Musica scientia : musical scholarship in the Italian Renaissance / Ann E. Moyer.

Author/creator Moyer, Ann E., 1955-
Format Book
Publication InfoIthaca : Cornell University Press, 1992.
Description325 pages : illustrations ; 25 cm
Subjects
Music--Italy. --15th century. --History and criticism.
Music--Italy. --16th century. --History and criticism.
Music theory--History. --15th century.
Music theory--History. --16th century.
Humanism--Italy.
Renaissance--Italy.

Contents The discipline of music in antiquity and the middle ages. Musical thought among the Greeks ; Later antiquity ; Boethius on music ; The medieval tradition -- Expansion of the Medieval tradition. Nicolaus Burtius of Parma ; Ramos de Pareja, Hothby, and Tinctoris: a range of opinion ; Franchino Gaffurio ; Giorgio Valla ; Beyond Boethius -- Humanists, mathematicians, and composers. Raffaele Brandolini ; Spataro and Aron ; The mathematicians ; An end to consensus -- Ancients and moderns. Dialogues, treatises, and essays ; Girolamo Cardano ; Music, ancient and modern: Vincentino, Lusitano, and Danckerts ; Daniele Barbaro and the commentaries on Vitruvius ; Reforms and revivals -- The science of sound and the study of culture. Gioseffo Zarlino ; Girolamo Mei ; Francesco Patrizi da Cherso ; Vincenzo Galilei ; The end of the Boethian tradition: minor musical writings of the late sixteenth century ; Ercole Bottrigari ; Toward a new synthesis.
Abstract Theories of music and its nature, central to many aspects of Renaissance thought, have nonetheless been difficult to integrate into modern scholarship. In this book, the author asserts that the Renaissance discipline must be understood in the terms of other contemporary fields of knowledge. Moyer begins with a clear and concise historical summary of ancient and medieval musical thought, emphasizing the importance of the Phythagorean teachings about music, transmitted to the medieval world through Boethius's De institutione arithmetica. Describing the factors that, in the late fifteenth century, led scholars and practicing musicians to raise new questions about the discipline and its study, Moyer closely analyzes the writings of the sixteenth-century Italians who debated the nature of music and its relationship to mathematics, the natural sciences, poetry, and rhetoric. Renaissance thinking about music, she shows, wrought a dramatic change in the understanding of the field: scholars came to distinguish between a science of sounding bodies and an art of music, an art to be studied in terms of poetics and the history of taste. Moyer's book offers a new and systematic treatment of a critical but neglected aspect of Renaissance thought. It makes a significant contribution to our understanding of the classification of knowledge in the Renaissance and of the process by which two competing kinds of analysis--humanistic and mathematical--came to distinguish the modern arts and sciences.
Bibliography noteIncludes bibliographical references (pages 297-320) and index.
LCCN 91055057
ISBN0801424267 (alk. paper)

Availability

Library Location Call Number Status Item Actions
Music Closed Stacks - Ask at Circulation Desk ML290.2 .M7 1992 ✔ Available Place Hold