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i
Composing the World: Harmony in the Medieval Platonic Cosmos, Andrew Hicks
iii
ANDREW HICK S
1
iv
1
Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers
the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education
by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University
Press in the UK and certain other countries.
1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2
Printed by Sheridan Books, Inc., United States of America
v
CONTENTS
SE R I E S E D I TO R S’ FO R E W O R D
Critical Conjunctures in Music and Sound offers a space from which to engage
urgent questions currently animating the humanities from the perspectives of
music, sound, and listening. Tied together by a common epistemological attitude,
the books in this series reconstitute the place of scholarship in response to a
world rapidly transforming under economic and technological integration, on the
one hand, and political and social disintegration, on the other. Authors articulate
new musical and sonic relations to the composition of the political, the social, and
the economic, while developing new ways to analyze music’s ever-shifting associa-
tions with aurality, human/nonhuman divides, materiality, nature, and ontology.
These relations and associations in turn provoke new questions about the past,
and a reassessment of our historical and ethnographic priorities—both empirical
and speculative. The series urges philosophical and theoretical critique to medi-
ate and question the relationship of music studies to other forms of knowledge
production. What it proposes, therefore, is a form of conjunctural analysis that
does not foreclose in advance how sound, music, and other forces are or have
been articulated together. “Conjuncture” captures the immediate and mobile sets
of circumstances determining the present, which authors engage by challeng-
ing theoretical categories and forms from a variety of disciplinary, historical, or
geographical homes.
Jairo Moreno and Gavin Steingo
ix
x
xi
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Many demiourgoi had a hand in the creation of this world of words, whose cos-
mogony spanned three institutions. At the Eastman School of Music, where its
first seeds were sown, I thank in the first instance Gabriela Currie (now at the
University of Minnesota), who has seen this project through every stage of its
development, as well as Patrick Macey, Martin Scherzinger, and Roger Freitas,
who accepted and fostered my peculiar brand of musicology. At the Centre for
Medieval Studies, University of Toronto, I thank John Magee and Peter King,
who expertly advised the doctoral work that grew into the larger project that fills
these pages; A. G. Rigg, who patiently read with me many of the Latin texts that
populate its pages; Brad Inwood, who generously accepted me as an interloper in
the Collaborative Programme in Ancient and Medieval Philosophy, whose Greek
and Latin reading groups and seminars exemplified the patient analysis of ancient
and medieval texts; and Fr. Édouard Jeauneau, whose mentorship, guidance, and
friendship has made this book possible. Over the past five years, my colleagues at
Cornell University (the Department of Music, Program in Medieval Studies, and
the Department of Classics) have provided an engaging environment for the proj-
ect’s final stages. In particular, I thank Andy Galloway, Judith Peraino, Charles
Brittain, Scott MacDonald, Roger Moseley, and Pete Wetherbee, all of whom pro-
vided valuable feedback on early drafts of some (or all) of its chapters, as well as
the graduate students (and colleagues) in my seminars on the history of music
theory, Latin philosophical commentaries, and medieval cosmologies (co-taught
with Benjamin Anderson).
Manuscript research in many European libraries was made all the more fruit-
ful by the generosity of my hosts John Marenbon (Trinity College, Cambridge),
Irène Caiazzo (Centre national de la recherche scientifique, Paris), Michael
Winterbottom (Corpus Christi College, Oxford), Martin Haltrich (Stiftsbibliothek
Zwettl), Fr. Hyacinthe Destivelle and Jean-Laurent Pinard (Centre d’Études Istina
and La Bibliothèque du Saulchoir), and many librarians (too many, with apologies,
to list here) at the Bibliothèque nationale de France, the Institut de recherche
xi
xii
xii Acknowledgments
et d’histoire des textes, the British Library, the Bodleian Library, Cambridge
University Library, the Parker Library, St. John’s College Library, the Biblioteca
Nazionale Centrale di Firenze, the Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, and Leiden
Universiteitsbibliotheek.
Many of these ideas were first floated in colloquia and public seminars, and I
thank in particular my many interlocutors at the History of Philosophy Seminar,
Trinity College (John Marenbon), the Séminaire “Histoire des sciences au Moyen
Âge,” École Pratique des Hautes Études (Irène Caiazzo and Danielle Jacquart),
the workshop on Medieval Music Theory in Context (Christian Leitmeir), the
Medieval Studies Colloquium at the University of Minnesota (Andrew Scheil),
Katholieke Universiteit Leuven’s Musicology Colloquium (David Burn), Yale
University’s History of Theory Seminar (Nathan Martin) and Medieval Song Lab
(Anna Zayaruznaya and Ardis Butterfield), and colloquia at Cornell’s Department
of Music and Department of Classics.
Scattered components of its argument have been published elsewhere:
“Pythagoras and Pythagoreanism in Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages,” in A
History of Pythagoreanism, ed. Carl Huffman, 416–434 (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2014), with permission from Cambridge University Press;
“Martianus Capella and the Liberal Arts,” in The Oxford Handbook of Medieval
Latin Literature, ed. David Townsend and Ralph Hexter, 307– 334 (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2012), with permission from Oxford University Press;
and “Musica speculativa in the Cambridge Commentary on Martianus Capella’s
De nuptiis,” Journal of Medieval Latin 18 (2008), 292–305, with permission from
Brepols Publishers. Dialogue from The Late Show with Stephen Colbert is courtesy
of the Late Show Inc. For permission to reproduce images, I thank the Walters Art
Museum; the Master and Fellows of Trinity College, Cambridge; Corpus Christi
College Library, Oxford; and Lennart Lannerbäck.
At Oxford University Press, I thank Suzanne Ryan, who has steered this proj-
ect with an expert hand (and provided astonishingly quick replies to importune
e-mails); Jairo Moreno and Gavin Steingo, who gave this undisciplined project
a ready home in their new series; and my readers, who improved the book in
countless ways.
Finally and first of all is my unpayable debt of gratitude to Kelli Carr, whose
unflagging support and unflinching criticisms have not only made this book pos-
sible but have made it better.
xiii
A B B R E V I AT I O N S
xiii
xiv
xiv Abbreviations
Abbreviations xv
xvi Abbreviations
Abbreviations xvii
xviii Abbreviations
A B O U T T H E CO M PA N I O N W E B SI T E
www.oup.com/us/composingtheworld
Oxford has created a website to accompany Composing the World. There readers
will find downloadable English translations of the Latin texts edited in the
Appendices (excerpts from William of Conches’s Glosulae de Magno Prisciano and
Hisdosus’s De anima mundi Platonica).
xix
xx
xxi
Prelude
Listening to the Universe
Mundus diligit concordiam.
—William of Conches, Glosae super Platonem, 39
“We can hear the universe!” This was the triumphant proclamation at a February
2016 press conference announcing that the Laser Interferometer Gravity
Observatory (LIGO) had detected a “transient gravitational-wave signal.” What
LIGO heard in the morning hours of September 14, 2015, was the “sound” of
cosmic forces of mind-boggling power diffused through a cosmic medium of
mind-boggling expansiveness.1 Einstein’s general theory of relativity predicted
that when massive stellar bodies explode or collide, the very fabric of space-time
would register the reverberations of the forces unleashed, and undulating vibra-
tions of space-time—gravitational waves—would propagate through the fabric of
the universe like ripples on the surface of a pond.2 The signal detected by LIGO
was a perceptible confirmation of Einstein’s equations: the transient ripple of
two black holes colliding more than a billion years ago, “their orbital inspiral and
merger, and subsequent final black hole ringdown.”3 The event was unseen and in
1
“Mind-boggling” was the term used to describe the event by David Reitze, executive director of the
LIGO Laboratory, in the press conference announcing the detection: “That’s what we saw here. It’s
mind-boggling,” “LIGO detects gravitational waves—announcement at press conference (part 1).”
YouTube video uploaded by the National Science Foundation, at 8:28, https://youtu.be/aEPIwEJmZyE
(accessed March 24, 2016).
2
See Marcia Bartusiak, Einstein’s Unfinished Symphony: Listening to the Sounds of Space- Time
(Washington, DC: Joseph Henry Press, 2000), who anticipated the musical response to the 2015 dis-
covery: “Firm discovery of these waves will at last complete the final movement of Einstein’s unfin-
ished symphony” (9). The mathematical model of the black hole ringdown—as yet undetected when
Bartusiak was writing—is discussed in a chapter entitled, “The Music of the Spheres” (188–206, with
the black hole collision at 195–196).
3
B. P. Abbott et al., “Observation of Gravitational Waves from a Binary Black Hole Merger,” Physical
Review Letters 116 0611202 (2016), 2.
1
2
Greene: You can actually in some sense hear the gravitational waves; they
vibrate at a frequency that, if you turn it into sound, the human ear can hear,
and these sounds …
Colbert [interrupting]: These waves can be turned into sound?
G: They can, and these are the most spectacular sounds from the standpoint
of—they herald a revolution in our understanding of the universe.
C: Okay, so I understand you brought one of these sounds with you.
G: Yeah, yeah I did.
C: And this is the sound of what? What are we listening to?
G: This is the sound of two black holes colliding.
C: Actually? This is actually a computer rendering of the gravitational waves
into sound.
4
The recorded wave sweeps from 35 to 250 hertz.
5
“LIGO detects gravitational waves,” at 18:43.
6
Ibid., at 10:54.
7
Sandi Doughton, “Hearing the Music of the Universe: Hanford Helps Find Einstein’s Gravitational
Waves,” The Seattle Times (February 11, 2016). http://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/science/
scientists-including-hanford-team-confirm-einsteins-theory-of-gravitational-waves/ [accessed March
23, 2016].
8
E.g., Arthur Jeffes, a London-based composer and producer, collaborated with astrophysicist Smaya
Nissanke (Radboud University) to construct a “musical narrative … which both demonstrates the
new data and responds to it artistically” (http://www.epcmusic.com/space).
3
P relude 3
I want to highlight three aspects of this exchange that are directly related to the
themes and arguments developed in this book. First, the human ability to hear
the cosmos is predicated upon the transduction of an extrasonic signal—a signal
that always exceeds or outstrips the physical, embodied limitations of the ear—
into a sonic representation accommodated to human sensory realities. As Greene
notes, we can “in some sense hear” gravitational waves, but only to the extent
that the signal transmitted via the medium of gravity is transduced into a sonic
signal that the ears can register. Put another way, only Pythagoras could hear the
music of the spheres (and as Isaac Newton is reported to have claimed: “I thought
Pythagoras’s Musick of the spheres was intended to typify gravity”).10
Second, these sounds are “spectacular” and “herald a revolution in our under-
standing of the universe.” The import of these sounds is epistemological. The
sounds qua spectacular (in the etymological sense of spectaculum as an act of
seeing) allow us insight into the unseen and invisible forces of nature; as trans-
duced sonic objects, they encode information about their sound producers and
“[tell] us things about the universe that we have no other way of discerning.”
Put another way, to hear the cosmos is to experience the world through a cosmic
acoustemology (acoustic epistemology) that privileges the experience of sound
as a special kind of relational knowledge, a “knowing-with and knowing-through
the audible.”11
9
“Gravitation Waves Hit the Late Show,” 6:48–8:00, http://www.cbs.com/shows/the-late-show-with-
stephen- colbert/video/F42ED0EC-2452-577E-F107-1614438B56F2/gravitational- waves-hit-the-late-
show/(accessed March 25, 2016). Dialogue courtesy of Late Show Inc.
10
Peter Pesic, Music and the Making of Modern Science (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2014), 131. The
quotation is recorded by John Conduitt (husband of Newton’s niece and co-resident with Newton at
Cranbury) in notes gathered for a (never realized) life of Newton: Cambridge, King’s College, Keynes
MS 130.07, 5r. The continuation of this claim clarifies Newton’s intention: “& as he makes the sounds
& notes to depend on the size of the strings, so gravity depends on the density of matter.” See J. E.
McGuire and P. M. Rattansi, “Newton and the ‘Pipes of Pan,’” Notes and Records of the Royal Society of
London 21 (1966), 108–143; but also note the important corrective provided by Paolo Casini, “Newton:
The Classical Scholia,” History of Science 22 (1984), 1–58.
11
Stephen Feld, “Acoustemology,” in Keywords in Sound, ed. David Novak and Matt Sakakeeny
(Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2015), 12.
4
12
I borrow the term “intermaterial” from Nina Sun Eidsheim, Sensing Sound: Singing and Listening as
Vibrational Practice (Durham: Duke University Press, 2015).
5
P relude 5
It is my hope that these broad claims will resonate with a wide variety of readers
in the fields of music studies, sound studies, medieval studies, and the history of
(natural) philosophy and science. The specific historical terrain of my argument is
more circumscribed, however; it focuses upon the music-theoretical, philosophical,
and philological specificity of these broader claims in the world of twelfth-century
music theory and philosophy. It offers a new intellectual history of the role of har-
mony in medieval cosmological discourse, focused primarily on the twelfth-century
reception and development of ancient and late-ancient Platonism, as transmitted
by Calcidius, Macrobius, Martianus Capella, and Boethius. Its central argument—
which synthesizes material from domains usually treated separately, including
philosophy, logic, cosmology, music theory, and literature—affirms music theory’s
foundational and often normative role within the development of medieval cos-
mological models, at both micro-and macrocosmic levels: the microcosmic harmo-
nies that govern the moral, physical, and psychic equilibrium of the human and the
macrocosmic harmonies that ensure cosmological perfection.
13
Nikolaus M. Häring, ed., Commentaries on Boethius by Thierry of Chartres and His School (Toronto:
Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1971), Tractatus de sex dierum operibus, 56.
14
Comm. in Mart. 8.1043–1044: Hec de uitali spiritu. Super Platonem enim hec latius executi sumus.
15
Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Codex Vaticanus latinus 919, 198va: Quid sit yle non hic dicetur, sed
in Platonis Thimeo.
6
16
Paris, Bibliothèque nationale, lat. 8624, 20r: quos in Arismetica euidentissime confutamus.
17
Lawrence Gushee, “Questions of Genre in Medieval Treatises on Music,” in Gattungen der Musik
in Einzeldarstellungen: Gedenkschrift Leo Schrade, ed. Wulf Arlt, Ernst Lichtenhahn, and Hans Oesch
(Munich: Francke Verlag, 1973), 410.
18
See, for instance, Dorit Tanay, Noting Music, Marking Culture: The Intellectual Context of Rhythmic
Notation, 1250–1400, Musicological Studies and Documents 46 ([s.l.]: American Institute of Musicology,
1999); Frank Hentschel, Sinnlichkeit und Vernunft in der mittelalterlichen Musiktheorie: Strategien
der Konsonanzwertung und der Gegenstand der musica sonora um 1300, Beiheft zum Archiv für
Musikwissenschaft 47 (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 2000).
19
E.g., Cecilia Panti, “The First ‘Questio’ of ms Paris, B.N. lat. 7372: ‘Utrum musica sit scientia,’” Studi
medievali 33 (1992), 265–313; Frank Hentschel and Martin Pickavé, “‘Quaestiones mathematicales’:
Eine Textgattung der Pariser Artistenfakultät in frühen 14. Jahrhundert,” in Nach der Verurteilung von
1277: Philosophie und Theologie an der Universität von Paris im letzten Viertel des 13. Jahrhunderts, ed. Jan
A. Aertsen, Kent Emery Jr., and Andreas Speer (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2001), 618–634; Hentschel,
Sinnlichkeit und Vernunft, 281–313.
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