Symposium ‘Hearing the Voice, Hearing the Soul’
List of Abstracts
1. Anne Sheppard (Royal Holloway, University of London)
‘Music and the Soul in Plato, Aristotle and the Neoplatonists’
Abstract
This lecture will begin by surveying the views of the soul found in Plato’s Phaedo, Republic
and Timaeus as well as the views about music found in Plato’s Republic, Laws and Timaeus.
It will then consider Aristotle’s very different account of the soul in the De Anima (On the
Soul) and Aristotelian views of the effect of music on the emotions and of the relation
between music and sense-perception. The lecture will conclude by explaining how the
Neoplatonists of late antiquity combined Platonic and Aristotelian views of the soul, and of
music, thus paving the way for developments in the Renaissance and later.
2. Wolfgang Fuhrmann (Musicology, Humboldt University Berlin)
“The ‚Renaissance‘ of the Phrygian Mode and the Rise of Negative Affect in Sacred
Music, ca. 1460-1520”
Abstract
During the earlier 15th century, composers of sacred polyphony chose liturgical genres and
devotional texts that leaned predominantly on ‘positive’ emotions (e. g., texts of praise),
while Texts of an ascetic, penitential or mourning nature mostly continued to be sung in
monophony. This is concordant with the contemporary view of polyphony as expressing
almost heavenly joy and jubilation. After mid-century, however, a trend toward the
expression of negative affects in polyphony can be discerned, evident in the cultivation of
compositions of mourning (including Requiem settings), of penitency and prayers for mercy
(for instance, in settings of the penitential psalms). Many sacred (and quite a few secular)
pieces embodying a ‘negative’ affect would be set in the ‘Phrygian mode’: a tonality with E
as final note often used in Gregorian chant, but virtually absent from polyphony composed
before the later 15th century. The possible implications of this correlation between choice of
mode and choice of mood are read against the background of late-medieval discussions of
inherent affective qualities of the church modes.
3. Giuseppe Gerbino (Musicology, Columbia University, New York)
‘The Two Souls of Renaissance Music’
Abstract
This presentation offers a first step toward the reconstruction of the way Renaissance culture
understood the relationship between music and mind. Philosophers and humanists writing
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about music from the point of view of natural philosophy found themselves in a rather
uncomfortable position. Classical antiquity bequeathed two main theories of the constitution
of the soul. The first, ontologically musical, had its origins in the narration of the creation of
the world soul in Plato's Timaeus. The second was based on Aristotle's De anima and
provided the foundation for the doctrine of the internal senses. As is well known to music
historians, the Platonic model was responsible for the idea that music has the power to shape
and condition the human soul. Conversely, Aristotelian psychology did not postulate any
special relationship between music and soul. Focusing on the writings of Guido Casoni,
Pompeo della Barba, and Francesco de' Vieri, I will discuss this conflict of visions as well as
the Renaissance attempt to find a synthesis between Platonic and Aristotelian conceptions of
the music-soul interaction. To privilege one philosophical model over the other meant to
draw rather different conclusions about what music is and does (or should do).
4. Jacomien Prins (Warwick University)
‘Marsilio Ficino’s and Girolamo Cardano’s Variations on The Dream of Scipio’
Abstract
Both the story of a near-death experience in the myth of Er that concludes Plato’s Republic
and the dream report about a disembodied soul in the Dream of Scipio in the sixth book of
Cicero’s Republic are narrations of journeys through the heavenly spheres. The influence of
these stories, and especially of their portrayal of a ‘music of the spheres’, was great and longlasting, despite rivalling Aristotelian conceptions of a silent cosmos. The Dream itself, which
was handed down to Ficino and Cardano as recorded in Macrobius’ commentary on it,
reflects a belief in the existence of a perfect harmonic world beyond the senses. Both
Renaissance philosophers used this belief to formulate an answer to the question of what one
can gain in this earthly life that is lasting and significant, especially if one compares it to that
other life in the hereafter. By comparing Marsilio Ficino’s (1433-1499) interpretation of
Scipio’s dream in his ‘Letter to King Ferdinand’ (Epistolae 6, Letter 13, 1479) with the
interpretation of the dream in Girolamo Cardano’s (1501-1576) ‘Dialogue between Girolamo
Cardano and Fazio Cardano, his own father’ (ca. 1574), I will demonstrate in this paper how
entirely different interpretations of the elusive ‘music of the spheres’, from perfect harmony
to sheer cacophony, were used to deal with what Ficino and Cardano considered to be
mankind’s major concerns, namely, physical and mental disease and the fear of one’s own
death and the illnesses of one’s fellow humans and grief over the deaths of one’s loved ones.
5. Penelope Gouk (Manchester University)
‘“On the Power of Words and Song”: Revisiting D. P. Walker’s Spiritual and Demonic
Magic (1958) and Responding to His Pioneering Discussion of Ficino’s Soul Music’
Abstract
This paper constitutes some reflections on the intangible relationship between music and
spirit (spiritus), a Platonically-influenced concept which I first came across in the context of
my doctoral research at the Warburg Institute under the supervision of D. P. Walker (19141985). Walker was a major figure in what the call for papers at this symposium describes as
the ‘interdisciplinary field of the history of music and philosophy’. Furthermore, as early as
1978 he had already called for a survey of the tradition of the harmony of the spheres in his
Studies in Musical Science in the Late Renaissance, with a view to see in what ways musica
mundana has had some reality as a part of, or influence on such fields as “ordinary music,
astronomy and cosmology, astrology and magic, architecture, mathematics and early modern
science” (p.3). My goal for this symposium is to ensure that his important contribution to this
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interdisciplinary field is recognised not just for its own sake, but also for having influenced
scholars such as myself, who still find it impossible to shoehorn our research on early modern
ways of thinking about music into any single disciplinary category. In this paper I will
suggest that an analysis of Walker’s portrayal of Ficino’s songs and their intended effects on
souls (demonic as well as human) can provide a starting-point for rethinking later
engagements with musica mundana, even at a time when this musical model was supposed to
have declined in influence.
6. Katherine Butler (Oxford University)
‘Music, Demons, and the Soul in England c.1580-1680’
Abstract
In the sixteenth century, music was often regarded as a ‘remedie against evil spirits’ (The
Praise of Musicke, 1586). The Biblical story of David playing the harp to drive away Saul’s
evil spirit was most commonly cited in evidence and explanations of music’s anti-demonic
powers traditionally relied on parallels between harmony and the divine order. Yet even in
the sixteenth century there were sceptics as to whether it had been David’s harp-playing or
rather his prayer and godliness that had worked Saul’s cure, and by the seventeenth century
the metaphysical powers of harmony were beginning to lose their explanatory force.
Music did not lose its reputation for driving away demons so quickly, however. Rather
accounts of music’s anti-demonic influence were increasingly framed in natural terms,
necessitating a shift in explanation from its harmonic to its affective powers. Saul’s illness
too was coming to be viewed as more of a physical rather than spiritual disease – usually
melancholy – though one that was exacerbated by demonic influence. Indeed melancholy was
popularly regarded as the ‘devils bath’ and the means through which evil spirits gained their
hold on the human soul. As a result music’s anti-demonic effects could now be explained via
its ability to alter the motions of the bodily spirits and the passions of the soul. Music was
still regarded as a preventative against demons, but via its ability to cure the humoral diseases
by which they gained their influence over the human soul. Through exploring ailments that
straddled the boundaries between spiritual and physical disease, this paper traces the shifting
understandings of how music affected the human body and soul in seventeenth-century
England.
7. Simon Jackson (Warwick University)
‘George Herbert, Suffering and Song’
Abstract
Throughout his short life, the poet, priest and musician George Herbert (1593-1633) was
afflicted by ill health – proving both a source of great frustration and artistic inspiration, and
culminating in Izaac Walton’s early biographical depiction of the poet using some of his last
breath to sing his poetry on his deathbed. In this paper I will examine the dynamic and
intensely physical, material way in which Herbert engaged his illness; and explore how his
suffering invigorates his poetry with an awareness of his body, his heart, blood, bones,
bowels and breath. I will pay particular attention to the ways in which Herbert frequently
conceives of suffering as ‘sounded’, sometimes as expressive yet inarticulate ‘sighs and
groans’, at other times as highly-wrought artistic song. For Herbert, music-making (and
singing in particular) bridges the gap between the physical and the spiritual, the body and the
soul, and is a balm for times ‘when displeasure/Did through my body wound my mind’
(‘Church-music’). Finally I will argue that for Herbert, the conjunction of suffering and song
allows the devotional poet an opportunity to interrogate his faith, to imagine Christ’s broken
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body on the cross in musical terms as the ‘stretched sinews’ of lute strings (‘Easter’), and to
come to terms with his pain.
8. Tomas McAuley (Indiana University)
‘Musical Affects and Philosophy in the Enlightenment’
Abstract
In this paper, I reveal how English and Scottish philosophy in the early eighteenth century
both drew on and informed widely-circulating ideas about music. I focus on theories of
musical affect, according to which the purpose of music is to move the affects of its listeners
for their physical and moral betterment. Sidestepping debates about the assumed
communicative qualities of particular musical figures, I address instead the philosophical
assumptions underlying such theories.
More specifically, I use Malcolm’s Treatise of Music (1721) to demonstrate how theories of
music’s affective force were usually informed by mechanism, the theory that everything in
nature is explicable according to physical laws. Conversely, I highlight Newton’s Opticks
(1704) as an instance of the impact of musical thought on the development of mechanistic
natural philosophy.
I close with a brief examination of what I identify as the eventual downfall of eighteenthcentury theories of musical affect. This is to be found, I claim, in the closing decades of that
century in the work of Immanuel Kant. In Kant’s philosophy, I argue, key presumptions
underpinning earlier eighteenth-century theories of musical affect were not only removed, but
also reversed, making such affectual theories no longer tenable.
9. Peregrine Horden (Royal Holloway, University of London)
‘Continuity and Context in the History of Islamic Music Therapy’
Abstract
The long tradition of theorizing the possibility of music therapy in the Islamic Middle East
can create, though its dependence on a few key early texts, an impression of great continuity.
That impression conceals a great deal, however: not only the lack of evidence for practical
realization of the ideas in question, but also important differences between one context and
another within which ideas about music therapy come to the fore. Starting with recent
recreations of supposed Ottoman musical healing, I shall work my way back from Ottoman
into ‘medieval’ Islamic times, showing how far the nature of the healing envisaged must be
related to immediate circumstances, much more than to the longue durée of theory.
10. Andrea Korenjak (Austrian Academy of Sciences, Vienna)
‘Music, the Soul, and the Senses as Exemplified by first half 19th Century Viennese
Medical Dissertations’
Abstract
In this paper I will give an overview of theories and the practical use of music in medicine
and psychiatry in the specific first half 19th century Viennese context. By the example of
some of the earliest Viennese medical dissertations dealing with music and other Viennese
medical writings, I will contextualize particularly the culturally- and historically-bound
notions of mental illness and the effect of music on the mind, the soul/Gemüth, and the
senses. Additionally, I will give insight into the practical use of music in Vienna, particularly
for patients suffering from an “illness of the Gemüth” [Gemüthskranke].
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Unlike the legendary healing stories passed on for centuries, 19th century medical
dissertations consider increasingly social factors affecting the patients’ “music perception” or
“sensitive faculty” [Empfindungsvermögen], and consequently, the success of music related
treatments: Education in the sense of studia humanitatis, musical preferences and habits,
nationality and gender.
In 1847 though, Carl Franz Hofgartner wonders in his Dissertatio inauguralis medica
exponens effectum musices in hominem sanum et aegrotum at the neglect of music in
medicine of his day, “since medicine has enjoyed the most unbelievable progress in the last
fifty years, not only in diagnostic but also in therapeutic respect”. The reason for this
development can be seen in the university medicine’s orientation towards the standards of
experimental science at that time. Furthermore, the awareness that mental illness would be
caused by a disease of the brain entailed a dominance of biologic oriented medicine and
psychiatry in Vienna.
Notwithstanding, considerations on music’s influence on the soul and the body (nerves) were
continuously discussed in many music philosophical and aesthetic writings, where music was
predominately regarded as an “intermediary” between the mind, the sense of hearing, and the
soul/Gemüth (or the “heart”, respectively).
11. Julian Johnson (Royal Holloway, University of London)
‘Silence, the Unsayable, and the Speechlessness of Music’
Abstract
I wondered whether music were not the sole example of the form which might have served – had
language never been invented – for the communication of souls. Music is like a possibility which has
never been developed, humanity having taken different paths, those of language.
My paper takes seriously this thought of Proust’s narrator in A la recherche du temps perdu
and proceeds by suggesting ways in which music’s exploration of a highly articulate mutism
counterpoints philosophy’s contemplation of the unsayable. It is grounded not in ancient or
Renaissance theory but in more recent musical thought traced from Debussy, Mallarmé and
Proust, through Vladimir Jankélévitch to Jacques Derrida and Jean-Luc Nancy.
I begin with Maeterlinck’s/Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande which, at the start of the twentieth
century, foregrounds an idea of music’s non-commensurability with language overshadowed
since the Renaissance. Its presentation of a vocal speechlessness as the state of the soul (‘the
nothingness’ of which Melisande is made, in Debussy’s words), contrasts with the blindness
of Golaud’s rationalist and linguistic search for ‘la verité’. But his increasing frustration is
also that of a musicology founded at exactly this time; in Arkel’s words, neither ‘knows what
the soul is.’
My suggestion is that the recent rethinking of language in terms of the gaps opened up
between its terms, and a direction in modern music which sheds the imitation of language that
had shaped it for 300 years, offers the beginnings of a cartography of the unsayable. In this
way, one might throw out a line from modern thought back towards a theorisation of the soul
in much older traditions. My interest is not with the unsayable as the ‘forever absent’ of
deconstruction, but with music’s capacity for affording the unsayable as presence; to that end,
my paper concludes by proposing some conceptual tools by which we might explore such an
idea.
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