's Lutebook (1591) and the Ideal of Singing and Playing,"
in Le concert des voix et instruments a la Renaissance, ed. J. M. Vaccaro, forthcoming.
42 See the contents of Fronimo (both the 1568 and the 1584 editions) in Brown, Instrumental
Music, pp. 225-29 and 331-34 (as 15682 and 15845).
43 For the aria for lute, see Palisca, "Vincenzo Galilei's Arrangements," pp. 223-32. Galilei's
volume of manuscript lute music is housed in Florence, Biblioteca nazionale centrale, MS Ant.
de Galileo. 6. A facsimile of the entire manuscript is forthcoming from Studio per Edizioni
Scelte in the collection Archivum Musicum (Florence). The contents of the manuscript are
briefly described in Bianca Becherini, Catalogo dei manoscritti musicali della Biblioteca
nazionale di Firenze (Cassel and Basel, 1959), pp. 139-40.
44 Palisca, "Vincenzo Galilei and Some Links Between •Pseudo-Monody , and Monody," pp.
347-48. See also Palisca, "The 'Camerata fiorentina'," pp. 222-34, where Palisca describes
Galilei's defense of his musical style, including an explanation of the technique of
 VINCENZO GAllLEI'S FIRST BOOK OF LUTE MUSIC 173

compositions in Galilei's lute book of 1563 teach us that Galilei's interest in

recitation formulas and native Italian song was not acquired from discus-
sions late in his life with Florentine intellectuals but dates from the very
beginning of his recorded career, a fact that suggests that the roots of
seventeenth-century Florentine monody lie at least partly in sixteenth-
century attempts to incorporate the recitation formulas traditionally
associated with native Italian singers into the music of the high culture.
Arias were of course cultivated everywhere in Italy in the sixteenth
century, but nowhere more than in Rome and Naples. Moreover, musicians
in those two cities made a special point of adapting the greatest Italian
poetry-works by Petrarch, Bembo, Sannazaro and others-to the
schematic formulas of the poet-improvisers. Galilei's lute book of 1563
reflects this Roman and Neapolitan predilection, so different in its results
from the courtly, florid and more theoretically oriented polyphony of the
Veneto. In his first anthology, Galilei reveals hirnself to be musically a
Roman, a characteristic trait, I would argue, that significantly shaped his
intellectual interests as weIl as his music. It was not just any native Italian
song that served as one of the sources of Florentine monody but quite
specifically Roman song. In another essay, I have already made the same
connection in pointing out precisely how the great Florentine Caccini-
"Giulio Romano" as he was called after his native city-formed his style by
learning from his teacher, the Neapolitan singer Scipione della Palla.45
Galilei's lute book of 1563 shows us a different side of this same phe-
nomenon, in offering us a collection of arias and madrigali ariosi, where the
declamatory melodies are largely sprung from a tightly-controlled contra-
puntal framework.
Knowing that Galilei was fascinated by music of the unwritten tradition
so early in his career suggests to me that he may have been the driving force
in the discussions in Florence in the 1570s with Count Giovanni Bardi
about the directions a new and more expressive music might take. 46 To
Bardi's elevated questions about aesthetics and Girolamo Mei's learned
speculations about ancient history, Galilei gave a performer's practical

accompanying a melody with simple triads, which Galilei equates with Plato's concept of
proschorda, or unison.
45 Brown, "The Geography of Florentine Monody," and, in a shorter ltalian version in Firenze
e la Toscana dei Medici nell'Europa dei '500, 1I: Musica e spettacolo, Scienze dell'uomo edella
natura (Florence, 1983), pp. 469-86.
46 Palisca, Humanism in Italian Renaissance Musical Thought, pp. 392-93, seems to suggest
that Galilei followed Bardi's lead in championing musical recitation of poetry.
174 HOWARD MAYER BROWN

answers, as indeed he did to Zarlino's theories of intonation.47 Even though

he knew it could not be defended satisfactorily from a theoretical point of
view, Galilei opted in his polemic with Zarlino for the equal temperament
that he knew lutenists came elose to using, and which both men labeled with
the appropriately elassical descriptive terms: Aristoxenian. It may be that he
took a similarly pragmatic view of the solution to the question of how to
make modem music as expressive as the ancient Greek by advocating that
composers base their work on that simple kind of declamatory music that
had for such a long time captivated ltalian audiences. It is in this context that
we can understand Caccini's claims ab out his own achievement: he con-
trolled the sorts of passaggi an Alessandro Romano used to dumbfound his
listeners and that Bardi rejected as a massacre of unfortunate poetry.48
Caccini, instead, controlled the amount and kind of elaborate omamentation
he added to his simple musical framework, and he took care to use it in the
service of good rhetoric and expressiveness. Galilei's early advocacy of
simple musical frameworks for the enhancement of great poetry comes elose
to revealing the Florentine Camerata as a group of intellectuals devoted in
part to a defense and justification of the "pop" music of their time.
My brief and preliminary summary of the contents of Galilei's lute
book of 1563 rerninds us ofthe fact that Galilei's own personal achievement
was as a lutenist: a soloist, a singer of lute songs, a teacher, and the writer
of what is arguably the most important Italian book on lute playing in the
entire sixteenth century. Fronimo deserves more scholarly attention than it
has received, if only to put to rest the persistent notion that sixteenth-century
lutenists knew nothing about traditional views on music theory, a difficult
argument to make in any case about a lutenist who was also the author of a
counterpoint book as weIl as a famous theorist. From the anthology of
examples ineluded in Fronimo, moreover, we can evaluate Vincenzo both as
composer and arranger, and get some idea of the taste of Florentine music
lovers in the 1570s and 1580s, of great help in assessing the cultural context
in which later Florentine musical radicalism flourished. But considering the
nature of his first volume of 1563 helps us to see the extent to which early

47 The best summaries of Galilei's debate with Zarlino may be found in Palisca, Humanism in
ltalian Renaissance Musical Thought, pp. 265-79, and Palisca, The Florentine Camerata, pp.
152-63. On the quarrel, see also D. P. Walker, "Some Aspects of the Musical Theory of
Vincenzo Galilei and Galileo Galilei," Proceedings 0/ the Royal Musical Association 100
(1973-1974), pp. 33-47. On Galilei's defense of equal temperament, see Palisca, Humanism,
Fr. 277-78, and Palisca, Camerata, pp. 198-207.
On Caccini's view of himself and his achievement, see Brown, "The Geography of
Florentine Monody," and the studies cited there, p. 164, by Hitchcock, Newcomb, Palisca,
Pirrotta, and others.
 VINCENZO GAULEI' S FIRST BOOK OF LUTE MUSIC 175

Baroque musie grew out of and remained a performer's art, a vehicle for
effective presentation. Not least of all, we can appreciate from this collection
of intabulations the interplay between the freely expressive and the formu-
laie that is such an important element in the his tory of the madrigal in the
second half of the sixteenth century.
The lute book of 1563, in sum, demonstrates that Vincenzo Galilei was
a practieal man, or rather, a man of practice rather than a mere theorist. It is
not a litde ironie that he is known today primarily for his theories. His
earliest work has helped us to see, though, that his theories are empirical
and based in practiee. Is it too far fetched to suggest that this practieal turn
of mind is important to consider in assessing, too, the achievement of his
more famous son? One of Galileo Galilei's greatest achievements was to
have gone beyond Aristotelianism to verify facts and confirm theories by
empirieal experiment. 49 That, of course, is precisely what his father
Vincenzo did in trying to revive the affective power of ancient Greek music
by adapting it to a genre of musie of proven popularity, quite aside from the
even more obvious parallel that his observations about the tuning systems
actually in use in the sixteenth century were based on practical knowledge
and experiment. It may be, then, that Galileo learned his path-breaking em-
pirical methods at his father's knee. Both father and son challenged basic
and accepted assumptions about the world around them, Vincenzo most
radically in his attempts to fuse high culture and popular song and by chal-
lenging the preeminence of tradition al counterpoint.

1HE UNIVERSITY OF OnCAGO

49 For an easily accessible summary of Galileo Galilei's achievements, see Eric Cochrane,
Florence in the Forgotten Centuries, 1527-1800 (Chicago and London, 1973), pp. 165-228.
For a thumbnail sketch of Galileo, in a musicological context, see Gary Tomiinson,
Monteverdi and the End althe Renaissance (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1987), pp. 11-17.
176 HOWARD MAYER BROWN

Example 1
"Ahi bella liberm"
A1essandro Romano

.
. n .J .J
V 1 r 1 1 1

..,
Ahi "'I -1<1
"'r ta, co me tu m'a i, Par lt>n du - li d" n'!e,
......,
.,.,
Abi "'I - la
"'r ta, co me tu m'a >, Par h,:n du - Li rC, (1)l:,

.,.,
Abi "'I - la ber - Li, co - rne tu m'a - i, Par - tell - da - li d:t me,

~
Abi "'I - la ber-l!.co-me tu m'a Par - [t,m du - Li (1:1

.., . ,,: " , f. U r #

4> •

JJ=;
I........J LJ

..,
sir.'! to qUit 1<, par - ten do- li da fllL', mu - stfil - tu 'lila

1""'1
\
slfa to 'lW:l le, par
-
- len do ti da Oll:, mo - sLI:t - Lu 'lila

V sLra to qua
'---'
le, par . ten do- ti da fllI:, mo - stra -
I........<
[0 qua

o......J
me, par - ten do- li da nie, mo - slra . (0 qua
 VINCENZO GAULEI'S FIRST BOOK OF LUTE MUSIC 177

-J .. . : - .
. . . . ~: • ~ fL~{IL # # fL •. n-
V .....- V

-.:r
E fa'l mi
. --.
e

.
le, 0 SI. 10, fa'l nuo

1'""--000

V
le, E fa'l nu SI. 10, e fa'l nuo

V
le, E fa'l nu 0 sta 10 ra'l ß1W

le, r:)'[ nl1v

12

,) . .. '7_7 '* '"

~n JI rI I I rI IlJ J I i J
-....

",
--.t #'
sta quan doil po rno

.
sla 10 quan doi! po

"""-

V
st%! 10 quan - da il po

-....
sla 10 quan doi! pri
178 HOWARD MAYER BROWN

,
. Jl n n

,]

-
sir. Je Fe C< b P'" }!::lon

V ...... ~ "-=.

-
stra le Fe- ce I. pli:! - pOil - d'j gu.:r

-
V ~
,oe
stra Je Fe I, pt;, ga, k

r"1
.....
slI::l Je Fe -:--1a pt:1 ~;,. k

16•

.J ., ~ ..
-
--c::::::J JI r

-.:r ~ --" <I-

., , a ,0
d'io non guer r6 mai t

V ......
.
r6 gucr Ill:U'

-V- -=ga
pia d'io non guer m:1i T

d'io non
 VINCENZO GAULE!' S FIRST BOOK OF LUTE MUSIC 179

Example 2
"Pur mi consola"
Alessandro Romano

• • u •
i r
J J J.. lLL--"

. -.
,....., .... ...
"
I"- ~ ~

j,....-'

,....., ......
. .
~

"

-
"
V

.....
V
180 HOWARDMAYER BROWN

10.

., - -
-.--.r
1:JU -.r --" -.r '1f 0- -,- ~ ~l1_;tt

... ~ ... ~ .hfJ "JJ IJ )JJ I'l ,., ri Fffi I

.....

--
[)
. -
.
~

--,
J _''''

\f

A
~ - ....
---
\f
 VINCENZO GAULEI'S FIRST BOOK OF LUTE MUSIC 181

Example 3
"AIcun non pub saper"
Vincenzo Galilei

,....., "
I I r U [j *
r1

,.....,

AI P"" !: . per
182 HOWARD MAYER BROWN

IO

U
.J I
D
,. ? • , fL J: JjJ . . fr

l..-J
--- .......

.J
,-'C, fe ce in la
'"

."
l'l:', fc ce in 1<1 1;\ Sk'

." ....
., '"
in I,

# #fl-

14,,-
ce, fe ce in --- ...... I,
'"
.
_r'""I.

.J
r 'UU 'r r r I I
r I r
.' n . Li
__ ..J..
J'lo a J J

.J
sie
de, in I. mo-la de,
'" I, rIlU- lil <I.....

."
de, b ruo- L<I SIe de, fa 1:1 ck',

."
d..::, I, ruu-lil, Sk' de, fa
'"

de, la ruo
'" la
" (l<:,
 VINCENZO GAULE!' S FIRST BOOK OF LUTE MUSIC 183

.
20.

r' L..J r I

- -

" "
J.J J I I I J n rI I .n . I

r' U l,....J
184 HOWARD MAYER BROWN

30

I I,....J

- -
 RUDOLF A. RASCH

SIX SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY DUTCH SCIENTISTS

AND THEIR KNOWLEDGE OF MUSIC

SCIENTISTS THROUGHOUT HISTORY HAVB occupied themselves with mu-

sic, but never has their interest in music been stronger than during the age of
Galileo. This essay will focus on six seventeenth-century Dutch scientists
who contributed to musical science, and try to shed light on their musical
competence as weH as their knowledge of music theory. The six are Simon
Stevin, Isaac Beeckman, Joan Albert Ban, Rene Descartes, Dirck
Rembrantszoon van Nierop, and Christiaan Huygens. In their diversity they
may constitute a representative set of musical scientists in the age of Galileo
in general. And diverse they are! Stevin was an army engineer; Beeckman, a
schoolmaster; Ban trained as a Catholic priest; Descartes was a philosopher;
van Nierop worked as a shoemaker; and Huygens was a physicist. All six
were active in the Republic of the Seven Allied Provinces from about the
last quarter of the sixteenth century until the end of the seventeenth century.
Descartes merits inc1usion in this group because of his prolonged stay in the
Netherlands-in effect, nearly all of his professional career-and because
of his mastery, to a certain extent, of the Dutch language.
In the following discussion the musical activities of these six scientists
will be investigated individually, taking the following into account: a) their
music education; b) their studies of books on music during their profes-
sional career; c) their studies of musical repertoire; d) their musical acquain-
tances; and e) their musical compositions. A biographical profile for each
scientist will also be provided, and mention made of the output for which
they received farne as "musical scholars." Finally, I shall comment upon
how much understanding of what it meant to compose or to perform music
is apparent from their work. Thus, this study will concentrate on the practi-
cal knowledge of these scientists and bypass their specific acheivements in
the field of musical science.

***

185
V. Coelho (ed.), Music and Science in the Age ofGalileo, 185-210.
© 1992 Khrwer Academic Publishers.
186 RUDOLF A. RASCH

I. Simon Stevin

Simon Stevin (1548-1620) was born in Bruges; we do not know much

about him before he settled in the northern Netherlands around 1580. 1 From
about 1590 onwards he served as an engineer in the Dutch State Army
commanded by Prince Maurice, an employment that lasted until his death.
He wrote numerous texts-after 1585 always in Dutch-about mathematics
and many branches of physics and astronomy, but also on politics, book-
keeping, rhetoric and many other topics. He wrote one musical text, De
spiegheling der singconst (The theory of music), which exists in two
manuscript drafts: an early, rough draft from the 1580s, and a second draft
that was written to be included in the magnum opus Wisconstige Gedacht-
enissen (Mathematical memoirs; 1605-1608) but was left out because it was
not yet ready by the printer's deadline. 2 In addition, a number of notes on
music as weH as actual music have been preserved in the manuscript KA
LXVII ofthe Royal Library in The Hague.3
About his youth we do not know very much at all. Since there is
among his papers a four-part setting of a Latin, clearly Catholic hymn text,
one could suspect-but as yet without any trace of proof-that he once was
a choirboy in a Catholic church in the southern Netherlands, perhaps in his
native town of Bruges.
It is obvious that Zarlino' s work was his main reference manual in
matters of music theory. Zarlino's name (Dutchified as Sarlijn) is mentioned
several times in both versions of his Singhconst, especiaHy in connection
with the modes. Probably most references concern the Istitutioni, and
specifically one of the later editions, in which the series of modes starts with
the C mode. 4 Zarlino was also the main source for Stevin's knowledge of
ancient (Greek) music and of the music of the sixteenth century.5 Finally,

1 For a comprehensive account of Stevin's life and works, see E. J. Dijksterhuis, Simon Stevin
(The Hague, 1943) and the abbreviated translation into English, Simon Stevin: Science in the
Netherlands around 1600 (The Hague, 1970).
2 The first edition of both versions is in D. Bierens de Haan, Simon Stevin: Vande Spiegeling
der Singkonst et Vande Molens (Amsterdam, 1884). An edition of the early version in English
translation by A. D. Fokker is in S. Stevin, The Principal Works, Volume V: Engineering,
Music, Civic life (Amsterdam, 1966), pp. 413-464. A facsimile edition of the later version
with transcription, translation, and comprehensive introduction by R. A. Rasch is in prepara-
tion.
3 These materials will be described in detail in the introduction 10 the new edition of Stevin's
Singconst mentioned in the preceding note.
4 See Stevin, 1884, pp. 45, 80; also The Hague, Royal Library, Ms. K.A. XLVII, fols.
638v/643 and 639v/642.
5 Stevin, 1884, pp. 42-43.
 SIX SEVENTEENTH-CENruRY DUTCH SCIENTISTS 187

Zarlino came to help Stevin, when the latter composed his double counter-
points and canons (see below). Another text mentioned by Stevin is
Andreas Papius' De consonantiis seu pro diatessaron (Antwerp 1581), im-
portant for Stevin for its discussion of the consonance of the fourth. 6 No
references to authors other than Zarlino and Papius can be found in Stevin's
extant work.
It seems that Stevin used as one of his primary musical sources a col-
lection known as the Septiesme livre de chansons vulgaires cl quatre parties,
a popular anthology of four-part French chansons by French and Franco-
Flemish composers, published for the first time in Louvain in 1560 and
reprinted many times during the next century, both in the southern and the
northern Netherlands. Two pages of his manuscript notes point to the
Septiesme livre. The first is a page on which are written, without further
comments, the first four notes of the four parts of Didier Lupi's setting of
Gueroult's famous text Susanne un jour (anonymous in the Septiesme
livre).? The other page contains some highly enigmatic scribbles, which at
first glance look like lute tablature. 8 But closer scrutiny reveals that it is a
listing of clef combinations that occur in the Septiesme livre. Obviously
Stevin worked the following way: he wrote down the cleffing of the first
piece. Then he browsed through the volume until another combination
showed up. That was written down as weIl, with the first syIlable of the text
to identify the piece, and so on. In aIl, he wrote down the first six cleffing
combinations found in the volume.9
In the later version of the Singhconst, a Dutch song is quoted:
"Fransken Floris wie hevet u gedaen," of which the melody is known from
a lute setting, but not the full text. 10 A last reference to musical repertoire is
the mention of Orlando [di Lasso] as an exemplary composer, which was
not an uncommon sentiment at the beginning of the seventeenth century.l1
David Jansz [Padbrue] is a musician referred to a couple of times
("Meester David") in Stevin's Spiegheling der Singconst. 12 Born in
Haarlem around 1550, he served as a choirboy in Haarlem and Madrid

6 Stevin, 1884, p. 41.

7 Ms. K.A. XLVII, fol. 632.
8 Ms. K.A. XL VII, fol. 649v.
9 In addition, one of the music examples in the later version of the Singconst may be borrowed
from the Septiesme livre, because its notes are the incipit of the tenor of Arcadelt's Vitam quae
faciunt, which occurs in the Septiesme livre.
10 Stevin, 1884, p. 18. The lute setting appears in the famous "Thysius Lute Book," Leiden,
Riksuniversiteitsbibliothek, Ms. Thysius 1666, fol. 342.
11 Stevin, 1884, p. 64, footnote.
12 See Frits Noske, "David Janszoon Padbrue-Corael, luytslager, vlascoper," in Renaissance-
muziek 1400-1600: Donum natalicum R. B. Lenaerts (Leuven, 1969), pp. 179-186.
188 RUDOLF A. RASCH

before enrolling as a student in Leiden in 1580, where he probably got to

know Stevin. Padbrue settled in Amsterdam and made his living as a musi-
cian and as a flax merchant. Of his compositions there remains a polyphonie
setting of the complete Dutch/Genevan psalter, which was printed in
Amsterdam in 1601 under the tide Davids Psalm-gecklanck, as weIl as a
number oflute pieces, which exist in manuscript. He died in 1635.
Another musician with whom Stevin had contacts was Abraham
Verheiden, organist in Nijmegen from 1595 until his death in 1619. The
contacts probably date from the 161Os. Verheiden read Stevin's Singconst
but disagreed with Stevin's preference for equal semitones. He wrote a let-
ter to Stevin, in which he attacked Stevin and presented adescription of the
true tuning according to his observation: meantone tuning. Verheiden pro-
vided the first mathematically correct description and monochord of that
tuning.
Among the Stevin papers in the Royal Library in The Hague there are a
number of music sheets containing notated music.1 3 No composer's name
is given, but the music written on them must have been composed by Stevin
himself. They are in his handwriting, and the corrections, emendations, and
remarks around them make it dear that they are original works and not
copied from other sourees. This ceuvre consists of eleven brief, sketchy
compositions and an unfinished fragment. First, there is aseries of counter-
point and canon exercises, numbered A through H. Five of them (A, B, D,
E, F) are two-part exercises in double counterpoint. Three of them (C, G,
H) and the unfinished sketch are canons with a cantus firmus and two
canonic voices. 1t appears that Stevin followed models of double counter-
points and canons given by Zarlino in his Istitutioni. Another composition
of Stevin has the curious title: "Mixolydius tonus, hodie non usitatus, apud
veteres primus ab hypate hypaton ad paramesum." This is a composition in
the Mixolydian mode, but in the Greek sense (at least, as understood by
Stevin); that is, a natural mode with B as final. The two-part composition is
in the same style as Zarlino's two-part illustrations of the twelve modes and
it must thus be seen as an addition by Stevin to Zarlino's examples. Finally,
there is a four-part homophonie setting of a Latin hymn, Pacem tuam
reposemus. The setting is repeated with a second stanza of the text. It
seems-because of the Latin commentary-that these attempts at composi-
tion by Stevin must date from before 1585. The Latin hymn even points to
an origin when he was still in the southern Netherlands.

13 See R. A. Rasch, "The Composer Simon Stevin," in Liber amicorum Chris Maas, ed. R.
Wegman & E. Vetter (Amsterdam, 1987), pp. 83-106.
 SIX SEVENTEENTH-CEN'ruRY DUTCH SCIENTISTS 189

11. Isaac Beeckman

Isaac Beeckman (1588-1637), born in Middelburg (Sealand), studied theol-

ogy in Leiden. 14 In 1619 he became vice-principal of the Latin school in
Utrecht, in 1620 he was vice-principal in Rotterdam, and from 1627 until
his death he was principal of the Latin school in Dordrecht. Beeckman was
interested in all fields of science and medicine, but he did not publish a
single word during his lifetime. Instead he kept a scientific diary, which
runs from 1604 to 1634, and which includes a number of remarks about
music. 15
Beeckman's comments in his Journael about his own musical compe-
tence are remarkably frank. In October 1631, at the age of 44, he wrote:
"My singing voice is so bad that my master [probably the Sweelinck pupil
Evert Verhaer, with whom Beeckman took singing lessons in Utrechtl said
he had never heard one worse. But I have learned enough so that I can sing
a part [in a polyphonie piecel, but not very weIl. Neither can I hear disso-
nances very well."16 But his musical proficiency cannot have been so bad,
since he was able to write down songs from memory in correct musical
notation.
The Journael reveals that the Dordrecht schoolmaster was well-read in
music theory. Zarlino's work, and this time in the tripie edition of the
Istitutioni, the Dimostrazioni, and the Sopplimenti of 1589, was again a
major source for himP But Beeckman also studied classical works such as
Faber Stapulensis' Musica libris quatuor demonstrata (Paris, 1552)18 and
Glareanus' Dodekachordon (Basel, 1547).1 9 Papius' De consonantiis
(Antwerpen, 1581) was on his desk,20 as wen as more recent works such
as Thomas Morley's Plaine and easie introduction (London, 1608),21 Pierre

14 See the "vie de l'auteur" in Comelis de Waard, Journal tenu par Isaac Beeckman de 1604 a
1634. Tome premier: 1604-1619 (The Hague, 1939).
15 The manuscript was destroyed during the bombing of Middelburg on 17 May 1940.
Fortunately, a modem edition was prepared by de Waard just prior to its destruction (see preced-
ing note.) The remainder of the volumes in the de Waard edition are as folIows: Tome deuxieme:
1619-1627 (The Hague, 1942); Tome troisieme: 1627-1634 (1635) (The Hague, 1953); Tome
quatrieme: Supplement (The Hague, 1953). All further references to the Journal are to these vol-
umes.
16 Beeckman, Journal, 1627-1634, p. 221: "Myn stemme om te synghen is so quaet dat myn
meester seyde noyt geen slechter gesien te hebben; evenwel hebbe ick soveel geleert, dat ick
mede partye singhen kan, maer niet seer wel; kan oock hel discorderen niet wel hooren."
17 Beeckman, Journal, 1604-1619, p. 323 (1619).
18 Beeckman, Journal, 1604-1619, p. 84 (1615-16).
19 Beeckman, Journal, 1604-1619, p. 88 (1616).
20 Beeckman, Journal, 1604-1619, p. 56 (1614-15).
21 Beeckman, Journal, 1627-1634, pp. 84-85 (1628).
190 RUOOLF A. RASCH

Maillart's Les tons, ou discours sur les modes de musique (Tournai,

1610),22 Salomon de Caus' Institution harmonique (Frankfurt, 1615),23
Jacob Vredeman's Isagoge musice (Leeuwarden, 1618),24 and Johannes
Kepler's Harmonices mundi lihri V (Linz, 1619).25 Beeckman is unique
among our set of scientists in that he consulted Stevin's manuscript
Spiegheling der Singconst in 1624,26 after having earlier studied Stevin's
remarks on equal sernitones in the printed Eertclootschrijt of 1608.27
The music with which Beeckman most extensively occupied himself
was the repertory of Genevan psalms, which-in the translation by Petrus
Dathenus of the French texts by Marot and de Beze-were sung in every
service of the Dutch reformed church by the entire congregation under the
direction and guidance of a precentor. Notes about the psalms abo und in
Beeckman's Journael between 1614 until 1634.28 Beeckman's work with
the psalms inc1ude attempts to solmise them (always with the old hexachord
system), to interpret their intonation in terms of just intonation, and to fit
them into the modal systems described by Glareanus, Zarlino, and others.
In addition, he checked whether or not the congregation sung them as
notated in the printed psalm books; interesting are his remarks that raised
leading tones were often sung but not notated. He also investigated a num-
ber of songs from a book called the "Bruges song book," which is nothing
else than the Catholic songbook Prieel der Gheestelycke Melodie, of which
the first two editions appeared in Bruges (1609, 1614).29
Beeckman's Journael contains four songs written down from memory:
"Als men hier in dese werelt siet," "Gelyck als de witte swaene sterft,"
"Myne herpe bec1eet met rouwe,"30 and "Het vlas dat heeft veel moyten
aen."31 These are not without interest, since in one case ("Het vlas") the
melody is not known from any other source, printed or manuscript, and in
two other cases ("Gelijck als" and "Myne herpe") Beeckman antedated all
notated sources that are known so far. Moreover, the notations are fairly
precise and thus indicate that Beeckman's musical competence was not as

22 Beeckman, Journal, 1604-1619, p. 184-87 (1618).

23 Beeckman, Journal, 1627-1634, pp. 287-88 (1633).
24 Beeckman, Journal, 1627-1634, p. 37 (1628).
25 Beeckman, Journal, 1627-1634, pp. 66-69 (1628).
26 Beeckman, Journal, 1619-1627, pp. 292,403-05 (1624).
27 Beeckman, Journal, 1604-1619, p. 29 (1613-14).
28 See the first three volumes of Beeckman's Journaei, and the letters from Beeckman to
Mersenne of March, 1629 and lune, 1629, in C. de Waard, Correspondance du P. Marin
Mersenne 1/. 1628-1630 (Paris, 1936).
29 Beeckman, Journal, 1604-1619, pp. 227-32 (1618), p. 274 (1619).
30 Beeckman, Journal, 1604-1619, p. 50 (1614-15).
31 Beeckman, Journal, 1604-1619, p. 190 (1618).
 SIX SEVENTEENTH-CEN'ruRYDurCH SCIENTISTS 191

bad as is sometimes supposed.

References to polyphonie musie are scarce in the Journal. There is a
mention of Andreas Spethe's four-part settings of the Genevan Psalter with
the German texts by Ambrosius Lobwasser, Psalmorum Davidis paraphra-
sis (Heidelberg, 1596).32 Since he mentions Claude le Jeune in connection
to the twelve modes, he may have been thinking of a volume such as the
Dodecachorde (La Rochelle, 1598), which contains twelve psalms in the
twelve modes. 33
Beeckman spoke with musicians several times in order to obtain infor-
mation about musieal matters. His social stratum was that of schoolmasters,
reformed ministers, and other people related to church and school, so it is
not surprising that we should find mention of talks with organists and caril-
loneurs several times. While in U trecht in 1619-1620, he became on good
terms with Evert Verhaer, writing master at the school where Beeckman
taught, as weIl as precentor in the Church. 34 Since Verhaer had been a pupil
of Sweelinck and obviously taught singing and keyboard to Beeckman,
Beeckman can-with some fantasy-be called an Enkelschüler of
Sweelinck.
From Beeckman's time in Rotterdam (1620-1627) no contacts with
musicians are known. We do know that in Dordrecht he was acquainted
with Jan Dircksz Tegelbergh, a harpsichord maker and bell programmer,35
and in 1633 he had a discussion with the blind Utrecht carilloneur Jacob van
Eyck about the sounds of bells. 36 Van Eyck was one of the first who
observed correct1y that the sound of a bell contained a partial at the minor
(and not the major) third of the strike tone, a fact that was hard to accept for
seventeenth-century musicians and scientists who had just discovered the
harmonie series.
Beeckman's single attempt at composition, in 1625, has gone unno-
ticed entirely until today, even though it can be found in his published
Journael. 37 On folio 247 recto can be found a ten-line staff with three clefs
(F-, C-, and G-clef) with two ten-note phrases in a four-part homophonie
setting. It is obviously a first attempt at something larger. Then follows the

32 Beeckman, Journal, 1619-1627, pp. 23-24 (1620).

33 Beeckman, Journal, 1627-1634, pp. 288 (1633). Another interesting reference is to a vol-
urne entitled Orphei Lusthof, which appeared in Haarlern in 1625, and which is lost today. It is
only through Beeckman that we learn it contained instrumental ensemble music, by "I. Z. G."
and "F. B." including a Branle Loreyne; see Beeckman, Journal, 1627-1634, pp. 83-84 (1628).
34 Beeckman, Journal, 1619-1627, pp. 4-5 (1619) and pp. 16-19 (1620).
35 Beeckman, Journal, Supplement, pp. 128-29 (1628).
36 Beeckman, Journal, 1627-1634, pp. 310-11 (1633).
37 Beeckman, Journal, 1627-1634, p. 332 (1625).
192 RUOOLF A. RAsCH

first line of Psalm 24, De aerd'is onses godts voorwaer, in a four-part set-
ting, notated on four staves with bass, alto, alto, and treble clefs. The psalm
melody is in the tenor voice. As Beeckman correctly remarks: "Boni com-
ponistae procul dubio elegantius dabunt et ipse forte post elegantius datu-
rus." [Good composers will do this more elegantly without doubt, and
perhaps I can do it more elegantly myself after that.] Beeckman wisely
stopped at this point

IH. Joan Albert Ban

Born in Haarlern, Joan Albert Ban (ca. 1596-1644) was a Catholic priest
who studied in Cologne from 1615 and in Louvain from 1619 onward.3 8
His dealings with music were extensive and one could argue whether or not
he rightly figures among the scientists included in this study. But, like other
scientists of his time, Ban was not a professional musician. Moreover, his
writings demonstrate that his approach to music is a scientific one-a search
for musieal laws as there were laws in physies, astronomy or arithmetic.
Ban was the author of a number of texts on music, most of them in Latin,
but some also in Dutch. All but one of the Latin texts-the Dissertatio epis-
tolica de musicae natura, origine, progressu, et denique studio bene
instituendo (Leiden, 1637)-remained in manuscript, of which only the
Tractatus brevis, written when Ban was not yet twenty years old. is
extant.39 Two Dutch texts were published: the introduction to his Zangh-
bloemzel (a collection of polyphonie songs with Dutch texts [Amsterdam,
1642]), and his treatise Kort Sangh-bericht (Amsterdam, 1643), a short
version of a proposed Ion ger one.40 There exists in addition a large corre-
spondence of his about music, with men such as Constantijn Huygens (the
father of Christiaan Huygens), Marin Mersenne, and Giovanni Battista Doni
in Florence.41 These letters are valuable for their extensive commentaries
about music and music theory, often including fragments of music as well
as descrlptions of or references to at least five treatises in progress: Musica
universa (mentioned in 1636, at least twenty chapters),42 Disquisitionum

38 On Ban, see R. A. Rasch, "Ban's intonation," Tijdschrift van de Vereniging voor

Nederlandse Muziekgeschiedenis 33 (1983), pp. 75-99; J. W. W. Valkestijn, "Een onbekend
handschrift van Joan Albert Ban," in Liber amicorum Chris Maas, pp. 131-54. See also the
references contained in the first footnotes of these articles.
39 See Valkestijn, "Een onbekend handschrift."
40 A facsimile edition of the preface to the Zangh-bloemzel and the comp1ete Sangh-bericht has
been edited by Frits Noske (Amsterdam, 1969).
41 See W. J. A. Jonckb10et & J. P. N. Land, Musique et musiciens au XVl/e siede. Correspon-
dance et reuvres musicales de Constantin Huygens (Leiden, 1882).
42 Letter from Ban to Constantijn Huygens of 11 August 1636.
 SIX SEVENTEENTH-CENTuRYDurCH SOENTISTS 193

musica rum libri V (mentioned in 1639-1640),43 Compendium musicae

(mentioned in 1640),44 Institutionum musicarum libri IV (mentioned in
1640, 1642 and 1644),45 and Sangh-bericht (1642, long version, 31 chap-
ters in Dutch).46
In the preface to the Zangh-bericht, Ban expressly called hirnself a mu-
sical autodidact, whose interest in pursuing the natural laws of music was
prompted when he attempted to leam about music all on his own. During
his student years in Cologne he made a Latin manuscript translation of
Girolamo Diruta's II transilvano (Venice, 1593) entitled Dialogus de vero et
genuino modo ludendi in organis.47 In addition, he wrote an original trea-
tise as a kind of summary of what he had leamed about music so far,
entitled Tractatus brevis totae musicae speculatio (1616).48 It is possible that
during his student years he became acquainted with Richard Deering, who
may have given hirn some music lessons. Deering was in nearby Brussels
during the 1620s while Ban was studying in Louvain, and in the preface to
his Zangh-bloemzel Ban referred to Deering as his old friend. Other than
this, information on Ban's contacts with other musicians is surprisingly
scarce, and no contacts with any Dutch musicians are documented for Ban's
Haarlern period (ca. 1623-1644).49 According to documents, Ban's musical
contacts in Haarlern were limited to two French musicians in the service of
Queen Henrietta Maria of England (a French princess): a man called
Varenne, who was sent by Huygens and came to see Ban on 5 January
1640,50 and Antoine Robert, sent by the Amsterdam engraver Michelle
Blon and who visited Ban in the beginning of September, 1642.51
Whereas Ban's contacts with musicians are difficult to trace, the written
sources of Ban's musical knowledge are weH documented in his Kort
Sangh-bericht of 1643. Zarlino provided the fundamental source, of wh ich

43 Letters frorn Ban to Doni of 1 January and 1 March 1639; letter frorn Ban to Mersenne of 17
April 1639; letter frorn Ban to Anna Maria van Schurman of 20 August 1640.
44 Letter frorn Ban to Huygens of 19 May 1640.
45 Letter frorn Ban to Anna Maria van Schurman of 20 August 1640 ("Institutiones rnusicae
flexanirnae"); letters frorn Ban to Huygens of 28 January and 2 April 1642, and 5 February
1644.
46 Letters frorn Ban to Huygens of 28 January, 27 May, and 21 July 1642.
47 See Valkestijn, "Een onbekend handschrift."
48 See Valkestijn, "Een onbekend handschrift."
49 One would have expected sorne contact between Ban and Comelis Thyrnansz Padbrue, a
nephew of David Jansz, rnentioned above. Padbrue was of about Ban's age, a Catholic, and was
active as a composer of rnadrigalesque vocal rnusic in the 1640s, but there is no hint that the
two even knew of each other.
50 Letter frorn Constantijn Huygens to Ban of 5 January 1640 and frorn Ban to Huygens of 13
January 1640.
51 Letter frorn Ban to Constantijn Huygens of 16 September 1642.
194 RUOOLF A. RAsCH

the tripie edition of 1588-1589 is mentioned by Ban. Franciscus Salinas's

De musica libri septem (Salamanca, 1577) is also mentioned. Mersenne is
not cited by Ban in any of his printed works, probably because of the un-
happy ending of his musical competition with Antoine Boesset. But from
his letter to Mersenne of 20 September 1638 (two years before the competi-
tion) it is clear that Ban owned copies of both the Harmonie universelle
(Paris, 1636) and the Latin Harmonicorum libri XII (Paris, 1636), as wen
as the Quaestiones in Genesim (Paris,1624). In the same letter still other
books on music in his possession are mentioned, such as Vincenzo Galilei' s
Dialogo de[lla] musica [antica e moderna] (Rome, 1581), and editions ofthe
musical treatises by Boethius,52 Aristoxenus,53 and Ptolemy.54 In a letter
of 12 April 1639 to Mersenne he asked if he could borrow copies of
Aristides Quintilianus's work on music and Porphyrius's commentary on
Ptolemy. From a letter to Giovan Battista Doni of 1 March 1639 it is clear
that Ban possessed Doni's Compendio del trattato de' generi e de' modi
della musica (Rome, 1635). In 1641 Ban borrowed from Constantijn
Huygens a copy of Antoine Parran's Traire de la musique thiorique et ora-
tique (Paris, 1639), a book that was highly valued by Huygens because of
its practical nature, but less by Ban probably for the same reason. 55 In an, it
seems that Ban was current on the musical scholarship of his time, concem-
ing Greek, classical (that is, sixteenth-century) and contemporary
(seventeenth-century) music. Ban also appears to have had asound know-
ledge of the ancient and Medieval treatises on music.
Information on Ban's musical tastes can be gleaned primarily from his
Tractatus brevis of 1616, which contains several references to specific
works, such as the motets In te Domine speravi and In principio erat ver-
bum by Orlando di Lasso, the motet Dilectus meus mihi (composer not
mentioned), and the motet Quem vidistis pastores (attributed to "Ludovici,"
but it seems unlikely that this refers to Lodovico Viadana's setting of this
text). In later years Ban's musical taste changed drastically. In his corre-
spondence of the late 1630s and early 1640s, repeated references are made
to early seventeenth-century madrigal composers such as Claudio
Monteverdi, Pomponio Nenna, and Carlo Gesualdo da Venosa. These
composers are mentioned again in the preface to the Zangh-bloemzel of

52 Probably the Opera quae extant omnia (Basel, 1546, 1570).

53 Collected in Johannes Meursius, Aristoxenus, Nicomachus, Alypius (Leiden, 1616).
54 Antonius Gogavinus, Aristoxeni...Harmonicorum elementorum libri 111, Cl. Ptolemaei
Harmonicorum, seu de musica lib. 111 (Venice, 1562). Gogavinus was born in Grave, The
Netherlands.
55 See the letters from Ban to Huygens of 13 and 31 January 1641, and from Huygens to Ban of
20 January.
 SIX SEVENTEENTH-CENruRY DurCH SCIENTISTS 195

1642, where specific mention is made to Monteverdi's eighth book of

madrigals, containing the Madrigali guerrieri et amorosi (Venice, 1638).
Although Ban was an important composer (and certainly the most im-
portant of the six scientists studied here), his compositions are not highly
valued for a variety of reasons. First of all there was the unfortunate com-
petition with Boesset, an event that has tarnished his reputation from the
seventeenth century until this day.56 Secondly, Ban's compositions are
heavily-Iaden with his theoretical views, his musica flexanima or "soul-
moving music," which has as its basis the theory that small intervals
express sweet affects, large intervals strong affects. Thirdly, very Httle
music is extant in such astate that it can be performed. Of his printed
collection Zangh-bloemzel for soprano, alto, and bass voices plus continuo,
only the alto and bass partbooks are preserved. From a single extant frag-
ment of the soprano one full piece from this collection can be reconstructed.
His correspondence contains some musical fragments, a nu mb er of
references to compositions, and one small vocal work in full. A fourth and
last point that helps explain Ban's unpopularity as a composer is that his
Zangh-bloemzel is microtonal, and meant to be performed in just intonation
(for example, with two D naturals and two B-flats, a syntonic comma
apart), but in fact Ban failed to grasp fully the consequences of just intona-
tion within the practice of compositionY Compositions of his that are
mentioned, referred to, or described in his correspondence are as follows:
antiphons,58 Dulce et decorum est (iLVirtus repulsae, iiLVirtus reclu-
dens),59 Blesse d'une playe (a 4), 60 0 Domine (Jesu) Christe (a 3),61 Jesu
dulcedo (a 4),62 Libera Domine (a 7),63 Ego dormio (a 2),64 Hodie apparu-
erunt (a 5), 65 0 crux ave (a 2),66 Die mihi, bone Jesu (a 4),67 and a Dutch

56 See D. P. Walker, "Mersenne's Musical Competition of 1640 and Joan Albert Ban," in
Studies in Musical Science in the Late Renaissance (London & Leiden, 1978), pp. 81-110; the
compositions involved are transcribed in Noske, 1969.
57 See Rasch, "Ban's intonation."
58 Letter from Ban to Mersenne of 15 May 1638.
59 The text is Ode II from Horace's Liber tertius carminorum. See the letter from Ban to
Mersenne of 15 May 1638.
60 Letters from Ban to Mersenne of 15 May 1638 and 12 and 17 April 1639.
61 Letters from Ban to Mersenne of 15 May 1638 and 17 April 1639.
62 Letters from Ban to William BoswelJ of 15 December 1637 and to Mersenne of 15 May 1638
and 17 April 1639.
63 Letters from Ban to Mersenne of 15 May 1638 and 17 April 1639.
64 Letter from Ban to Mersenne of 17 April 1639.
65 Letter from Ban to Mersenne of 17 April 1639.
66 Letter from Ban to Mersenne of 17 April 1639, which also contains the music of this com-
~osition.
7 Letters from Ban to Constantijn Huygens of 7 December 1643 and 5 February 1644.
196 RUDOLF A. RAsCH

song on the birthday of Jacob van Campen. 68

IV. Rene Descartes

Rene Descartes (1596-1650) does not really need an introduction here. Like
Marin Mersenne and Joseph Sauveur, among others, he was educated at the
Jesuit College in La Fleche, but no information about a musical education
there is known. He visited the Netherlands for the fIrst time in 1618 when
he served in the Dutch army commanded by Prince Maurice. While in Breda
he met Isaac Beeckman. This led to his writing of a short text on music, the
Musicae compendium, wh ich remained unpublished until after Descartes'
death in 1650. Written in Latin, the treatise received French, Dutch, and
English translations soon after its first publication. Until that time it was
mainly known in the Netherlands. Apart from Descartes' autograph, at least
four manuscript copies were circulated: one for Beeckman, one for
Constantijn Huygens, another for the Leiden mathematics professor
Franciscus van Schooten, and the one that was used for the publication.
Descartes did not return to musical subjects again in his professional career.
Indeed, it would be an understatement to say that he did not hold his own
musical competence in very high esteem. On 15 April 1630 he wrote to
Mersenne that he could not "distinguish the fifth from the octave," while
"there are those who can distinguish the major from the minor tone." In a
letter of 12 December 1639 to Constantijn Huygens, he called himself
"practically deaf' in musical matters, and in another letter to the same, of 30
November 1646, he described himself as "a man who never learned to sing
ut re mi fa solla, nor to be able to judge whether someone else could sing it
correct1y."
Music obviously played only a minor role in Descartes' professional
career after the completion of the Musicae compendium in 1618, and he
does not appear to have had contacts with professional, performing musi-
cians. It appears that most of the practical musical knowledge in his book
was derived from Zarlino. No music literature is mentioned in his other
works. In 1640 Constantijn Huygens sent Descartes a pre-publication ver-
sion of his booklet on the use of the organ in the Dutch reformed church
(Gebruyck en Ongebruyck) for his comments. 69 Mersenne's Harmonie
universelle (Paris, 1636) and Harmonicorum !ibri (Paris, 1636) are
mentioned in Descartes' correspondence from time to time, but only for

68 Letter from Ban to Constantijn Huygens of 5 February 1644.

69 Letter from Constantijn Huygens to Descartes of 14 August 1640. Descartes' comments on
the book appear in his letter to Huygens of 27 August 1640.
 SIX SEVENTEENTH-CENruRY DUTCH SCIENTISTS 197

infonnation regarding physics.

v. Dirck Rembrantszoon van Nierop

Dirck Rembrantszoon van Nierop (ca. 1610-1682) was born in Nieuwe

Niedorp (=Nierop), a little village north of Alkmaar in north Holland. He
spent his entire life there, earning his money as a shoemaker; Christiaan
Huygens gave hirn the nickname "Nordhollandus rusticus."70 He was an
ardent and zealous amateur scientist who wrote a considerable number of
scientific texts, mostly on the subjects of astronomy, navigation, and
mathematics. All of his works are in Dutch and he is said to have mastered
no other language than his mother tongue. His one musical treatise, the
Wiskonstige Musyka, appeared in Amsterdam in 1659, and a chapter on
music appears in his much later book on mathematics, Tweede deel op de
Wiskonstige Rekening (Amsterdam, 1680).
Van Nierop probably never attended a Latin school but he is reported to
have been a pupil of Descartes during the years 1645-1648.71 Prior to this,
knowledge of his musical training is limited to the existence of a music book
that is known to have been used by van Nierop. The Provincial Library in
Leeuwarden (Frisia, The Netherlands) owns a copy of the Isagoge musicle
(Franeker, 1618), a little book expressly intended for use at school, written
by Leeuwarden town musician Jacob Vredeman. The Leeuwarden copy has
an anonymous manuscript appendix dated 1642-1644, which consists of
text that largely returns in van Nierop's Wiskonstighe Musyka. Obviously,
the Leeuwarden copy was once used by van Nierop, since on several pages
of the printed text we find handwritten remarks in van Nierop's hand. Since
considerable space is devoted to the issue of eittem fretting, one may sup-
pose that van Nierop played that instrument, a plausible conjecture given the
social status of both van Nierop and the cittem. Other than the Isagoge, it is
difficult to know what other books on music he used. His correspondence
offers no further clues; he probably occupied hirnself with music only
occasionally. Descartes' Musicae compendium is not mentioned anywhere,
but he may have read the Dutch translation that appeared in 1660, one year
after his Wiskonstige Musyka. Ban's Kort Sangh-bericht of 1643 was
clearly a source for hirn, whose understanding was faeilitated since it was
written in Dutch. Van Nierop also studied non-musical works such as

70Letter from Huygens to Franciscus van Schooten of 7 October 1654.

71See Ch. Adam & Paul Tannery, ed., (Euvres de Descartes. Correspondance V. Mai 1647-
Fevrier 1650 (rpt./Paris, 1974), pp. 265-67.
198 RUOOLF A. RASCH

Stevin's Eertclootschrift 72 and Adrianus Metius' Meet-constigh Liniael

(Franeker, 1626), which contains a division of the monochordJ3 Van
Nierop's writings on music are devoid of any reference to musical reper-
toire. 1t is dear, however, from his annotations to Vredeman's Isagoge, that
van Nierop, like Beeckman, studied the modal categorization of the
Genevan psalms. On one page of his manuscript additions he listed the
twelve modes along with the numbers of the psalms supposedly in that
mode. Neither compositions nor references to musical acquaintances are
mentioned in any ofvan Nierop's writings.

VI. Christiaan H uygens

Christiaan Huygens (1629-1695) received his early education from his

father, Constantijn Huygens. Private teachers taught hirn languages, sci-
ences and the arts before he went to the University ofLeiden in 1645. After
1650 he developed into one of the most important scientists of his age, with
major accomplishments in physics, mathematics, and astronomyJ4 After
three short visits to Paris in 1655-56, 1660-61, and 1664, he settled there
more or less permanently from 1666 to 1681. He became interested in mu-
sic in 1661, as we know from a little note, dated Antwerp 16 June 1661,
from the famous bell founder Pierre Hemony, probably brought from
Antwerp to The Hague by Constantijn Huygens. The one-page note con-
tains the principles ofmeantone tuning. 75 Among his published works there
is only one brief text on music, the Lettre touchant le cycle harmonique,
published in a journal in 1691,76 but among his manuscript Nachlass sev-
eral more texts as weH as numerous notes, drafts, and sketches that deal
with music and music theory can be found. 77
The musical education of Christiaan Huygens is very weH docu-

72 Wiskonstige Musyka. 1659, pp. 62-68.

73 Wiskonstige Musyka. 1659, pp. 60-61.
74 See the "Biographie de Christiaan Huygens," in Christiaan Huygens. (Euvres completes.
Tome vingt·et-deuxieme: Supplement a la correspondance. Varia. Biographie de Chr. Huygens.
Catalogue de la vente des livres de Chr. Huygens (The Hague, 1950), pp. 385-778.
75 (Euvres completes. Tome vingtieme. pp. 45-46.
76 A modern edition appears in (Euvres completes. Tome dixieme: Correspondance 1691-1695
(The Hague, 1905). pp. 525-533; a facsimile edition with English and Dutch translations ap-
~ars in R. A. Rasch. ed .•Christiaan Huygens: Le cycle harmonique (Utrecht, 1986).
7 Most of these are now in the Codex Hugenianus 27 in the University Library, Leiden, pub-
lished in (Euvres completes. Tome vingtieme: Musique et matMmatique. Musique.
Mathematiques de 1666 a 1695 (The Hague, 1940). For an inventory of the contents of Codex
Hugenianus 27, see Rasch, Christiaan Huygens ...• pp. 76-85.
 SIX SEVENTEENTH-CENTuRYDurCH SCIENfISTS 199

mented. 78 In fact, we know more about Huygens' musical education than

the training of any of his famous musical contemporaries, such as
Frescobaldi, Monteverdi, Lully, Purcell, or even Bach. His musical
education was planned in detail by his father, the famous poet, musician,
and secretary to the Orange stadholders, Constantijn Huygens (1596-1687).
Christiaan received his first music lessons from his father in February,
1637, when he was not yet eight years old. In 1639 Christiaan, together
with his older brother Constantijn, Jr., (1628-1697), started to play the
viola da gamba on a matched set of instruments purchased in England by
Constantijn, Sr., through the musician Nicholas Lanier. Christiaan practiced
so much on the viol that he could play Psalm 117 perfectly after seven days.
First Constantijn, Sr., hirnself did the teaching; later the teaching was con-
tinued by the musician Steven van Eyck. The next year, 1640, Constantijn,
Jr., and Christiaan were taught the lute, under the supervision of Hierony-
mus van Someren, Constantijn, Sr.'s own old lute teacher. In 1643 the
boys put the lute aside and were to be taught the harpsichord, again under
the guidance of Steven van Eyck. The year 1645 marked the end of the
horne education of Christiaan Huygens under the supervision of his father.
No music instruction was included in Christiaan's formal studies at the
University of Leiden (1645-47) and the Collegium Auriacum in Breda
(1647-49).
Codex Hugenianus 27 of the Leiden University Library (fols. 26-45)
consists of a generally coherent sequence of notes, presumably written
down in 1676, that allow us to document Huygens' musical studies in some
detail.19 We fmd extracts from and comments on such books as Mersenne's
Harmonie universelle (Paris, 1636),80 Pierre Maillard's Les Tons (Tournai,
1610),81 Christopher Simpson's A compendium ofpractical musick (Lon-
don, 1667),82 Salinas' De musica (Salamanca, 1577),83 Giovanni Maria
Artusi's L' arte deI contrapunto (Venice, 1586),84 Thomas Salmon's An es-
say to the advancement ofmusick (London, 1672),85 Athanasius Kircher's
Musurgia universalis (Rome, 1650),86 Marcus Meibomius' Antique

78 See Rasch. Christiaan Huygens ...• pp. 13-19; also J. A. Worp. "De jeugd van Christiaan
Huygens. volgens een handschrift van zijn vader." Oud-Halland 31 (1913). pp. 209-235.
79 See Rasch, Christiaan Huygens ... , pp. 30-39.
80 (Euvres completes. Tame vingtieme, pp. 69. 120.
81 (Euvres campletes. Tame vingtieme, pp. 118-19.
82 (Euvres campletes. Tame vingtieme, p. 130.
83 (Euvres campletes. Tame vingtieme, p. 112; see also Rasch. Christiaan Huygens ...• pp. 34-
35. 62.
84 (Euvres campletes. Tame vingtieme. p. 74.
85 (Euvres campletes. Tame vingtieme, p. 136.
86 (Euvres campletes. Tame vingtieme. pp. 123-28.
200 RUOOLF A. RASCH

musicae auctores septem (Amsterdam 1652),87 and Zarlino's Tutte le opere

(1588-1589).8 8 Most of these books were in the property of his father,
Constantijn Huygens. This fact is of importance because it seems that
Christiaan Huygens mainly studied music theory when he could make use
of his father' s library and this was, of course, only possible when he stayed
in the Netherlands; the years 1676-1678 were such aperiod. 89 A number of
notes in the Codex Hugenianus 27 obviously date from around 1690 or
even later. They are from books such as Andreas Werckmeister's
Musicalische Temperatur (Quedlinburg, 1691),90 Joannes vander EIst's
Den ouden ende nieuwen grondt van de musijcke (Gent, 1661),91 and John
Wallis's edition ofPtolemy on music, Claudii Ptolemaei harmonicorum libri
tres (Oxford, 1682).92 Huygens' continued interest in absorbing the most
recent information on music lasted until his death. 93
Christiaan Huygens' knowledge of the musical repertoire of his day
should have been fairly extensive considering his education, his father's
musical activities and music library, and his long contacts with musicians,
especially in Paris. Yet, litde trace of the music to wh ich he was exposed
can be found in his diaries and letters. His tastes seem to have favored "the
elegant, not the profound.''94 Fugues and counterpoint were considered as
too complicated to be pleasing, an opinion that he shared with his father
Constantijn Huygens. French airs and the music of Jean-Baptiste Lully
must certainly have been considered as "elegant," and there are a number of
works by Lully that Huygens certainly knew. During his stay in Paris in
1655, Huygens sent, at the request of his brother Constantijn Jr., French
airs to The Hague. 95 A letter of 29 October of that year contains the air "A la
rigueur de sort" from Lully's Ballet des plaisirs (1655).96 From his Paris
diary it appears that on 27 November 1660, Huygens visited one of the

87 CEuvres completes. Tome vingtieme, pp. 89-100.

88 CEuvres completes. Tome vingtieme, pp. 114-18.
89 See R. A. Rasch, "De muziekbibJiotheek van Constantijn Huygens," in Veelzijdigheid als
levensvorm, ed. A. Th. van Deursen, E. K. Grootes, P. E. L. Verkuyl (Deventer, 1987), pp.
141-62.
90 CEuvres compLetes. Tome vingtieme, pp. 133-35.
91 CEuvres compLetes. Tome vingtieme, pp. 128-29.
92 CEuvres compLetes. Tome vingtieme, pp. 80-81, 100-103.
93 In 1694, Huygens wrote to his brother Constantijn in London to try and obtain a copy of
William Holder's A treatise on the natural grounds and principles of harmony (London, 1694),
but we do not know whether or not he was successful; see Rasch, Christiaan Huygens ... , p. 37.
94 See H. Floris Cohen, Quantifying Music (Dordrecht, 1984), p. 225.
95 See Rasch, Christiaan Huygens ... , p. 22.
96 The text is from Benigne de Bacilly's Recueil des plus beaux vers (Paris, 1661), p. 24. The
first line should read "A la rigeur des ans."
 SIX SEYENTEENTH-CENruRYDurCH SCIENTISTS 201

performances of Cavalli's Xerse, with the ballets by Lully,97 as weIl as a

performance of Lully' s Ballet de l' impatience on 26 February 1661.98 On 3
February 1664, he attended a petit ballet performance of Le mariage force
by Moliere/Lully.99 Finally, in one of the scientific notebooks appears a
notation of the air "Si du triste recit," from the comedie-ballet Le siciIien ou
l' Amour peintre by Moliere/Lully (1667).1 00 In addition, the Paris diary and
correspondence with his family back horne mention several performances of
music he attended in churches, at the court, and elsewhere by the La Barres,
Gobert, and Hotman, among others. 101
Huygens' correspondence and diaries provide a detailed account of his
extensive contacts with musicians, all of them initiated by his father. When
Christiaan Huygens went to Paris for the first time in 1655 (his father had
not yet been there), he already had with hirn a list of musicians he wished to
contact, inc1uding Chambonnieres, Lambert, Hotman, Constantin, Dufaut,
Pinel and Gobert. 102 During his stay of 1655 there were frequent contacts
with Chambonnieres, Lambert, and Gobert, as weIl as with various mem-
bers of the La Barre farnily.l03 But these contacts were different from the
contacts his father had cultivated with, for example, Gobert, Jacques
Gaultier, and Henri Dumont. Constantijn sought musical information from
these French court musicians who were, in his eyes, the most important
musicians in the world. There is no evidence that Christiaan ever discussed
any musical subject with them, though he was on friendly terms with them,
he enjoyed listening to their music making, and went with them to hear
music elsewhere. His own musical competence or interests were not
involved in these contacts, however, and he did not correspond with these
musicians after his return 10 the Netherlands.
Much of the same can be said about Christiaan's contacts with musi-
cians during his Parisian sojoum of 1660-166 Ll 04 He renewed most of the
contacts from the first visit and added Henri Dumont to his circ1e of friends,
but there does not appear to have been any interchange of ideas related to

97 See H. L. Brugmans, Le sejour de Christian Huygens a Paris (Paris, 1935), p. 134; (Euvres
completes. Tome troisieme: Correspondance 1660-1661 (The Hague, 1890), pp. 199-200.
98 Brugmans, Le sejour de Christian Huygens, pp. 155-56; (Euvres completes. Tome troisieme,
ff" 252-54.
(Euvres completes. Tome cinquieme: Correspondance 1664-1665 (The Hague, 1893), pp. 24-
25.
100 Leiden, University Library, Codex Hugenianus 3, fol. 93r; see Rasch, C hristiaan
Huygens ... , pp. 25-26, 41.
101 Brugmans, Le sejour de Christian Huygens, pp. 119-61.
102 Letter from Christiaan to Constantijn Huygens of 24 September 1655.
103 See Rasch, Christiaan Huygens ... , pp. 20-23.
104 See Rasch, Christiaan Huygens ... , pp. 23-25.
202 RUOOLF A. RASCH

related to music. He heard performances by Nicolas Hotman on the viola da

gamba and by Denis Gaultier on the lute, but we do not know whether he
got to know these musicians. One explanation of the absence of musical
discussions between these musicians is that this all occured before
Christiaan began to be actively interested in music, but during his later stays
in Paris, Christiaan' s contacts with musicians remained much as they were:
friendly but without musical involvement.
Christiaan Huygens remained in the Netherlands from 1681 onwards.
During this time he probably became on friendly terms with the organist
Quirinus van Blankenburg (1654-1739), a rather colorful person in Nether-
landish music history.l05 Huygens wrote a letter of recommendation for
Blankenburg,106 and Blankenburg mentions discussions with Huygens
about the 31-tone system in his book Elementa musica (The Hague, 1739
[text in Dutch]).
A single attempt at musical composition by Christiaan Huygens has
come down to uso Among his papers there is a sketch of wh at should prob-
ably be called a Courante. 107 The handwriting is clearly that of Christiaan
Huygens, and the corrections and emendations make clear that it is not a
copy of an existing piece, but an attempt at an original work. It is a well-
formed litde piece that makes one wish that he had composed more (see
Example 1).

***
What can we leam from the ways the six Dutch scientists presented
here dealt with music? For all of them, with the possible exception of
Descartes, there was in their lives a clear musical counterpart to their scien-
tific career. They studied books on music and musical repertoire; they
played instruments or sung; they were acquainted with musicians and for
the most part discussed musical problems with them. Some of them even
made attempts at musical composition.
But their diversity is also striking. The six scientists are all very differ-
ent in their dealings with music, particularly in their intensity of musical
interest, which runs (on a scale of least interested to most interested) from
Descartes, via Nierop, Stevin, Beeckman, and Huygens, to Ban. Their
writings about music are so diverse that it is very hard to compare the
various outputs. Stevin wrote a manuscript treatise defending the division of

105 See Rasch, Christiaan Huygens ... , pp. 28-30.

106 Letter from Christiaan Huygens to Johan Hudde of 14 December 1690.
107 Leiden, University Library, Codex Hugenianus 27, fol. 52r.
 SIX SEVENTEENTH-CENruRY DUTCH SCIENTISTS 203

~# [' ~.;)J !
~
,,
,,

(6!J
(H
r.~~
~
J-L, I

,,
'-/ I I
,
~----~~--l
1'I~ll 112 :
: :
IU
,
, -....
I
:
:
)1 : I 11 : I !~ml
: :
r r ,I

EXAMPLE 1: Transcription of the [Courante] in E minor for keyboard by

Christiaan Huygens (1661?), see n. 107
204 RUOOLF A. RAsCH

the octave into twelve equal semitones. Beeckman did not try to conceive an
independent text on music, but wrote down what came to his mind and
commented upon what he heard and saw. Descartes' single text on music
was obviously inspired by Beeckman. At its core is an attempt to connect
the older philosophical views on music with the more recent views based on
experimental science. Ban was interested, more than anyone else, in com-
posing and performing music, but at the same time in looking for the laws
that governed musical expression. Van Nierop's Wiskonstighe Musyka is
based-according to his preface--on things written down from time to time
about music. His scientific orientation is made clear from his wish to treat
music by starting from the first principles. The four parts of his texts deal
with naIve acoustics, just intonation, the tuning of instruments such as key-
boards and citterns, and early music-that is, music from the ancient
Greeks to Stevin.
Christiaan Huygens is scientifically the most sophisticated of them all.
He began his musical research with putting meantone tuning into a mathe-
matically sound description, first as a tempered tuning, then as a selection
from a 31-tone equal division of the octave. He also designed transposition
devices to play both 19-tone and 31-tone equal divisions on ordinary 12-
tone keyboards. Finally, he theorized about the nature of consonance in
music, and occupied himself with questions in musical acoustics.
In spite of the diversity there is, however, one common denominator to
the work of these six men. It is their belief that music was subject to laws of
the same kind as the movements of the planets and of falling bodies,
namely, naturaliaws. Today, we are not so sure that the rules of music the-
ory that composers follow are universal and infallible. Rather, we tend to
see them as conventional rules, the products of specific musical cultures.
But sixteenth- and seventeenth-century scholars grew up in worlds where
single musical cultures were dominant. Although these cultures varied for
all of those mentioned in this study, they all had a basis in a common deep
structure, a structure most comprehensively and authoritively revealed by
Zarlino. For the seventeenth-century Dutch musical scientist, Zarlino was
the bible of music; they refer to him without exception.
How sound was the musical scientist's musical knowledge? If we mea-
sure their musical knowledge against what is necessary for composing and
performing music, one is forced to say that the ruIes the scientists evoke are
at best incomplete. In most instances the musical rules they discuss concern
simple contrapuntal and harmonic rules, such as consonant and dissonant
intervals, and voice leading. Questions relating to rhythm are touched upon
 SIX SEVENTEENTH-CENruRY DurCH SCIENTISTS 205

only occasionally, and discussions of matters such as musical form and text
setting are totally absent. The more complicated and interesting aspects of
counterpoint, such as the treatment of dissonant intervals and the formation
of cadences are only rarely hinted at. Clearly, reading the treatises of these
musical scientists would in no way provide the means for succesfully
putting together a musical composition. But, then, it was perhaps not their
first and main purpose to write such a treatise.
As to the question of whether or not the work on musical science of
these men was important, the answer is that it was important in the first
place for the authors themselves. In fact, very litde of it was published so
that it could have any general impact. Stevin's treatise on music remained
unpublished until 1884; the manuscript was only consulted by Beeckman.
Beeckman's work was not published until the middle of the twentieth cen-
tury. (The manuscript was consulted by a happy two or three, Mersenne
among them.) Descartes' Musicae compendium was a posthumous publica-
tion, whose printing was no doubt prompted by the farne of its author rather
than by any intrinsic value. No traces of it can be found in the work of Ban
and van Nierop, even though they both knew Descartes rat her weIl.
Huygens did not provide any comments on Descartes' Compendium.
Ban produced a respectable amount of writings on music, but it seems
that there was much more that was not written down and remained
projected. It is striking how often Ban spoke about his musical treatises in
the future tense, and it may be that litde else than the printed Dissertatio
epistolica of 1637 was ever completed after his manuscript Tractatus brevis
of 1616. The Kort Sangh-bericht of 1643 was a shorter version of a pro-
jected treatise in Dutch, and we may wonder whether that larger version
could have been completed had he not died the following year.
Nevertheless, Ban's work was relatively weIl known to later authors, both
in the Netherlands and in Germany. Actually, van Nierop was the only one
of these scientists who produced a text of some magnitude that can be
considered complete and finished: his Wiskonstighe Musyka of 1659. Even
this text was not an independent publication, but the second part of a work
on mathematics. Moreover, because of its rather impractical content, it has
aroused litde attention. Huygens' printed output on music was very limited:
only a dozen pages with a table, published late in his life. The publication of
the Lettre touchant le cycle harmonique in French made it a weIl-known text
during the eighteenth century, to such an extent that the 31-tone equal divi-
sion became known as "Huygens' system."
I believe that the spotted publication history of these musical writings
was not just an accident. The impression prevails that these scientists-
206 RUOOLF A. RAsCH

however honestly they tried-were not very successful in completing the

program that they had set out for themselves, namely to show that music
could be described as being subject to certain immutable laws. Almost all of
the texts discussed above give the impression of not having really matured,
not fully developed, as if the scientists still had something essential to be
added. This contrasts strongly with their accomplishments in other scientific
fields, for the contributions to the fields of astronomy, mathematics, me-
chanics, and engineering by Stevin, Descartes, and Christiaan Huygens are
indisputable.
It is clear that the contributions by our musical scientists to the
development of the science of music cannot stand up against their accom-
plishments in natural science. Neverthless, they do reveal the wide range of
interests of seventeenth-century scientists in general, and the sincere wish to
expand their own knowledge and methodology to the musical sciences. In
their eyes there was still much work to be done in the latter field. Today, not
very many would disagree.

UNIVERSITY OF UTRECHf
 SIX SEVENTEENTH-CENruRY DUTCH SCIENTISTS W7

ApPENDIX
Letters eited in this article

This appendix contains, in chronological order, all the letters cited in this article, with
references to editions of them. For the abbreviations used in the column headed
"Editions," see the list of abbreviations following the appendix. This appendix also serves
to emphasize the role of correspondence in the scientific pursuit and exchange of ideas dur-
ing the seventeenth century as weIl as underscores the importance of this correspondence
to our knowledge of this pursuit and exchange.

Date From To Editions

'!! Abr. Verheiden Simon Stevin Stevin 1884, p. 87

162903 ?? Beeckman Mersenne Beeckman 4, p. 141

Mersenne 2, no. 128

162906 ?? Beeckman Mersenne Beeckman 4, p. 145

Mersenne 2, no. 130

16300415 Descartes Mersenne Descartes I, no. 31

Mersenne 2, no. 155

163608 11 Ban Const. Huygens Jonckbloet, p. lxii

Worp 2, no. 1417

1636 12 15 Ban William Boswell J onckbloet, p. lxiii

16380515 Ban Mersenne Mersenne 7, no. 671

16380920 Ban Mersenne Mersenne 8, no. 698

16390101 Ban Gio.Batt. Doni Mersenne 8, no. 716

16390301 Ban Gio.Batt. Doni Mersenne 8, no. 727

16390412 Ban Mersenne Mersenne 8, no. 733

163904 17 Ban Mersenne Mersenne 8, no. 735

1639 12 12 Descartes Const. Huygens Roth, no. 46

16400105 Const. Huygens Ban Worp 3, no. 2294

164001 13 Ban Const. Huygens Jonckbloet, p. lxviii

Worp 3, no. 2299
208 RUOOLF A. RASCH

16400519 Ban Const. Huygens J onckbloet, p. lxix

Worp 3, no. 2370
Mersenne 9, no. 864

16400814 Const. Huygens Descartes Descartes 3, no. 201

Worp 3, no. 2485

16400820 Ban A. M. Schurman Jonckbloet, p. lxx

Mersenne 10, no. 909

16400827 Descartes Const. Huygens Worp 3, no. 2509

Descartes 3, no. 203
Roth, no. 58

16410105 Const. Huygens Ban Worp 3, no. 2294

1641 01 13 Ban Const. Huygens Jonckbloet, p. cviii

Worp 3, no. 2607
Mersenne 10, no. 962

16410120 Const. Huygens Ban Worp 3, no. 2165

Mersenne 10, no. 968

164101 31 Ban Const. Huygens Jonckbloet, p. cxviii

Worp 3, no. 2622

16420128 Ban Const. Huygens Worp 3, no. 2937

16420131 Descartes Const. Huygens Descartes 3, no. 267

Worp 3, no. 2938
Mersenne 10, no. 1064

16420402 Ban Const. Huygens Jonckbloet, p. cxix

Worp 3, no. 2973
Mersenne 11, no. 1077

16420527 Ban Const. Huygens Jonckbloet, p. cxx

Worp 3, no. 3003

16420721 Ban Const. Huygens Jonckbloet, p. cxxi

Worp 3, no. 3067

16420916 Ban Const. Huygens Jonckbloet, p. cxxi

Worp 3, no. 3155
Mersenne 11, no. 1130
 SIX SEVENTEENTH-CENTuRY DurcH SCIENTISTS 209

16431207 Ban Const Huygens Jonckbloet, p. cxxv

Worp 3, no. 3434

1644 02 05 Ban Const Huygens Jonckbloet, p. cxxvi

Worp 3, no. 3460
Mersenne 14, no. 1250

16461130 Descartes Const Huygens Roth, no. 103

Mersenne 14, no. 1564
Huygens 22, no. 25

16541007 Chr. Huygens Fr. van Schooten Huygens3,no.199a

16550924 Chr. Huygens Const Huygens Huygens I, no. 235

16551029 Christ. Huygens Const Huygens Jr. Huygens I, nos. 243-244

1660 11 ?? Chr. Huygens Const. Huygens Jr.? Huygens 3, no. 818

16610227 Chr. Huygens Lodewijk Huygens Huygens 3, no. 846

16901214 Christ. Huygens JohanHudde Huygens 9, no. 2642

***
Ä.BBREVIATIONS

Beeckman4 Cornelis de Waard, ed. Journal tenu par lsaac Beec/arum de

1604 cl 1634. Tome quatrieme: Supplement. The Hague, 1953.

Descartes 1 Ch. Adam & P. Tannery, ed. (Euvres de Descartes.

Correspondance 1. Rpt, Paris, 1975.

Descartes 3 ldem. Correspondance IlI. Janvier 1640-Juin 1643.

Huygens 1 D. Bierens de Haan, ed. Christiaan Huygens. (Euvres

completes. Tome premier: Correspondance 1638-1656. The
Hague, 1888.

Huygens 3 ldem. Tome troisieme: Co"espondance 1660-1661.

The Hague, 1890.

Huygens9 J. Bosscha, ed. Tome neuvieme: Co"espondance 1685-1690.

The Hague, 1901.
210 RUDOLF A. RAsCH

Huygens 22 J. A. Vollgraf, ed. Tome vingt-et-deuxieme: Supptemant cl la

correspondance. Varia. Biographie de Chr. Huygens. Catalogue
de la vente des livres de Chr. Huygens. The Hague, 1950.

Jonckbloet W. J. A. Jonckbloet & J. P. N. Land. Musique et musiciens

au XVlle siede. Correspondance et lEuvre musicales de
Constantin Huygens. Leiden, 1882.

Mersenne2 Comelis de Waard, ed. Correspondance de P. Marin Mersenne.

11. 1628-1630. Paris, 1936.

Mersenne 7 Idem.vll. Janvier-Juillet. 1638. Paris, 1962.

Mersenne8 Idem.vm. Aout 1638-Decembre 1639. Paris, 1963.

Mersenne9 Idem.lX. Du 2 janvier au 6 aout 1640. Paris, 1965.

Mersenne 10 Idem. X. Du 6 aout 1640 clfin decembre 1641. Paris, 1967.

Mersenne 11 Idem. XI. 1642. Paris, 1970.

Mersenne 14 Idem. XIV. 1646. Paris, 1980.

Roth 1926 L. Roth, ed. Correspondence 0/ Descartes and Constantijn

Huygens 1635-1647. Oxford, 1926.

Stevin 1884 D. Bierens de Haan. Simon Stevin: Vande Spiegeling der

Singkonst et Vande Molens. Amsterdam, 1884.

Worp2 J. A. Worp. De briejwisseling van Constantijn Huygens

(/608-1687). Derde deel.1634-1639. The Hague, 1914.

Worp3 Idem. Vierde deel.1640-1644. The Hague, 1915.

 ROBERT LUNDBERG

IN TUNE W ITH THE UNIVERSE:

TIm PHYSICS AND METAPHYSICS OF GALILEO'S LUTE*

G ALILEO GALILEI WAS BORN INTO A FAMILY and a time in which skill in
music was considered necessary for complete personal and intellectual
development. Galileo's father, Vincenzo Galilei, was one ofthe most influ-
ential musical theorists and pedagogues of the late sixteenth century, as well
as an important lutenist and teacher of the instrument. As a boy Galileo was
taught lute technique and the theory and numerology of music by his father,
and there is preserved a manuscript tutor especially written for Galileo by
Vincenzo, which contains marginalia by Galileo consisting of mathematical
analyses of the music. 1 However, when Vincenzo found his young son
becoming too interested in numbers, he pushed hirn even harder towards the
study of medicine. Only later did he reluctantly concede to allow Galileo to
enter the formal study of mathematics and astronomy. Galileo's younger
brother Michelagnolo, however, continued in the father's footsteps as a
composer and lutenist. An exceptionally talented performer, he worked for
many years at the court in Munich and published a book of lute music in
1620.2 Galileo hirnself encouraged and ultimately provided for the continu-
ing musical education of his eldest nephew, Vincenzo, by sending hirn to
Rome for study. From Galileo's many letters we know that music, espe-
cially playing his lute, was a source of great pleasure and a special comfort
and solace to hirn in his final years, when blindness was added to the many
other trials of his life. But where did this lute that Galileo played originate?
In what context would he have known it, and how did it develop into the
instrument that he played and mastered?
The European lute developed from the Arabic al' ud, which was most
probably introduced by the returning crusaders in the twelfth and thirteenth
centuries. The Arabic name al'ud means literally 'with wood', and is one of
those interesting etymological instances in which the name of the feature that
differentiated it from its predecessor became, in fact, its name. The earliest

• A glossary is appended to the end of this articJe to aid the reader who is unfamiliar with the
terminology of lute construction.
1 Private correspondence from Stillman Drake.
2 On GaJileo and Michelagnolo see Claude Chauvel's preface to Michelagnolo Galilei, Il prima
libro d' inJavolatura di liuto (Geneva, 1988).
211
V. Coelho (ed.), Music and Science in the Age ojGalileo, 211-239.
© 1992 Kluwer Academic Publishers.
212 ROBERT LUNDBERG

form of al' ud had a stretched skin top quite like a banjo. At some point,
probably in the sixth century, a half-wood, half-membrane belly was fitted.
The upper part of the soundboard was wood and had asoundhole or
rosette, while the lower half remained skin with the strings still passing over
the bridge and fastening on to the end of the body. By the late sixth or early
seventh century, Arabic literature denotes this new instrument as "with
wood," informing us that the belly was now made entirely of wood. Adding
two more soundholes lower down on the belly and fastening the strings to
the bridge produced the classieal form of al' ud, whieh we find still used in
Arabic lands today.3 All European geomusieal areas subsequently adopted
this Arabic name for their own lute: the Spanish used laud, the French luth,
the German Laute, and the Italian lauto or liuto. The motivating reason for
this major structural change from a skin top to a wooden belly was acousti-
cal. 1t greatly increased the sustain of the instrument, as well as the effec-
tiveness of the bass courses, thereby adding signifieantly to the drama of
musical expression that was possible. Stylistic changes resulting in a similar
dramatic effect are observable in Persian/Arabic poetry of the time.
During the first few hundred years after its introduction into Europe the
lute was played with a plectrum. 1t was a simple melodie instrument, used
for a single line of notes or strummed chords. Unfortunately there are no
extant lutes from before the early sixteenth century, so we must rely on
iconographical evidence to ascertain that the structure of this four- or five-
course pre-Renaissance lute changed very little from its origins untillate in
the fifteenth century. We can, however, find diverse sizes and shapes of
lutes illustrated throughout this early history.
In the drawing illustrated as Plate 1, from a manuscript treatise written
by the Dutch scholar Renri Arnault of Zwolle (ca. 1450), we find the earli-
est extant written information on the design and construction of the
European lute. 4 Arnault gives us specific geometrical information on the
proportion and design of the lute outline, how to construct the form over
which to shape the ribs which make up the bowl, and where to locate the
rosette, bars, and bridge on the belly.
Arnault's information, however weH informed, is given in a somewhat
belabored and whimsical manner, suggesting that he was perhaps an enthu-
siastie chronicler, rather than a true instrument maker hirnself. An example

3 Robert Lundberg, "Historical Lute Construction: The Erlangen Lectures, Day One," American
Lutherie 12 (Winter, 1987), pp. 32-49.
4 Paris, Bibliotheque nationale, Ms. Latin 7295, fo1. 132, published in facsimile as Instru-
ments de musique au XVe siede: les traites d'Henri-Arnaut de Zwolle et de divers anonymes,
with transcription and commentary by G. le Cerf and E. R. Labande, (Paris, 1932); see also Ian
Harwood, "A Fifteenth-Century Lute Design," The Lute Society Journal II (1960), pp. 3-8.
 THE PHYSICS AND METAPHYSICS OF GALILEO'S LUTE 213

.,-
I • ~

..... - r "....

. ....... ......
~
~
"~. •
~ .
,. ....... .".,.
., ... ".
1 -. ~

PLATE1: Paris, Bibliotheque Nationale, Ms. latin 7295, fol. 132,

treatise by Henri Arnault de Zwolle (ca. 1450)
214 ROBERT LUNDBERG

of this whimsy can be seen in his comment written along the left-hand side
of the neck. Here we are told that the correct proportion for the length of the
neck is to be equal to the extreme width of the body, but that this cannot be
demonstrated for lack of enough paper! In spite of his style, we can learn
much from Henri Arnault. We can readily corroborate through ieonography
the results obtained by following his directions to construct a lute outline.
He teIls us to fIrst draw a circ1e for the lower part of the body of the size we
wish the lute to be, and then, opening the compass to the diameter of the
circ1e just drawn, to draw the arcs that curve towards the neck. He then rec-
ommends a smaller radius to form the neck end of the body. This construc-
tion produces an outline whieh, if the last radius at the neck end is omitted
(Fig. 1), is identieal to many lutes found in visual sources of the fIfteenth
century. We also find that the neck length of these lutes frequently corre-
sponds to the proportions given by Arnault. These smaIl-bodied roundish
lutes with long necks worked quite weIl for playing improvised single lines
with a plectrum, but changes in instrumental technique were to put demands
on these instruments that they could not meet.

FIGURE 1

Writing in 1487, the Flemish theorist and composer Johannes de

Tinctoris teUs us that there is a new way of playing polyphonie music on the
lute by whieh instead of using a group of three or four lutes in consort for
the separate parts of the composition, one person plays all the different, but
equal, voiees on a single instrument. s This necessitated playing with the

5 Johannes Tinctoris, De inventione et usu musicae, (ca. 1487), partial English translation in
 THE PHYSICS AND ME'rAPHYSICS OF GAULEO'S LlJfE 215

individual fingers of the right hand rather than with a plectrum. However,
because the pre-Renaissance lutes were designed and constructed to sound
best with the sharp, hard impact of a plectrum they did not respond nearly
so weIl when plucked with the much softer flesh of the fingers. The
lutenists' new playing technique required a much more responsive instru-
ment, and to meet these demands the lute makers drastically altered the
shape and structure of the lute. The newly-designed Renaissance lutes had a
proportionally longer body, nine or eleven ribs of hard wood for the bowl,
and were lighter in overall construction, all of which helped provide the
response needed for successful non-plectrum playing. The inventory made
in 1566 of the collection of musical instruments belonging to Raymund
Fugger, a member of the Augsburg banking family, lists 141 lutes. 6 Of
these, eighty-seven are specifically described as being made from an
extremely hard material, such as ivory, whalebone, ebony, rosewood, etc.
Another fourteen are described as of 'figured' wood, most likely ash or
maple, which are relatively hard.The penetrating tone of this new finger-
plucked lute is rather bright and dry and not completely unlike the tone of
the earlier rounder and heavier lutes when they are played with a plectrum.
The construction of the outline (Fig. 2) of this new lute is a simple con-
ceptual step from the construction inspired by Arnault.7

FIGURE2

Anthony Baines, "Fifteenth-century Instruments in Tinctoris's De inventione et usu musicae,"

Galpin Society Journal m (1950), pp. 19-26.
6 Douglas Alton Smith, "The Musical Instrument Inventory of Raymond Fugger," Galpin
Society Journal 33 (1980), pp. 36-44 and plate VII.
7 Robert Lundberg, "Historical Lute Construction," p. 39.
216 ROBERT LUNDBERG

Given the total length of the outline, which is proportional to the string
length, an arc with this length as its radius is drawn describing the lower
end of the outline. A shorter unit-length radius carries the outline around
and up nearly to the widest point. Here, a longer proportional unit-Iength
radius takes up to complete the outline to a point at what will be the neck
end of the body. Three radii are employed.
The unit-lengths of proportion, or moduli, wh ich formed the funda-
mental designing of the lute size and outline-surely based on Pythagorean
principles-were most probably a well-kept secret of the master of the
workshop.8 The anthropometricallinear measure (feet, inches, and lines)
used in the workshop was the system with which the assistants, journey-
men, and apprentices employed in the cutting and fitting of the wooden bits.
These two unit-lengths often relate directly to each other by chance.
The primary motivation for the lute makers' continued use of geometry
in their concepts of construction came in part from their deep cultural preoc-
cupation with proportion, symbolism and harmony. This was the
culmination of nearly 2000 years of philosophical discourse relating to the
nature of the universe and man's place in a world within that universe. In
the sixth century B.e. Pythagoras described a universe wherein the planets
were ruled by consonant musical proportions that produce a concordant
sound, the Music of the Spheres. 9 Plato added a metaphysicallevel to this
concept by saying, that while Pythagoras was content in merely understand-
ing the universe through numbers, Man's position in the world should be to
emulate this universal order through proportion, thence to harmony.
These two ideas were later restated and augmented by the Roman
philosoph er Boethius (480-524 A.D.) in his treatise De institutione mu-
sica. lO Boethius designated three categories of music: Musica Mundana, the
music of the spheres or universe; Musica Humana, that the proportionate
harmony which rules the universe is the one and the same harmony which
rules man; and Musica Instrumentalis, the audible or man-made music.
These categories were so widely accepted that practically all Medieval and

8 I acknowledge here my sincere thanks to the lute builder Lawrence Lundy for the suggestion
that several hierarchies of fundamental knowledge might have coexisted in the workshop.
These ideas are drawn from Lundy's Design Systems and Venere's Design System (Madison,
WI, 1987).
9 I arn very much indebted to Todd Barton for his series of articles revealing the influence of the
music of the spheres on Medieval and Renaissance music; see esp. Todd Barton, "Analogia:
Musica Mundana and Musica Humana," Pro Musica 1 (Jan/Feb, 1976), pp. 7-19. His articles
have been extremely influential in stimulating and guiding my own search for the ideas behind
the geometry of the Renaissance lutemakers.
10 Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius, Fundamentals 01 Music, trans. by Calvin M. Bower
(New Haven, 1989).
 THE PHYSICS AND METAPHYSICS OF GAULEO'S LUTE 217

Renaissance musical treatises mention them.

Boethius thought that Musica Instrumentalis should be an imitation of
Musica Mundana and that the basis for this was to be found in mathematical
proportion based on Pythagorean numbers. Men were to imitate the uni-
verse in their works, or at least be guided by the same principles. The
cosmological models, based on this Harmony of the Spheres, were funda-
mental to Renaissance artistic thought. Architects such as Pacioli, in his De
Divina Proportione, refer continually to the beauty created by consonant
proportions. 11 Some painters divided their canvasses into grids of harmo-
nious proportions. And the perceptions of the musical world were so
dominated by these concepts that no wonder could be too marvelous and no
hero too strong, when empowered by such harmony.
It will be no surprise, then, if I suggest that lute makers truly believed
that in order for their instruments to sound well and be harmonious they
needed to be in tune with the universe. What may be surprising, however,
is that the tonal results engendered within these geometrical models result in
certain acoustical properties, some of which seem to flaunt explanation by
modern physics.

***
While Renaissance lutes, with their long, narrow shape, certainly were
dry and bright sounding, they had little depth of tone (despite an enormous
potential for tone color). In other words, their tone was not particularly
refined-and subtlety and refinement were a growing concern in keeping
with the developing musical styles of mid-sixteenth-century Italy. Once
again, then, these lute makers were faced with demands for new tonal sub-
tleties from their instruments. But, how did the lute makers effect these
changes? What were their guiding principles? I believe they quite simply
proceeded empirically, allowing their craftskill to guide them, while main-
taining absolute faith in the basic correctness of their geometrical design
techniques.
Strict reliance on tradition al principles, even those we might consider
somewhat mystical in nature, may be more reasonable than one might at
first suspect. Instrument makers are faced with a unique problem: what is
the nature of tone-its origin, character, and control? This is a question that
even the best master can do no better than ans wer with a few general ideas.
They cannot teach their students how to create wonderful tone in an

11 Todd Barton, "Musica Instrumentalis: Intellect and Transformation," Pro Musica I,

(Mar/Apr, 1976) pp. 9-13.
218 ROBERT LUNDBERG

instrument, for certain fundamental aspects goveming the nature and quality
of tone in stringed instruments are simply not teachable. The broad
parameters used in building an instrument are certainly the results of the
master's training and experience, including the model, design and geometry
used. But the real tonal character of the instrument derives from how
skillfully the maker solves the 10,000 questions that are posed at the
workbench, thereby impressing a unique and personal impact on the total
building process.
An illuminating example of this non-teachable aspect in instrument
making can be illustrated through the work of the two sons of the famous
stringed instrument maker Antonio Stradivari. Francesco and Omobono
Stradivari, who are virtual unknowns in the history of instrument building,
worked together with their father for about fifty years, yet their instruments
seldom, if ever, show the character of tone so common in those of the eIder
Stradivari. Yet the instruments of Stradivari's best apprentices do com-
monly have this superb tonal character, which in their best examples equals
or surpasses the great master himself.
This special difference, the seemingly impenetrable complexity of the
decisions in design and construction that are required to build the best
stringed instruments, might be easier to appreciate if an analogy is given
between a highway bridge spanning a large river, and a lute (or, for that
matter any other type of stringed instrument). The highway bridge needs a
structure light enough to support its own weight yet strong enough to bear
the weight of the expected traffic. Likewise, the lute needs to be light
enough to resonate properly, yet strong enough to be handled and played
while under great tension from the strings. A mid-sixteenth-century Italian
7-course lute such as Galileo would have played, would weigh somewhat
less than two pounds and yet be expected to withstand a total string tension
approaching 100 lbs.
Next, the highway bridge should carry the required traffic smoothly,
provide agreeable access and egress, remain above water at flood time, and
generally make the crossing of the river easy and possible in all times and
seasons. In short, it must function. So must the lute, because any instru-
ment is in essence a tool of the musician. The slender tuning pegs, for
example, must be made of stable, weH-seasoned wood and weH fitted, so
they turn easily when the player needs them to but otherwise stay pUl. Any
other behavior from these pegs and one might come to believe that disturb-
ing comment from the notorious anti-lutenist Johann Mattheson, who in his
Memorial to the Lute (1713), wrote, "If a lutenist lives to be eighty years
old he has surely spent sixty years tuning."
 THEPHYSICS ANDME'rAPHYSICS OFGAULEO'S LurE 219

Access to the instrument, its playability, is determined by the playing

action. For a good action, the strings must lie elose enough to the finger-
board so that they can be pressed easily onto the frets, but remain,
paradoxically, far enough away from the frets that they do not buzz against
them when enthusiastically plucked. The lute must also produce an ample
quantity and pleasing quality of sound. The last requirement that might be
made for our hypothetical bridge, is that it should have a certain aesthetic
quality, a visual beauty, so that, in the words of the late Professor R.
Buckminster Fuller, "Its beauty will testify to its structural integrity."12 So
also must the lute have visual beauty.
Thus far the bridge and the lute have remained on par. Each demands a
certain structure, function, and physical beauty. But here, the probable
demands on the highway bridge stop while we make one more very impor-
tant demand of the lute: it must be musical. It must have a sufficiently color-
ful, interesting, and engaging character so that the musician and instrument
are intrigued and challenged-urging each other on, surprising and delight-
ing each other, supporting each other. In this way, as the musician is moved
to perform his or her best, we find that deep sense of rapport between two
individuals acting as one. This is where the craftskill of the lute maker and
the largely re-creative skill of the musician combine to make art. To meet
these new and far more subtle tonal demands, final alterations in body out-
line, shape, and construction were perfected, most probably in Venice by
the builder Magno Tieffenbrucker about 1550. 13 And with this period, the
'golden era' for lute making, we arrive at the type of lute that Galileo would
have played.
The construction of this 'fuHer' late Renaissance outline (Fig. 3)
begins, as did the former, with a total body length, derived from the desired
string length. 14 A body-Iength radius is used for the lower end of the body
and a shorter unit-Iength radius is used in making the 'corner' of the outline.
In many designs, a third, somewhat longer, radius is needed to complete the
corner of the lute and bring the curve through the widest area of the body.
However, we find that the main difference is in the upper portion of the
outline, which is now a section of an ellipse. 15 This increases soundboard

12 In private conversation with 'Bucky' Fuller at the experimental commune Drop City in the
summer of 1967.
13 See Stefano Toffolo, Antichi strumenti veneziani (Venice, 1987), pp. 90-95. Unfortunately,
this baok contains many errors and omissions regarding the genealogy and, subsequently, the
production of the Tieffenbrucker family, which are corrected in Giulio M. Ongaro, ''The
Tieffenbruckers and the Business of Lute-making in Sixteenth-century Venice," GaIpin Society
Journal 44 (1991), pp. 45-54.
14 Rohert Lundherg, "Historical Lute Construction," p. 36.
15 The idea that the upper section of the late Renaissance lute outline was an elliptical section
220 ROBERT LUNDBERG

FIGURE 3

area and air volume near the neck end of the body. In cross-section the
bowls of some late Renaissance lute outlines are flattened, sometimes con-
siderably, to reduce the internal air volume. This, then, is the basic outline
that was used untillate in the seventeenth century. Later seventeenth- and
eighteenth-century developments in lute construction recapitulate, to a cer-
tain degree, the actual outlines of the earlier lutes themselves, but without
the underlying proportion and geometry.
Yew wood was without question the material of preference for these
new late Renaissance lute bowls. Almost all of the wooden lutes extant from
this period (1550-1620) are made from yew. 16 It was highly esteemed not
only for its tonal and visual qualities, but also for its place as a unique
material with inherent paradoxes of truely mythic proportions: as an archery
bow it took life, as a lute it gave life.
Yew has the unique nature of being relatively heavy and at the same
time extremely resilient, and therefore resonate, which adds warmth and
power to the lute's tone. Aesthetically, the shaded yew wood suited per-
fectly the manneristic visual trends also current in Italy. When using yew to
produce a shaded bowl, the rib blank is aligned so that as the rib is shaped
the sharp line of demarcation between the sapwood, which is a light

was first proposed by Gerhard C. Söhne, "On the Geometry of the Lute," Journal 0/ the Lute
Society 0/ America 13 (1980), pp. 35-54.
16 Robert Lundberg, "Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century Lutemaking," Journal 0/ the Lute
Society 0/ America 7 (1974), pp. 31-50.
 THE PHYSICS AND ME'rAPHYSICS OF GAULEO'S LUTE 221

creamy-yellow, and the heart wood, a dark reddish-brown, runs down the
center of the rib. This gives the colorful illusion that there are twice as many
ribs as there actually are. Because the sapwood of the yew tree is relatively
narrow, this illusion was perfected through the use of multi-ribbed bowls;
that is, from twenty-five up to fifty-one narrow ribs were used, which
allowed equal width and, therefore, balance, to the heartwood and sap-
wood. The number of ribs vary with the overall size of the lute because in
these multi-ribbed bowls the ribs are always I/2V" (Venetian inches)17 at
their widest, with the exception of the two side ribs, which are usually
about Iv".
Because the lute has such a wonderfully complicated and geometric-
looking bowl, people often assume that a certain symmetry, or 'perfection',
exists in its shape. Many modern-day lute makers construct their lutes as if
they were half round in cross-section with a longitudinal section of the back
identical with one-half of the outline. Some makers even use forms which
are at first turned on a lathe and are therefore completely symmetrica1. 18
Such a symmetrical shape was not intended and never occurs in period
lutes. It is, in fact, contrary to the basic principles of proportion and balance
in air-mass distribution. An image of the lute makers' initial conception for
this interior air-mass, and therefore body shape, can be clarified if we think
of an analogy with the work of a viol or violin maker, rather than a mathe-
matically-defined, perfectly symmetrical shape. The violin maker visualizes
an air mass and then carves the arching of the back and belly plates to
enclose this mass. The air is proportioned according to plan and realized
through the archings and graduations of the plates, together with the outline
of the instrument and the heights of the sides.
Lute makers did a similar thing. Taking a geometrically generated
outline, and with the help of proportional cross and longitudinal sections,
they visualized the complete interior air cavity, mentally adding or subtract-
ing pieces of air, as it were, until they had the desired shape. This idealized
shape was the solid wooden form they then carved, wh ich represented
exactly the desired interior air mass and distribution. Then, they simply
'captured' that air mass by covering the form with the pieces of wood that
made up the lute bowl. Understandably, then, the lute bowl's shape is as

17 Through analysis of historie lutes I have found the actual metric mass of this inch to be about
28.4 mm. A range of 28.35 to 28.5 seems to have been used in sixteenth- and seventeenth-cen-
tury Yenice only for the construction of musical instruments, which suggests that it was a
Yenetian import. The old Yenetian inch, according to official sourees, is about 28.97 mm. For
more on this subject, see Herbert Heyde, Musikinstrumentenbau: 15.-19. Jahrhundert Kunst-
Handwerk Entwurf (Leipzig, 1986).
18 See Franz Jahnel, Die Gitarre und ihr Bau (Frankfurt-am-Main, 1963).
222 ROBERT LUNDBERG

subtle and complex as that of a violin's carved belly and back arching, with
many variables in the air mass volume and distribution, each variable pro-
ducing substantial changes in tone color, of bias in power, projection,
andlor balance.

***
Galileo would not have thought of the lute as a single instrument, as we
think of the piano or classical guitar, but rat her as an entire family of
instruments which was organized using strict Pythagorean harmonic rela-
tionships. Most Renaissance musical instruments were built in sets or
families. Referring once again to the inventory of musical instruments in the
collection of Raymund Fugger, we find that almost two-thirds of the lutes
listed are specified as belonging to a set (accordo), usually of three or four
instruments. Many of the lutes in the inventory are characterized as one of
seven specific sizes, Le. octave lute, small descant, descant, chamber lute,
tenor, bass, and contra bass.1 9
Further information about the Renaissance lute family, confirming the
sizes listed in the inventory above, is contained in Part Two, de Organo-
graphia, of Michael Praetorius' important treatise Syntagma Musicum
(Wolfenbüttel, 1619).20 Praetorius has long been recognized as a reliable
source on late Renaissance musical instruments, and some modem recon-
structions have relied solelyon his information. In de Organographia we
find the names for seven members of the lu te family listed together with
their nominal tunings.
Most common nominal tunings Pythagorean
for consort lutes, proportions

small octave lute d"

~
d"

descant lute a'

2:3 a'
alto lute g'
tenor lute e' g' 1:2
bass lu te d' 3:4 e'
FIGURE4 d'

The nominal tunings of the chanterelle for the five sizes of lutes most

19Smith, ''The Musical Instrument Inventory of Raymond Fugger," p. 37.

20 Most of the following discussion is abstracted from Robert Lundberg, "The Lutes in
Praetorius' Syntagma Musicum,"unpublished paper, 1989. Part Two, De Organographia, has
been translated into English by David Z. Crookes (Oxford, 1986).
 THE PHYSICS AND MErAPHYSICS OF GAULEO'S LUrE 223

commonly played are listed in the chart (Fig. 4). We can see from the
diagram at right the Pythagorean relationships for these tunings. 21
Pythagoras had discovered, while experimenting with the monochord, that
the consonant intervals of the Greek musical system, correspond exacdy to
the divisions on the string by the smallest whole integers, 1, 2, 3, and 4.
The ratio of 1:2 is the diapason or octave, therefore the octave lute should
have a string length one-half as long as the bass. The ratio 2:3 is the dia-
pente or fifth, so the descant lute is two-thirds the string length of the alto.
The ratio of 3:4 is the diatessaron or fourth, producing an octave lute that is
three-fourths the length of the descant, which in turn is three-fourths the
length of the tenor. Finally, the alto lute is three-fourths the length of the
bass.
In the Theatrum Instrumentorum found in the back of Praetorius' de
Organographia, is a fascinating and quite unique set of woodcuts, depicting
some of the instruments mentioned in the text. What makes these plates so
valuable is that they were very carefully drawn, cut, and printed with the
intention that they could be scaled. In this way we can know rather precisely
the full-size measured sizes of the instruments in the plates. Since almost
every major city or prinicipality in Renaissance Europe had its own unit
length,22 Praetorius provides a full-sized engraving of a ruler indicating 6
inches of his measuring unit, the New Brunswick foot. 23 In order to make
consideration of the sampie ruler as convenient as possible in comparing the
scaled drawings to full-size instruments and vice versa, Praetorius has had
the inches on this printed ruler subdivided in an interesting manner. The
first inch is one whole unit, the second inch is divided in two halves, the
third inch is in three thirds, the fourth into four fourths, etc. The scales
provided with each plate are subdivided alternately into fourths and
twelfths.
Unit length measurement systems were not always arbitrary. In their
workshops, the lutemakers in Galileo's Padua used an anthropometric
measure, the foot, which was divided into 12 inches; each inch was further
subdivided into 12 lines. This inch is a unique measure which seems to
have been used only by makers of musical instruments. Because the Paduan
21 I am indebted to Ray Nurse for sharing with me the unpublished transcript of his lecture,
Design and Structural Development 01 the Lute in the Renaissance, given at the International
Lute Symposium, Utrecht, 1986, which corroborates some of my findings presented at the
Erlangen Lautenbaukurs, 1978-1988.
22 See Vincenzo Scamozzi, Idea deli' Architettura Universale, Parte Prima, Lib. Secondo
(Venice, 1615); also, in Horace Doursther, Dictionnaire universelle des poids et mesures
anciens et modernes ... (Brussels, 1840).
23 Michael Praetorius, Syntagma Musicum II, De Organographia, Theatrum Instrumentorum
(Wolfenbüttel, 1620), lower page adjacent to Plate no. 1.
224 ROBERT LUNDBERG

luthiers were originally trained in Venice, and the fundamentals of their

design systems were developed there, I have chosen to call this metrological
unit the Venetian inch (V").
These anthropometric metrological systems served to keep people in
touch with their world. They had developed over centuries and were very
real measures for the life and times of human beings. Several units, which
are based, for example, on the amount of a man' s labor, were universal in
Christian Europe until the beginning of the scientific/industrial revolution.
And how useful many of these measures are. One very practical measure of
arable land is, for example, the area which can be sown by one man in one
day.24 It is superbly unambiguous by giving certain knowledge of how
much grain the measured area would produce. By extension it would also
give an accurate relative valuation to the land. This system of measurement
works because, depending on the quality of the soil on which he was at that
moment walking, the seed was sown relatively thickly on good soil, by
taking smaller steps and larger handfuls, or thinly on poor soil, by taking
longer steps and smaller handfuls. This extremely useful andfair measure-
ment is decidedly non-linear in its subjectivity. Lutemakers show a similar
reliance or confidence in their own design systems, although we sometimes
have difficulty interpreting and defining the moduli because of the sec-
ondary theme of proportion which result simply from the eminently
divisible mIer the lute makers used.
Prom the illustrations accompanying the lute family articles we can take
scaled measurements to serve as a guide in selecting historical instruments
for the Praetorius lute family. With the help of the scale at the bottom of the
page we find that the string length of the 9-course alto lute tuned in g' is
261/2 New Bmnswick inches or about 221/4V" (63 cm).25
By comparing the Praetorius alto lute to late Renaissance lutes that are
in original condition and using their Pythagorean relationships as a guide,
we can now reconstruct the late Renaissance lute family and their nominal
tunings, as shown in Plate 2. 26 These instruments were made in Padua and
all of these, with the exception of the alto, which is dated 1582, were made
exactly during the time that Galileo was resident there.27

24 Witold Kula, Measures and Men, Irans. R. Szreter (Princeton, 1986).

25 Nicholas Bessaraboff was the first to publish extensive work on the scaling of Praetorius'
plates in his Ancient European Musical Instruments (New York, 1941/ rpt. 1964), a catalogue
of the Leslie Lindsey Mason collection at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
26 See Robert Lundberg, "Historical Lute Construction," pp. 34-35.
27 The exceptions are (left to right): Small Octave-the bridge may not be original; Descant-
pegs are not original; Alto-the neck has been narrowed slightly and the pegbox shortened to
hold only ten pegs; Tenor, the neck, pegbox, pegs front block and bridge are museum re-
 THE PHYSICS AND ME'TAPHYSICS OF GAULEO's LUrE 225

-
§

-
I

~
V'l

; i.

~~
~=
d)
0
1ä
'"'"
.;
5

-
fl::
~
(-.i

placements based on the bass which is in the same collection; Bass-for inexplicable reasons
the string holes in the bridge have been plugged and redriIIed twice in recent years.
226 ROBERT LUNDBERG

Beginning on the left they are: a 7-course small octave lute with a string
length of 151!2V" [44.Dem], a 7-course descant lute at 201/2V" [58.4cm], a
7-course alte lute which is 231/2V" [66.7cm], an 8-course tenor at 271/2V"
[78.1cm], and last an 8-course bass at 33V" [93.7cm] (which is a litde
longer than the 311/2V" [89 .5cm] it should be, perhaps because it was
intended to be tuned a tone lower in c'). In Figure 5 we can see the
Pythagorean relationships between these lutes.

Lute names tunings Pythagorean

proportions

small octave lute d"

E
15~V"y\
3'
descant lute a' 2: 3 20~V"

alto lute g' 3:4 2 3~V" 1:2

tenor lute e 27W"\3)

bass lute d' 33V"ß

AGURE5

Let Us now take a closer look at two instruments selected from this lute
family. The first is the smallest member of the lute family mentioned by
Praetorius, which he called a small octave lute and would be tuned in d" or
c" to play the treble part in an ensemble. It has an open vibrating string
length of 151/2V" [44 cm]. The tone of this litde lute is very bright and
penetrating, much like that of a mandolin. This lute would originaHy have
been strung with gut strings arranged in seven courses. 28 Late Renaissance
lutes have courses of two strings (although in practice the first course,
called the chanterelle, is sometimes strung and played with a single string),
so Galileo's lute would have had fourteen strings total. The strings in the
first through the fourth courses are tuned in unison and those in the fifth,
sixth, and seventh are tuned in octaves, that is one to the primary note and
one an octave higher. Double-string courses are used because of the greatly
increased tone color caused by dissonance in the upper partials. Added ben-
efits are a perception of greater volume, caused by the unequal beating of
the two strings, as weH as augmentation of the weak tone of the large gut
bass strings.
A profile of this little lute would show that the longitudinal seetion has
a different shape, and therefore geometry, than the outline. The multi-rib

28See Robert Lundberg, "Course," The New Harvard Dictionary o[ Music, ed. D. M. Randel
(Cambridge, MA, 1986), p. 211.
 TIm PHYSICS AND METAPHYSICS OF GAULEO'S LlIT'E 227

bowl is made from nineteen ribs of nicely-shaded yew wood (Plate 3) with-
out spacers. The lute makers in Padua did not usually include spacers when
they used shaded yew wood. However, when making lutes of the dark
heartwood yew only, they often would use white spacers, usually of maple
or poplar wood. Most lutes made prior to this late Renaissance period had
nine or eleven ribs. However, some makers built both multi-rib and wide-
rib lutes.
The rosette is carved directly into the soundboard of the lute (Plate 4).
A slip of paper with the pattern printed on is first glued to the underside of
the belly, and the rosette is then cut from the inside of the belly following
the printed paper pattern. The uncut portions of the paper remain to
strengthen this weak area. When the pattern is completly pierced, the belly
is turned over and small relief cuts are made in the design to emphasize the
impression of its being interwoven, and the chip work ringed border is laid
out and cut.
In these soundhole rosettes we find yet another clear link between the
European lute and its Arabic precursors. 29 The basic structure of the three
most common rosette patterns can be drawn using ancient geometrical con-
struction methods from Arabic sources. The dodecagon series, which can
be seen on some of the Paduan lutes by the Tieffenbrucker association, is
the most commonly used pattern, accounting for about 30 percent of extant
European lute roses. This method for construction of geometrical designs,
based on the dodecagon (Fig. 6), derives from ancient Arabic design
sources. Following Bourgoin, one can draw the primary structure of the
preceding rosette; I have circled the relevant portion of the drawing. The
drawing in Figure 7 was made from a design carved in pIaster in the
Alhambra. With a primary pattern of diapered hexagons interwoven with a
secondary theme of linked circles, it shows the use of double themes of
mixed shapes. 30 The rosette pattern in Plate 5 (rosette of Venere) is called
the Knot of Leonardo after the engraved knot-work designs of Leonardo da
Vinci. 31 It is, however, also based on Arabic geometrical construction.

29 See J. Bourgoin, Les Elements de I' art arabe: le trait des entrelacs (Paris, 1879). The plates
have been reprinted by Dover Publieations as Arabic Geometrical Pattern & Design: 200 plates
(New York, 1973).
30 I would Jike to express my gratitude to Keith Critehlow for the many examples in his mar-
velous work, Islamic Patterns: an analytical and cosmological approach (New York, 1976),
whieh have helped me immeasurably when grappling with geometrie al analyses, partieularly in
my reeonstruetion of rosette geometry.
31 Arthur M. Hind, Marcantonio and Italian Engravers and Etchers 0/ the Sixteenth Century,
(Stokes, n.d.). See also Hind's A History 0/ Engraving and Etching /rom the 15th Century to
the Year 1914 (New York, 1963).
228 ROBERT LUNDBERG

PLATE 3: Small octave tute by Wendelin Tieffenbrucker (ca. 1600),

Vienna, Kunsthistorisches Museum, C-39, side view.
 THE PHYSICS AND METAPHYSICS OF GAULEO'S LUIE 229

PLATE 4: Small octave lute by Wendelin Tieffenbrucker (ca. 1600),

Vienna, Kunsthistorisches Museum, C-39, rosette.
230 ROBERTLUNDBERG

FIGURE6

FIGURE7
THE PHYSICS AND METAPHYSICS OF GAULEO'S LUrE 231

PUTE 5: Alto lute by Wendelin Tieffenbrucker (dated 1582),

Vienna, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna, C-36, rosette.
232 ROBERT LUNDBERG

The bridge used on late Renaissance lutes is very narrow and does not
have a saddle as is found on the guitar or mandolin, for example. Instead,
the strings are simply looped through holes in the bridge and tied back on
themselves. These bridges also taper both in height and width towards the
treble end. Dr. Michael Kasha, a physicist working on a scientific develop-
ment of the classical guitar has found that a bridge with a narrower treble
end helps the faster oscillations of the high frequencies and produces better
treble volume and power. Most bridges of this late Renaissance period are
made of walnut or pearwood and stained black, when used in conjunction
with an ebony fingerboard, points and binding.
As mentioned earlier, a persistent direction in the acoustical develop-
ment of the lute was towards increasing sustain while attempting to maintain
significant amounts of tone color. I have commented on tone color before,
but Renaissance musicians were obsessed with tone color. For example,
they had several closely-related families of double reed wind instruments
that we find practically indistinguishable in tone. We are simply not
prepared to appreciate these subtleties in tone color.
Plate 6 shows the belly underside of a lute by Michelle Rarton. It can
be seen that the lute belly is barred with transverse bars except in the area
below the bridge, which has two small radial bars added to give control and
power to the treble. A bent bass bar is used to control and limit bass re-
sponse. This rather heavy barring scheme, when coupled with a very thin
and flexible belly, tends to produce a tone more like the banjo than the clas-
sical guitar. The initial fundamental tone is very bright and strong, but
decays quickly into myriad upper partials. The lute belly is usually made
from two bookmatched pieces of fir or spruce wood which are joined in the
middle. These joined pieces are then thicknessed in such a way as to leave
various areas thicker or thinner, depending on the strength, weight and
flexibility of the wood, much in the same way as a violin belly (Fig. 8). It is
absolutely essential for the tone of the late Renaissance lute that the belly be
as flexible as possible while maintaining sufficient strength. And as each
piece of belly wood, even from the same tree, has unique characteristics, no
two bellies are ever exactly the same. Obviously then, the scheme of thick-
nesses shown are only relative, and meant to represent a relationship in
thicknesses and a possible range in graduations.
Once the belly is thicknessed, the outline is traced on from a pattern and
the totallength of the belly is subdivided, in this hypothetical example, into
nine equal parts (Fig. 9).32 We see once again in these geometrical divisions

32 See the important article by Friedemann Hellwig, "On the Construction of the Lute Belly,"
Galpin Society Journal 21 (1968), pp. 129-45 and Plates XIV-XVI.
 THE PHYSICS AND METAPHYSICS OF GAULEO'S LlJI'E 233

PLATE 6: Bass lute by MichelJe Harton (dated 1602),

Nuremberg, Germanischen National-museums, MI 44, inside ofbeJly.
234 ROBERT LUNDBERG

'" --f--f-- -f--f-+-

 THE PHYSICS AND METAPHYSICS OF GALILEO'S LUTE 235

-
o

-H--ff-
N ~
236 ROBERT LUNDBERG

the lutemakers' desire to proportion their work to a greater universal

harmony. The center of the rosette falls on the fifth division. At this point
the rosette is cut into the belly in an area which has been made especially
thin, about 1.0 mm. After the rosette is completely finished and the belly
smoothed, the main bars are glued onto the belly using divisions 2, 3, 4, 5,
and 6 (Fig. 10). The area between the uppermost bar and the place where
the belly is glued to the front block is then subdivided into three parts, with
a bar glued to each. Likewise, the area below the lowest bar extending to the
bottom of the belly is also subdivided into three parts, with the bass bar
glued to the first division and the bridge on the outside of the belly glued to
the second part (Fig. 11). A circle is sometimes found inscribed on the
inside to indicate the placement of the treble bars and bass bar.

** *
Craftskill exhibited on the order of the old instrument makers is very
rare these days. We seldom see it because we deny and show aversion to
skill. 33 Our Western scientific/industrial age has attempted to bypass it
through substitution of knowledge used in conjunction with determining
systems. Craftskill is neither knowledge nor simply experience. Rather, it
indicates the application of a manual exercise that is guided not by a con-
scious image or calculated solution but by the spirit acting through intuition.
The vigorous philosophy of Galileo, indeed of most early scientists and
mathematicians, took this spiritual aspect of work and science into consid-
eration, and most of them provided for it in their encompassing theories.
Galileo's method came to hirn in a thoughtfully empirical way. He ob-
served' he thought, he experimented, he wrote. But the nature of serious
inquiry was not to remain so innocent for long.
Descartes awakened in us a consciousness away from the more empiri-
cal methods. His '21' Regles pour la direction de l' esprit written in 1628
and his Discours de la methode pour bien conduire sa raison, et ehereher la
virite dans les sciences of 1637, offered us intellectual tools with which to
conduct a serious inquiry into totally abstract areas. However, the natural
outcome of this misdirection into seeking was to isolate a small area of in-
quiry and to subject it to particularly intense scrutiny. Both the empiricist
and the theorist would then look for quantities which tended to remain the
same and hope they had found a linear system that they could solve. But the
universe does not work in this way.

33 See David Pye. The Nature 0/ Design (London, 1964).

 THE PHYSICS ANDME'rAPHYSICS OFGAULEO'S LU1E 237

The difficulty is-and Galileo and the lute makers took this for
granted-- that our universe is far too complex for any mind to comprehend.
No matter how specific, an questions will leave some-perhaps very
small--causes unnoticed, which can greatly affect the outcome of the pro-
cess. Every child realizes quickly that we live in a world of constant disor-
der which nonetheless manifests an underlying order because it tends to
remain within certain bounds. Is there any reason that this underlying order
should not be Pythagoras' consonance? That Newton's object at rest is not
really ever at rest but instead subject to and continually influenced by a
greater harmony than we can, with our limited minds, easily perceive?
Perhaps it is time now to reconsider our aversion to skin. How much
different our world might be if modern man had pursued science and engi-
neering with skin, as music and art should be, rather than with determining
systems.

PORTLAND, OREGON
238 ROBERT LUNDBERG

ApPENDIX
Glossary of Tenns

Barring (bars, SbUts, bracing): Small pieces of fIr wood glued transversely to the under-
side of the belly to add some sbUctural rigidity to the lute and to control the tone. They
are offcuts from the same wood as the belly.
Bass bar: A heat-bent asymmetrical bar used to control and limit the bass response. In
shape, areiteration of the belly outline directly below it.
Belly (top): The thin soundboard of the lute which is made of a light-weight coniferous
tone-wood, usually flf or spruce.
Body frets: Non-moveable wooden frets glued to the belly to extend the fretting range
through the octave.
Bowl (shell, body, back): The consbUction that forms the body of the lute, built up of
individual ribs of a hard wood such as yew, maple, or ash, and the spacers in between
them, if used.
Bridge: The piece that is glued to the belly to wh ich the strings are fastened. It is usu-
ally made from walnut or pearwood, often stained black.
Cap (capping strip, end clasp): A thin strip of the same material as the ribs which wraps
around the lower end of the body helping to bind the ends of the ribs together, and aug-
menting the gluing surface for the belly.
Counter-cap (tail strip, end strip, lower block): A piece of fir glued to the inside of the
bowl, opposite the cap, to help bind the ends of the ribs together.
Course (choir): A set of one or two strings tuned and played as a unit. Strings in a
course are tuned in unison or in octaves.
Fingerboard (fretboard): A thin piece of hardwood glued to the front of the neck which
is played upon when stopping the strings. Usually of ebony or some other hard wood.
Fret(s): On historical lutes, small pieces of gut-string material tied around the neck
which serve to stop the vibrating string at a pre-determined interval when that string is
pressed against the fingerboard. Since they were tied they could be moved by sliding
slightly up or down the neck to change the temperament of the insbUment. The correct
neck-Iength proportion of the Renaissance lute allows eight tied gut frets to be placed at
semitone intervals.
Half binding (purfling, binding, lace): A thin strip of wood inlaid into the outside edge
of the belly one-half of its thickness. It reinforces and protects the edge of the soft fir
belly.
Label: A small slip of paper glued to the inside of the lute, usually under the rosette,
with the maker's name, place, and date.
Linings (rib reinforcement): Usually paper, rarely vellum, strips which are glued to the
inside joints of the ribs to reinforce the joint.
Multi-rib: Many-ribbed lutes, usually 25 to 51 ribs.
Nail: The joints between the neck and neck block, and between the pegbox and neck,
were usually aligned, clamped, and reinforced with long hand forged square nails.
Neck (handle): The piece which carries the strings over the belly, around which the frets
are tied; usually a core soft wood, such as poplar, veneered with a harder one, commonly
ebony, and sometimes inlaid with woods or ivory.
 THE PHYSICS ANDMEl'APHYSICS OFGALILEO'S LUrE 239

Neck block (upper block, top block, front block): A piece of wood to which the ends of
the ribs and the narrow end of the belly are glued, and to which the neck is glued and
nailed or screwed.
Nut: A small quarter round piece of ivory, bone, or hard wood which holds the strings at
the pegbox end of the neck.
Peg(s) (tuning peg, lute pin): A friction device to which the string is tied and wound,
used to raise and lower the pitch of the string. The pegs are tumed on a lathe from fruit-
wood or boxwood or other especially hard wood.
Pegbox(peghead, head): The construction that holds the tuning pegs, which is made of
beech wood, or (rarely) maple, which is usually veneered and decorated in the same
manner as the back of the neck. In the case of the archlute, theorbo, and chitarrone the
pegboxes are greatly prolongated.
Points (beards): Two small pointed pieces of wood which carry the fingerboard onto the
belly/front block. Originally arepair technique used to widen the narrow portion of the
belly which extends onto the neck in order to accommodate the new wider neck, which
was then adopted as stylistic feature. Not used prior to ca. 1560.
Rib(s) (stave): The individual pieces that make up the major part of a lute bowl.
Rosette (rose, knot, star): The decorative and acoustically significant soundhole carving
which, in most historicallutes, is carved into the soundboard itself.
Shaded yew: Refers to the bi-color effect of using yew wood with both the heartwood,
which is a dark reddish-brown, and the sap wood' which is a medium cream-yellow, to ef-
fect visual definition in wide-ribbed instruments. In multi-rib lutes shaded yew ribs give
the illusion that the bowl has twice so many ribs as it actually has.
Spacer(s) (fillets): Thin decorative strips of hardwood or ivory (or combinations thereof)
inserted in between the joints of adjacent ribs, which actually space the two ribs apart the
distance of their thickness ..
Treble bars: One, two, or more small radially placed bars that are glued to the belly un-
der the treble side of the bridge to control treble response and overall tonal balance in the
lute.
 CONTRIBUTORS

HOWARD MAYER BROWN, Ferdinand Schevill Distinguished Professor of Music at The

University of Chicago, has written extensivelyon the music of the Renaissance. Among
his many publications, his book A Chansonnier from the Time of Lorenzo the
Magnificent (1983), won the Kinkeldey prize of the American Musicological Society for
the best scholarly book of the year. In 1988 he was awarded the Galileo Galilei prize by
the University of Pisa for his contributions to the study of Italian culture.

ROBERT E. BUTTS is Professor of Philosophy in the University of Western Ontario. His

works include Kant and the Double Government Methodology (1986, 2nd ed.). He edits
the University of Western Ontario Series in Philosophy of Science; from 1980-1990 he
was Editor-in-Chief of Philosophy of Science.

VICTOR COELHO is Associate Professor of Music History at The University of Calgary

as weIl as a lutenist. His publications include The Manuscript Sources of 17th-Century
Italian Lute Music and a forthcoming volume in the Cambridge Studies in Performance
Practice series. He is currently working on a textbook, entitled Wisdom I nherited from the
Past: The Relevance of Music History. Since 1985 he has been Editor-in-Chief of The
Journal ofthe Lute Society of America.

H. FLORIS COHEN is Professor of History of Science at the University of Twente

(Netherlands). He is the author of Quantifying Music (Dordrecht, 1984) and The Banquet
ofTruth (forthcoming).

STILLMAN DRAKE is Professor Emeritus at The University of Toronto. He is the author

and translator of numerous publications on the science of Galileo. Among them are
Discoveries and Opinions of Galileo (New York, 1957), Galileo at Work (Chicago,
1978), Galileo (Oxford, 1980), and Galileo: Pioneer Scientist (Toronto, 1989).

OWEN GINGERICH is Senior Astronomer and Professor of Astronomy and History of

Science at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, and an authority on
Copernicus and Kepler. His recent works include two anthologies of his essays: The Eye
of Heaven: Ptolemy, Copernicus, Kepler and The Great Copernicus Chase and Other
Adventures in Astronomical History.

FREDERICK HAMMOND is Irma Brandeis Professor of Romance Culture at Bard College,

New York. He is both a professional harpsichordist and a scholar, the author of two
books on Girolamo Frescobaldi published by Harvard University Press (1983) and Garland
Publishing (1988).
241
242 CoNTRIBUTORS

WILLIAM JORDAN is Professor of Music Theory and Composition at The University of

Calgary. Although his primary career is as a composer, he holds a doctorate in music
theory and maintains an interest in connections between musicology and music theory,
c1assica1 philosophy, and the humanities.

ROBERT LUNDBERG is a lutemaker in Portland, Oregon, building for an international

clientele. Trained in the USA and Europe, he has done extensive research on historica1
lute construction, and has been involved in the conservation and restoration of lutes in
important collections worldwide. Lundberg writes on the lute and related subjects, and for
ten years lectured at the Erlangen Lautenbaukurs.

CLAUDE V. PALIS CA is Henry L. and Lucy G. Moses Professor of Music Emeritus at

Ya1e University. He editited and translated Vincenzo Galilei's scientific essays in The
Florentine Camerata: Documentary Studies and Translations (New Haven, 1989) and was
the first to reveal a link between his studies in acoustics and those of his son, Ga1ileo.

RUDOLF RASCH is Associate Professor of Musicology at the University of Utrecht

(Netherlands). His areas of research are the music history of the Netherlands (especia1ly of
the 17th century), musical acoustics and perception, and problems of tuning and temper-
ament. He is a1so the director of the Diapason Press, a small publishing company
focusing on such areas as tuning and temperament, and microtonal music.

ALEXANDER SILBIGER is Professor and Chairman of the Department of Music at Duke

University. He holds doctorates both in engineering mechanics and in musicology; his
publications in engineering include studies on vibrating structures and wave propagation,
and his work in musicology includes books and artic1es on sources, styles, and genres of
music from the 16th and 17th centuries.

Ackerman, James 95n
Alberti, Leon Battista 24
Alemanni, Nicolo 76
Alessandro Merio [Romano ]
160-163, 166-169,
171, 174
Allen, Woody 118n
Arcadelt, Jacques 158
Ariosto 162, 168, 170, 171
Aristotle 3-5, 22, 29, 47,
48, 102, 132, 134, 143
Aristoxenus 102, 150, 194
Amault de Zwolle, Henri
212, 214, 215
Artusi, Giovanni Maria 35,
95, 96, 199
Ashworth, William, Jr.,
102n
Askew, Pamela 105n, 108n
Audsley, G. A. 150
Augustine 132, 133, 138
Bach, Johann Sebastian 43,
199
Baglioni, Giuseppe 73
Baines, Anthony 215n
Ban, Joan Albert 185;
musical knowledge,
192-196; 197, 203-205
Bandmann, Günter 106n,
108
Barberini family: household
and inheritance, 68-72;
patronage, 74-78;
operas and symbolism
76-77; Galileo affair
and criticism of, 81, 89;
Quarantore 82-84
Barberino, Francesco da 68
Barbetta, Giulio Ces are 163
Bardi, Giovanni 143, 144,
153, 167, 168, 173
Barre, Antonio 158, 161,
167, 168
Barton, Todd 216n, 217n
Bauer-Formiconi, B. 165n
Becherini, Bianca 172
INDEX
Beeckman, Isaac: on beats,
17-19, 32-34; 28, 96n,
185; musical
knowledge, 189-192;
196, 198, 203-205
Bembo, Pietro 165
Benedetti, G. B. 7, 8, 15, 33
Bentivoglio, Enzo 82, 84
Bentivoglio, Guido 80, 82,
84
Bemini, Gianlorenzo 69,
73, 74, 78, 80
Bessaraboff, Nicolas 224n
Biagioli, Mario 92, 93
Bianconi, Lorenzo 41, 42,
92n, 96
Blankenburg, Quirinus van
202
Blumenberg, Hans 91, 93,
94, 114
Boccaccio, Giovanni 157
Boethius 91, 92, 194, 216,
217
Boesset, Antoine 194, 195
Borsi, Franco 74n, 78n
Bottegari, Cosimo 172
Bouchard, Jean-Jacques 86
Bourgoin, J. 227n
Bouwsma, William 91n
Bracciolini deli' Api,
Francesco 73, 74
Brahe, Tycho 51, 52
Brancacci, G. C. 167
Braun, Wemer 41, 42
Brown, Howard 53n, 154n,
157, 158n, 159n,
163n, 164n, 165n,
166n, 168n, 173n,
174n
Brugmans, H. L. 201n
Bumey, Charles: A General
History o[ Music, 35-
37,42,43
Buxtehude, Dietrich 43
Caccini, Giulio 93, 94, 95,
167, 172, 173
243
Cage, John 133
Camassei, Andrea 74, 82
Camiz, Franca 75n
Campanella, Tomaso 73, 80
Campen, Jacob van 195
Capaccio, G. C. 107
Caravaggio 68, 105
Carissimi, Giacomo 35, 36,
42,43
Camap, Rudolf 115n
Carter, Tim, 93n
Cartolaio, Giovanni dei 160
Caspar, Max, 46, 62
Castelli, Dom Benedetto 75
Castiglione, G. B. 112, 113
Caus, Salomon de 190
Cavalli, Francesco 201
Cesarini, Virginio 73, 84
Cesi, Federico 73
Cesti, Antonio 35
Chilesotti, Oscar 154n
Ciampoli, Giovanni 73, 84
Cicero 132
Cigoli, Ludovico 97, 136
Cipolla, Carlo 79n
Cochrane, Eric 79n, 175n
Coelho, Victor 93n, 172n
Cohen, H. F. xi, 96n, 121n,
124n, 143n, 200n
Copenhaver, Brian 97n,
114n
Copemicus, 46, 130
Corelli, Archangelo 36, 42,
43
Cortona, Pietro da 74, 75,
78, 82, 83
Court, Suzanne 159n
Critchlow, Keith 227n
Crombie, A. C. xi, 92n, 94
Cusick, Suzanne 160n
Dalhaus, Carl 44
Dall' Aquila, Serafino 165
Dante 94n, 106-109, 168
Darwin, Charles 116
Deering, Richard 193
Della Bella, S. 78, 82, 84
244
Della Rovere family 72
Descartes, Rene 4, 6, 8n, 28,
29, 81, 96, 97, 120,
185; musical lmowledge
196-197; 197, 203-
206, 236
Diaz, Furio 157n
Dickreiter, Michael 45
Dijksterhuis, E. I. 186
Diruta, Girolamo 193
Doni, Giovanni Battista 81,
96, 192
Dorico, Valerio 160
Dostoevsky, Fyodor 126n
Doursther, Horace 223
Drabkin, 1. E. 7n
Drake, Stillman xi, 4, 7n,
9n, 12n, 51n, 98n,
100, 115, 118n, 146n,
21ln
Duncan, A. M. 5
Dürer, Albrecht 111
Einstein, Albert 43
Eisenstein, Elisabeth 23
EI Greco 126n
Elliott, I. H. 80n
Eist, Ioannes vander 200
Euc1id 8; Elements, 9
Eyck, Iacob van 191
Eyck, Steven van 199
Facoli, Marco 163
Fano, Fabio 157n
Ferabosco, Domenico 157
Ferro, Vincenzo 158
Ficino, Marsilio 134
Filippo Magalotti 78
Fiorani, Luigi 74n
Florentine Camerata 133,
153, 174
Francesco da Milano 154,
157, 159, 160
Frescobaldi, Girolamo:
Recercari and Fantasie,
35, 95, 96; 43, 75, 88,
199
Fugger, Raymond 215, 222
Fuller, R. Buckminster 219
Fumaroli, Marc 73n
Galilei, Galileo xi, 3-6, 20,
24, 26, 28, 29, 32, 34,
INDEX
51, 78, 88, 111, 131, Giustiniani, Vincenzo 167
153, 175, 236, 237; Glareanus, Heinrich 189
Discorsi, 25, 122; on Godwin, Iosce1yn 98
equal speeds in fall, 7, Goethe 126n
11-15; 8; on phil- Gombrich, E. H. 135
osophy, 9; 10, 22-23; Gouk, Penelope xi
on motion, 11; Gozza, Paolo ix, xi, 94n
description of the 8ve Grant, Kerry 37n
and 5th, 16; Sidereus Grassi, Orazio 79, 100
nuncius, 52, 53; trial Grijp. Louis Peter 108n
of, 67, 70, 79-81; on Grimm Brothers 41
elevation of Urban VIII, Grisar, Iohannes 72n
73; printing of Guidiccioni, Lelio 73
Dialogo, 78; influence Guitti, Francesco 82, 84, 8S
on visual art, 97; Gundersheimer, Werner 72n
musical training, 98, Gustavus Adolphus of
99, 211; use of myth in Sweden 79
II Saggiatore, 99-103,
114; influence on Kant; Haar, Iames 157, 167
on sense qualities, 116- Hamburger, Paul51
121; on consonances, Hamel, Marie-Pierre 150
123-127; and Hanunond, Frederick 74n,
Pythagoreanism, 130- 75n, 82n, 96n, 98
132, 135, 136; on Harnin, Don 158n
imitation, 136; on Harton, Michelle 232, 233
mathematics 137; on Harwood, Ian 212n
resident and non- Haskell, Francis 68
resident qualities, 146; Hatfield, Gary 98n
construction of lute Hawkins, Sir Francis:
218, 219, 222-224, History o[ Music, 36
226 Haydn, Ioseph 36
Galilei, Michelagnolo 211 Hellwig, Friedemann 232
Galilei, Vincenzo [Ir.] 211 Heimholtz, Herrnann 20
Galilei, Vincenzo: x, 135, Hemony, Pierre 198
211; dispute with Heninger, S. K. 91n
Zarlino, 8, 10; as Hessen, Boris Mikhailovich
experimentor, 10, 11, 26,28
34, 143-151; Dialogo Heyde, Herbert 221n
della musica antica e Hill, lohn W. 160n
moderna, 53, 54, 56, Hind, Arthur 227n
98, 99, 194; II Hipparchus 3, 4
Fronimo, 99, 132, 172, Hollander, John 135n
174; contents of 1563 Homer 102
lute book, 154-156; Hooykaas, R. 23
dedication of 1563 Hope, Charles 72n
book, 157; on inta- Hotrnan, Nicolas 201, 202
bulation 158-159 Hudson, Richard 165n
Gassendi, Pierre 28 Huygens, Christiaan 6, 185,
Gaultier, Denis 202 197; musical
Geminus 3, 4 knowledge, 198-202;
Gesualdo, Carlo 194 contacts with other
Ghiselin, B. 125n musicians, 201-206
Gingerich, Owen 46n, 48n Huygens, Constantijn 192,

194, 196, 198, 199, 200
Huygens, Constantijn, Jr.
199, 200
Jackson, Philip 160n
Jahnel, Franz 221n
Jansz [PadbrueJ, David 187,
188, 193n
Jonkbloet, W. J. A. 192n
Josquin des Pres 40
Kant, Immanuel 115
Kapsberger, J. H. 73, 74n,
75
Kasha, Michael 232
Kassler, Jamie xi, xii, 91n,
96n, 97, 98n, 103n
Kemp, Martin 98n
Kepler, Johannes 4-7, 28,
34, 123, 132, 190; on
heliocentricity, 45; on
ratios for scales, 46; on
solids, 47; derivation of
harmony of the spheres,
48-63; on Vincenzo
Galilei, 56-57.
Kerll, Johann Caspar 43
Kircher, Athanasius 96, 199
Kirkendale, Warren 162n,
164
Koyre, Alexandre 28-30
Kristeller, Paul Oskar x
Kuhn, Tbomas 38-40, 131
Kula, Witold 224n
Landi, Stefano 74n
Landini, G. B. 78, 88
Landsberg, Herrad von 106
Lanier, Nicolas 199
Lasso, Orlando di 187, 194
Lavin, Irving 74n
le Blon, Michel 193
le Jeune, Claude 191
Legrenzi, Giovanni 43
Leibniz, Gottfried von 120,
132
Leman, Auguste 70n
LeoX72
Leonardo da Vinci 24, 227
Levi, Ezio 164n
Lobwasser, Ambrosius 191
Lockwood, Lewis 159n,
165n
INDEX
Longhi, Roberto 105n
Longomontanus, Christi an
52
Lully, Jean-Baptiste 43,
199-201
Lundberg, Robert 212n,
215n, 219n, 220n,
222n, 224n, 226n
Lundy, Lawrence 216n
Lupi, Didier 187
MacClintock, Carol 163n
Macrobius 132
Maestlin, Michael 46
Maillart [MaillardJ, Pierre
190, 199
Maniates, Maria Rika ix
Marazzoli, Marco 75, 76
Maria Lactans 106
Marino, Giambattista 73
Mascardi, Agostino 71, 73
Mathieu-Arth, Francroise 41,
42
Mattheson, Johann 218
Mazzochi, Domenico 73, 75
Mazzochi, Virgilio 75
Medici family: Cosimo II,
92; stage productions,
92-93; Alessandro (Leo
XI), 157, Bernadetto,
157
Medieval technology 21-22,
Mei, Girolamo 135, 153,
173
Meibomius, Marcus 199
Mellan, Claude 69, 75
Mersenne, Marin xi, 4-7,
192, 194, 196; Har-
nwnie Universelle, 6,
19, 86; 34, 81, 87, 96,
143, 150n, 151n, 199,
205
Merton, Robert 23
Metius, Adrianus 198
Milton, John 129
Minamino, H. 159
Moliere 117, 201
Montefeltro, Federigo da
108, 110
Monteverdi, Claudio:
L'Or[eo, 35; 79, 94, 9
5, 96, 97, 114, 194,
195, 199
245
Morley, Thomas 189
Mozart, W. A . 126n
Murata, Margaret 75n
Myers, Patricia Ann 158n,
160n
Nagler, Alois 93
Nenna, Pomponio 194
Ness, Arthur, J., 154n
Newton, Isaac 32, 132, 136,
237
Nicolson, Benedict 105n
Nierop, Dirck
Rembrandtszoon van
185; musical
knowledge, 197-198,
203-205
Noehles, Karl 82n
Nola, Giovanni Domenico da
158, 166, 167
Noske, Frits 187n
Nugent, George 158
Nurse, Ray 223n
Olschki, Leonardo 24-26,
29,32
Ongaro, Giulio 219n
Oresme, Nicole 24
Orsini, Chi ara 53n
Ovid 102
Pachelbel, Johann 36
Pacioli, Fra Luca 217
Palestrina, Giovanni 74n
Palisca, Claude x, 10, 37,
38n, 53n, 96n, 97n,
144n, 145n, 146n,
149n, 153n, 172, 173,
174n
Panofsky, Erwin 97n, 98n,
111, 136
Papius, Andreas 187
Paradigm shift 38-44
Parker, Geoffrey 79n
Pascal, Blaise 138
Pascal, Etienne 26
Pasqualini, Marc' Antonio
76, 77, 84
Pastor, Ludwig von 68, 73n
Patera martelli 106
Paul III (Farnese) 72, 130
Pecchai, Pio 68
Peiresc, Fabri de 81, 86
246
Peri, Jacopo 93, 94, 172
Periodization in music
history 37-38
Petrarch 158, 161, 162,
166, 168, 170
Petrucci, Ottaviano 163
Philolaus 130
Piccinini, Alessandro 95
Pietrobono of Ferrara 165
Pirrotta, Nino 93n, 94n,
98n, 163
Plato 5; on measurement, 7;
92, 129, 132, 216
Platonic solids 5, 45, 46,
52,57
Pleiade 133
Plutarch 130
Poussin, Nicolas 75, 80
Praetorius, Michael 222-224
Ptolemy 47, 54, 194, 200
Purcell, Henry 199
Pye, David 236
Pythagoras 103n, 123, 143,
216, 223, 237
Quintilianus, Aristides 194
Rabb, Theodore 39
Radice, Betty 94n
Rameau, Jean-Philippe 97
Rasch, R. A. 188n, 192n,
194n, 199n, 20On,
201n, 202n
Redondi, Pietro 73n, 75n,
8On, 81n, IOOn
Reinken, Johann Adam 43
Riccardi, Niccolo 78
Ripa, Cesare 68; Iconologia,
102, 103, 107, 113
Robert, Antoine 193
Robertis, Domenico de 164n
Rodio, Rocco 168
Ronan, Colin 79
Rooley, Anthony ix
Rore, Cipriano de 157, 160,
170
Rospigliosi, Giulio
(Clement IX) 75, 84
Rossi, Luigi 35, 76
Rossi, Miche1angelo 75
Rossi, Paolo 23
Ruggiero, Maria Grazia 74n
INDEX
Sacchi, Andrea 76, 77, 78,
79, 81, 84
Salinas, Franciscus 194, 199
Salmon, Thomas 199
Sances, Lorenzo 76
Sannazaro, Jacopo 165
Sauveur, Joseph 196
Scaglia, Desiderio 88
Scamozzi, Vincenzo 223n
Schlick, Amolt: on tuning
the organ, 17, 18, 20,
22, 32-34;
Schmitt, Charles 146n
Schoenenberger, Walter
105n, 106
Schooten, Franciscus van
196
Schütz, Heinrich 36
Scott, John Beldon 67, 74,
78n, 79n
Scotto, Girolamo 160
Serodine, Giovanni
Allegoria della scienza,
97, 104-113;
Shakespeare, William 45
Simpson, Christopher 199
Slim, H. Colin 154n
Smith, Douglas Alton 215n,
222n
Socrates 86
Someren, Hieronymus van
199
Spethe, Andreas 191
Spitzer, Leo 129n, 132n,
133n
Springenklee, Hans 107n
Stapulensis, Faber 189
Steele, John 167n
Stelluti, Francesco 73, 78
Stevin, Simon 6, 185, 190;
testing speeds, 7;
L'Arithmetique, 8; 9,
32, 34; musical
knowledge, 186-188,
203, 205, 206
Stradella, Alessandro 35, 42,
43
Stradivari family 218
Stravinsky, Igor 126n
Striggio, Alessandro 79
Strozzi, Piero 143, 144
Sweelinck, J. P. 96, 191
Tagliavini, Luigi 41
T ansillo, Luigi 165
Tartaglia, Niccolo: Nova
scientia, 7; 8-10, 24
Tasso, Torquato 82
Tegelbergh, Jan Dircksz 191
Teti, Girolamo 76, 79n
Thirty-Years War 39,79
Tieffenbrucker, Magno 219;
Tieffenbrucker family
workshop, 227-229,
231
Tielke, Johann 108n
Timotheus Milesius 99
Tinctoris, Johannes de 214
Toffolo, Stefano 219n
Tomiinson, Gary 97n, 103n,
175n
Torricelli, Evangelista 26
Truesdell, Clifford ix
Valkestijn, J. W. W. 192n,
193n
Vasa, King Vladislao 84
Vasa, Prince Alexander
Charles 82, 84
Vecchi, Orazio 163
Verhaer, Evert 191
Verheiden, Abraham 188
Viadana, Lodovico 194
Virchis, Girolamo 108n
Vittori, Loreto 76
Vouet, Simon 75
Vredeman, Jacob 190, 197,
198
Waddy, Patricia 67n, 75n
Wagner, Richard 40
Walker, D. P. xi, 48, 53n,
93n, 94n, 133, 134,
144, 174, 194n
Wallis, John 200
Warner, Maria 106n
Weil, Mark 82n
Wendland, John 162
Werckmeister, Andreas 200
Westman, Robert xi, 48n
White, Jr., Lynn 22, 23
Whitehead, Alfred North
131, 132n, 136n, 137
Willaert, Adrian 40, 172
Wilson, Charles 39n
 INDEX 247

Wintemitz, Emanuel 106n, Zarlino, Gioseffo 8, 54, 56,

107, 108n, 109, lUn 149n, 153, 174, 186-
Wittkower, Rudolf 105n 188, 190, 193, 196,
Worp, J. A. 199n 200, 204
Zaslaw, Neal41
Zilsel, Edgar 26-28
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