Bloomsbury Cultural History - Philosophies
Skip to main content
Loading
Loading

We're sorry, but that page can’t be found.

Please visit our Home page or try using the Search, Explore or Browse links above to find what you are looking for.

Error Image
A Cultural History of Western Music in the Renaissance
A Cultural History of Western Music in the Renaissance

Jeanice Brooks

Jeanice Brooks is Professor of Music at the University of Southampton. She is author of The Musical Work of Nadia Boulanger: Performing Past and Future Between the Wars (CUP, 2013) and Courtly Song in Late Sixteenth-Century France (University of Chicago Press, 2000)and co-editor of Music and Poetry in the French Renaissance (Cambridge French Colloquia, 2001). Author affiliation details are correct at time of print publication.

Search for publications
and Richard Freedman

Richard Freedman is John C. Whitehead 1943 Professorship in the Humanities and Associate Provost for Curricular Development and Support at Haverford College. His books include The Chansons of Orlando di Lasso and their Protestant Listeners: Music, Piety, and Print in Sixteenth-Century France (University of Rochester Press/Boydell and Brewer, 2001), Music in the Renaissance (Norton in 2012) and An Anthology of Music in the Renaissance (Norton in 2012). Author affiliation details are correct at time of print publication.

Search for publications
(eds)

Bloomsbury Academic, 2023

Subjects

Period:

Early Modern

Place:

Europe

Related Content

Death’s Ritual-Symbolic Performance

Avriel Bar-Levav

A Cultural History of Death in the Age Of Enlightenment , Volume IV

The Cultural Histories Series

Cultural History Chapter

Emotions, Mortality, and Vitality

Gordon D. Raeburn

A Cultural History Of Death In The Renaissance , Volume III

The Cultural Histories Series

Cultural History Chapter

Introduction: Musicking in the Age of Enlightenment

David R. M. Irving and Estelle Joubert

A Cultural History of Western Music in the Age of Enlightenment

The Cultural Histories Series

Cultural History Chapter

Popular Culture

Remi Chiu

A Cultural History of Western Music in the Renaissance , Volume Volume 3

The Cultural Histories Series

Cultural History Chapter

The Undead and Eternal

Kathryn A. Edwards

A Cultural History Of Death In The Renaissance , Volume III

The Cultural Histories Series

Cultural History Chapter

Death’s Ritual-Symbolic Performance

Brenda Mathijssen and Claudia Venhorst

A Cultural History Of Death In The Modern Age , Volume VI

The Cultural Histories Series

Cultural History Chapter

Emotions, Mortality, and Vitality

Joanna Stalnaker

A Cultural History of Death in the Age Of Enlightenment , Volume IV

The Cultural Histories Series

Cultural History Chapter

Emotions, Mortality, and Vitality

Julie-Marie Strange

A Cultural History of Death in the Age of Empire , Volume V

The Cultural Histories Series

Cultural History Chapter

Exchange Liturgical Reform, Pilgrimage, and Saints’ Cults

Rebecca Maloy

A Cultural History of Western Music in the Middle Ages , Volume Volume 2

The Cultural Histories Series

Cultural History Chapter

Explaining Death: Belief, Law, and Ethics

Henry Novello

A Cultural History Of Death In The Modern Age , Volume VI

The Cultural Histories Series

Cultural History Chapter

View More

Philosophies

Skepticism and the Crisis of Musical Knowledge

by

Melinda Latour

Melinda Latour is Rumsey Family Assistant Professor in the Humanities and Arts and Assistant Professor of Musicology at Tufts University. Her research explores the intersection of music and philosophy in early modern Europe. She has published in Music and Letters, the Cambridge History of Sixteenth-Century Music, and the Journal of Musicology. Her first monograph, The Voice of Virtue: Moral Song and the Practice of French Stoicism, 1574–1652 (forthcoming) is supported by the American Council of Learned Societies and the National Endowment for the Humanities. Author affiliation details are correct at time of print publication.

Search for publications
DOI: 10.5040/9781350075566.ch-2
Page Range: 65–90

What is the purpose or value of music in human life? Today, common responses might be that it offers pleasure and entertainment, comforts us when we are down, provides a soundtrack for dancing or exercise, or relieves the stress of a busy day. For the most part, these views of music relate to the emotional and physical aspects of musical experience as it generates an aesthetic response of some kind. That is, our notions of beauty are bound up with feeling and taste. But what of the rational power of music, such as the ability of song to introduce or cement knowledge in the mind or trigger a memory? Parents and teachers of preschoolers are one group likely to recognize the cognitive utility of music, as they have witnessed the power of simple but delightful didactic songs like the “ABCs,” which easily teach an otherwise tedious academic lesson, or the ubiquitous “clean up song,” which uses a catchy melody to encourage resistant toddlers to help tidy up the room. Music therapists and health care workers in geriatrics are another group likely to cite the mental benefits of music, which has been able to recover lost speech and memory in some dementia patients (Chang et al. 2015).

Although present-day musicians and adult listeners tend to recognize the emotional aspects of music far more readily than its interconnected cognitive benefits, people in the mid-fifteenth to the mid-seventeenth century were deeply concerned with music’s relationship to the mind. As Rob Wegman has shown, a “crisis of music” developed early in this period, provoked by anxieties about music’s role as a transmitter of knowledge, as a way of thinking, and even as a mirror of human understanding (Wegman 2005b). This musical crisis emerged in tandem with a broader crisis of knowledge that was driven by the revival of ancient Skepticism. As a philosophical movement, Skepticism was more than a generalized posture of doubt; it encompassed a formal method for evaluating all claims to knowledge. Music reflected and exacerbated a concern with establishing the best way to know religious, moral, and political truths. As we will soon discover, this impulse became particularly visible in the push for textual clarity, the valorization of the vernacular, and the increased production of amateur music tutors and treatises. The effects of this intertwined intellectual and musical crisis were felt long into the seventeenth century, propelling changes in church worship, influencing compositional style, inspiring new musical genres, justifying a shift in aesthetics, and transforming performance practices to better align with the new knowledge-music paradigm.

Two sixteenth-century Skeptic philosophers summed up the spirit of the age in their signature questions: Michel de Montaigne’s famous motto “What do I know?” (Que sçay-je?) and Francisco Sanchez’s “What?” (Quid?), which he mounted like an obelisk at the end of his treatises. Together, these mottos embody the relentless quest for truth and knowledge that left no assumption or authority unchallenged. In Latin-based languages, there are two types of knowledge and knowing—one type rooted in the mind (it. sapere, fr. savoir, sp. saber) and another acquired through bodily or sensory experience (it. conoscere, fr. connaître, sp. conocer). The purpose of this chapter is to illuminate how music evolved as a way of knowing that exploited this tension between rational and embodied knowledge. Music proved to be a perfect example of the problem of knowledge in these debates, as it was clear that human musical practices modeled a complex interplay of physical skill and mechanics, sense perception and understanding, and had the power to elicit a powerful emotional response that could either cement knowledge or bypass cognitive processes altogether. As the stakes around knowledge reached new heights in this period, it is no wonder that the musical conversation ranged from the theoretical and philosophical to the proscriptive and speculative. How should music properly engage the mind and senses? And how would a proper use of music’s rational and sensory potential affect compositional style and musical performance?

The reactions to these issues in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were diverse and led to more doubts than conclusions. We will carve a path through this complex terrain by tracing musical ways of knowing illustrated in the folly literature, voiced in religious debates, and rehearsed in musical and visual materials—reading them through the Skeptical debates of the time. We will conclude with the surprising transformation of these debates over knowledge in the age of exploration, as Europe’s traditions and ideas were brought into counterpoint and conflict with those from cultures beyond its frontiers. Over time, the instability of the sixteenth-century Skeptical turn gave rise to various musical and philosophical strategies for establishing a secure basis of knowledge through observation and applied experimental practice.

A Theme Song for Fools

Sebastian Brant’s (1458–1521) bestseller The Ship of Fools (1494; see Figure 2.1) opens with a series of woodcuts, attributed to Albrecht Dürer, that depict several raucous scenes of fools taking a journey to the nonsense land of Narragonia. After traveling by horse-drawn cart in the upper scene of the first woodcut, the fools get on a boat in increasingly aural illustrations of boisterous revelry. The iconic costume of the fool with his double-horned cap and bells, which already signals that noise in the form of the uncontrolled jangling of the bells, was a baseline marker of folly. The two shipboard scenes take this sonic foolishness even further by foregrounding the musicality of the ship of fools. Some fools are shaking rattles or clanging handbells, some are playing flutes, and the open mouths of the banner-waving fools gesturing to the musical flag flown proudly on both ships invite us to hear song. This musical banner clearly displays the opening neumes of the Introit chant Gaudeamus omnes (Let us rejoice). It was an established custom by this point to cite the Gaudeamus omnes in non-religious contexts—as a cry of common joy, as parody, or for blasphemous purposes. Thus, the sacred call to rejoice in God’s glory doubled as a carnivalesque call to worship human folly through drink and bacchic pleasure (Schmid 2013: 246–59).

Figure 2.1. Sebastian Brant, The Ship of Fools (Basel: Johann Bergmann von Olpe, 1494), opening woodcuts. (Photo courtesy of Universitätsbibliothek Basel, UBH Rb 1565. Public Domain.)

The musical banner of Gaudeamus omnes cleverly accommodates this paradox, serving as the theme song for the land of fools while simultaneously proposing a musical passage to redemption. Brant says as much in Chapter 108 (“The Schluraffen Ship”), where we again see the Ship of Fools woodcut. The closing lines of the chapter refer to the musical flag, noting that the passengers will sing either the gaudeamus or the song of fools (“mit den er gaudeamus sing/oder das lied im narrendon”). In Brant’s ship, music—as an object and action—thus falls on both sides of the binary of wisdom and folly, representing the ridiculous warblings of the incompetent, dissolute fool and also the ideal art of the sage, who knows how to handle the dangerous potential of musical irrationality. Readers seeking to become wise are invited to vocally decry their folly and choose the artful path by singing appropriate airs of wisdom.

Music’s paradoxical flexibility across the folly/wisdom divide becomes even more apparent in two other woodcuts from the same volume. One shows the fool playing the bagpipes, long denigrated as an uncouth instrument connected to foolishness, while a rejected lyre and lute—instruments of refined knowledge—are carelessly tossed at his feet. Later in Chapter 62 (“Of Serenading at Night”), even these instruments, associated with Apollo andmarked as learned and noble, are played by a band of fools in a nocturnal concert that mixes their music with the rowdier sounds of fiddles and horns. The reward for this amorous tomfoolery is a bucket of slops thrown down on their group by an old woman in an upper window.

First published in German and quickly translated into Latin and other vernacular languages, Brant’s print circulated an important archetype of the wise person, who was an expert in the art of living, against various depictions of fools, who were often drawn from the ranks of the most illustrious positions. As Brant explains in Chapter 107 (“Of Reward for Wisdom”), all human knowledge is mere folly to God. This strategic pitting of human reason against divine revelation, known as fideism, became a common theme in the period, finding popular expression in a spate of cheap print dedicated to exposing the nature and limits of human knowledge. The point was to cast doubt on human knowledge while directing the readers to place their trust in the wisdom that comes only from divine revelation. Like their medieval forbears in the folly tradition, these prints rely upon a universal delight in turning the tables on those in positions of power and authority, justifying on religious and intellectual grounds their themes of a topsy-turvy world where the weak shame the strong and the ignorant outwit the learned (Robert-Nicoud 2018).

Desiderius Erasmus (1466–1536) produced his own instant classic in this genre, The Praise of Folly, which was written in 1509 but first published in 1511. In Erasmus’s satire, Folly rants against the foolish dogmatism of theologians and other professional know-it-alls, emphasizing the utter fallibility of human knowledge in favor of divine wisdom. Some later editions of Erasmus’s work make the link with Brant’s work even more explicit by recycling the signature Ship of Fools woodcut discussed earlier, although in some cases with less detail. For example, the 1520 French edition of Erasmus includes the musical ship of fools illustration for Chapter 33, “On the Infinite Number of Fools,” portraying the notated music but without the accompanying Gaudeamus omnes text underlay. The image without the text underlay could suggest an alternative reading of the woodcut, as it cuts out the semantic aspect of the banner, leaving behind only the chant notation, which the average reader was unlikely to recognize. The song of the fools, then, would have been emphasized over their text.

We will now bring the singing fool off the ship and onto the streets. Under Dominican Friar Girolamo Savonarola’s (1452–1498) guidance, late fifteenth-century Florence literally went crazy for Jesus in a carnivalesque explosion of popular religious zeal that directly challenged Papal authority. On April 13, 1495, Savonarola preached the fideistic theme that craziness is true wisdom, citing St. Paul’s claim that “we are fools for Christ’s sake” (I Cor. 4:10). Savonarola cited the example of King David, “who was so wise and was King of Israel; nevertheless when he came before the Ark of the Lord, he put off his regal robes and there in the street he danced like a buffoon, and the crowd said that he was crazy” (cited in Macey 1998: 83). With King David as a model, the Florentine revelry produced a musical expression of this celebration of craziness as the beginning of true wisdom: a series of simple devotional songs, called laude, that focus on this theme of pazzia (craziness). The most familiar is the lauda by Giralamo Benivieni, Non fu mai el più bel solazzo, which is structured around a “crazy for Jesus” refrain.

The craziness of Jesus spurns
that which the wise man seeks and desires:
conditions of honour, pomp and riches,
pleasure, celebrations, glory and fame.
Always one seeks honour and loves
that which the wise man hates so much:
poverty, sorrow, and tears,
because the Christian is crazy.
. . .
Everyone cry out, as I cry out,
always crazy, crazy, crazy. (Macey 1998: 83)

In the repetitions of “cry out,” this song emphasizes its own vocality, reminding singers that the act of making these musical cries was itself a claim to a kind of anti-rational knowing, fueled by prophecy and zeal rather than by academic learning or logic. In the tradition of the singing fools illustrated by Brant and Erasmus, these “crazy” religious songs reveled in their disregard for traditional intellectual authority and aligned themselves with the proper kind of fool, who humbly recognizes her own limitations and relies upon divine guidance to find the true (i.e., spiritual or non-rational) path to wisdom.

Although fideism in its most extreme form easily justified anti-intellectualism, rank ignorance, and the worst kind of religious fundamentalism, it became more productively attached to the revival of Skepticism beginning in the late fifteenth century. Savonarola was so convinced of the value of Skepticism for his fideistic agenda that he advised his followers to read the Skeptic Sextus Empiricus’ treatises (c. second century ce) as a primer for Christian faith, and he asked the humanist scholar Giorgio Antonio Vespucci (c. 1434–1514) to translate them from Greek into Latin (although the project does not seem to have been completed). Savonarola’s interest in Sextus Empiricus was also taken up by Gianfranceso Pico della Mirandola (1469–1533), whose Examen vanitatis doctrinae gentium (1520) represents a landmark deployment of Skepticism against the authority of Aristotelian scholasticism (Floridi 2002: 32–4). What these early Italian humanists recognized was that ancient Skepticism offered a rigorous philosophical method that could be deployed effectively against established knowledge structures. Skepticism’s common pairing with fideism, moreover, offered continued reassurance to later Christian thinkers that Skepticism was not an attack on religious belief per se but rather a sophisticated intellectual process of understanding the limits of human knowledge.

The Art of Doubting

Before considering the role of music and aurality in this nuanced intellectual movement, it will be helpful to understand a bit more about ancient Skepticism and how it functioned in the religious debates that exploded across Europe after the execution of Savonarola. Two streams of ancient Skepticism came down into the fifteenth century. The Academic stream, developed in the Platonic Academy in the third century bce, concluded that no knowledge is truly possible. In Socrates’ words, “All I know is that I know nothing.” Academic Skepticism was the version of this school known best throughout the Middle Ages in a Latinized form, primarily via Cicero’s Academica and Augustine’s Contra Academicos, a late fourth-century rebuttal to Academic Skepticism (Smith and Charles 2017: xvii–xix). The only surviving texts from the Greek stream, known as Pyrrhonism, come from Sextus Empiricus’ Outlines of Pyrrhonism and Against the Professors, which began to recirculate in Italy and later beyond the Alps in numerous manuscript versions in the sixteenth century. These writings were printed in translation for the first time in Henri Estienne’s important 1562 Latin edition. Pyrrhonists differed from their Academic counterparts in their resistance to making knowledge claims. The Academic claim that we know nothing was, after all, essentially a form of negative dogmatism. To positively deny anything, even the possibility of human knowledge, is to arrive at a certainty based on a non-evident proposition. Pyrrhonian Skepticism fought against dogmatism in any form and sought to encourage inquiry through the systematic questioning of assumptions and of the foundations of all knowledge, and they devoted particular attention to attacking traditional disciplinary knowledge of music and aurality. The endpoint of this approach was the complete suspension of judgment, which was thought to lead to a desirable state of mental tranquility. Considering that music was widely valued as a practice for promoting mental health, both in ancient discussions of the ethics of music and in later revivals, these Skeptic attacks cleverly turned the tables by suggesting that the “not knowing” of music might be a truer route to peace.

The fiery debates that erupted with the advent of the Protestant Reformation in the early sixteenth century certainly proved the danger of dogmatism, whether regarding music or theology. Ironically, the growing interest in Skepticism at this time, far from spreading mental tranquility, only intensified the conflict as both Reformers and Catholics weaponized Skeptical arguments to undermine the intellectual authority of their opponents. The central theological dispute, as framed by the Protestants, was about how to determine an appropriate criterion for religious knowledge, also known as the “rule of faith” (Popkin 2003: 3). Martin Luther (1483–1546) used Greek Skeptical arguments in his attacks on church authority, ultimately asserting that individual interpretation and personal conscience should be the sole foundations for religious knowledge and truth. Erasmus responded to Luther in his Of Free Will (1524), this time using Skepticism in defense of Catholicism. He concluded that because no claim could be proven infallibly, the default position should be to rely on consensus and authority and so maintain the status quo. Erasmus’s treatise elicited an angry response from Luther, who rebuked his opponent on the grounds that a Christian cannot be a Skeptic, for how could one believe that which one doubts (Popkin 2003: 7–9)?

Luther’s limited approach to Skepticism (using the method as a weapon but disavowing its logical outcome) reveals the Skeptic’s dilemma. Once the validity of Skeptical arguments is acknowledged and the limits of human knowledge are recognized, after all, how does one believe anything, make any judgment, resolve any truth claim, or commit to any particular course of action or way of life? Skepticism, in its ruthless attack on all dogmatic positions, ultimately leads to its own self-destruction. As Luciano Floridi strikingly puts it, “It is not an easy attitude, and the Skeptic is usually a negative hero, a Samson who dies with all the Philistines when he makes the temple of certainties collapse” (Floridi 2002: 32).

Jean Calvin (1509–1564) found his own exit strategy from this downward spiral. He cleverly exploited Skeptical arguments to challenge Catholic authority, but then quickly took an offramp towards religious dogmatism that confirmed his own unassailable authority. Divine inner persuasion, he concluded, was the true foundation of knowledge, but it could only be recognized by the elect. Of course, in perfectly circular logic, the surest way to reveal that one was not a member of God’s elect was to disagree with Calvin’s theological agenda. The Basel Reformer Sebastian Castellio (1515–1563) called out Calvin’s problematic use of Skepticism. Disagreeing with Geneva over the violent outcome of the Servetus heresy trial, Castellio gave Calvin a bit of his own medicine by deploying Skeptical arguments to undermine Calvinist truth claims in his treatise On Heretics (1554). He followed this up with an unpublished work titled The Art of Doubting that posits a cautiously Skeptical approach, accented with fideism. The work circulated and became influential in the more liberal streams of English Protestantism in the seventeenth century (Popkin 2003: 10–13).

Musical Knowing (or Not Knowing)

The crisis of music emerged alongside this Skeptical revival, bringing a number of concerns and doubts regarding knowledge transmission into the realm of church musical practice. It may not be a coincidence that the major figures known to have displayed interest in Skepticism from the late fifteenth century to the rise of the Protestant Reformation—including Savonarola, Erasmus, Luther, and Calvin—also led the call for church music reform. Their invectives against elaborate vocal polyphony, as a kind of excess sonority that could please the ears while impeding the understanding of the words, treat music as an unruly link between the senses and the mind. These discussions add texture and nuance to the more generalized paradox of music that we saw in the Folly literature, as they marshaled increasingly sophisticated arguments against particular church music practices.

Elsewhere in this volume, Richard Freedman discusses several examples of precisely the sort of church polyphony that came under fire at this time, including Johannes Okeghem’s (c. 1410–1497) Missa Prolationum and Josquin des Prez’s (c. 1450/5–1521) Missa L’homme armé super voces musicales. Both display virtuosic compositional skill, developing musical ideas through the mind-boggling technology of notated mensuration canons. A look at the individual voice parts for Okeghem’s Kyrie and Josquin’s Agnus Dei (see Chapter Eight in this volume and especially Figure 8.2) reveals the elaborate writing typical of this style, in which each syllable of text might receive a long melisma of notes, thus breaking up the word and phrase into often unrecognizable bits that would make it difficult to understand the text if only one voice were singing, let alone multiple layers of staggered voices. In other words, these pieces rely on bookish knowledge of notation, in contrast to the simpler and more transparent style that came to be preferred in popular devotional genres (such as the laude of Savonarola’s community, Lutheran chorales, and the psalms and chansons spirituelles sung by Calvin’s followers). As far as church polyphony of the period goes, these continental musicians were actually far clearer and more restrained than their contemporaries in England writing in the so-called Eton Style, who were liable to take a chant that could be recited or sung in a minute or two and expand it into a luxurious polyphonic setting lasting up to fifteen minutes. These compositions made it obvious that the priority was the music, both as heard in glorious sound and as symbolically understood within an elite and costly knowledge system. In any case, the liturgical text in this elaborate style was virtually impossible to decipher. More to the point, who would even care to contemplate the text when offered the chance to be ravished by the sheer beauty and power of such a musical offering?

Skeptics like Savonarola and his fellow Dominican friar in Florence, Giovanni Caroli (1428–1503), were worried about precisely this point. They viewed this overt investment in extravagant liturgical music as evidence of a topsy-turvy paradigm that privileged the external senses over the inner ear that led to understanding. As Caroli put it in 1479, music ought to be “taken in with the ear of the heart, not of the body.” He explained that “neither, in that multiplicity of voices or sounds, can the words be properly made out whereby the spirit is to be set ardently aflame to God, nor in that gaiety or swiftness of notes can its gravity any longer be safeguarded, but either the mind wanders away or at any rate dissolves into slumber” (cited in Wegman 2005b: 28). Savonarola echoed these sentiments in 1495, claiming that organs and polyphony “yield no profit whatsoever,” for they only “please the sense and external things” (cited in Wegman 2005b: 37). The next year, Savonarola preached a sermon in Florence that framed his objections to vocal polyphony in even less flattering terms: “There stands a singer with a big voice who appears to be a calf, and the others cry out around him like dogs, and one can’t make out a word they are saying” (cited in Macey 1998: 97–8).

Following Augustine, who had singled out understanding as the key difference between human song and bird song, these critics of polyphony mapped the difference between humans and animals onto a division between reason and the senses. Polyphony appealed to the external, animal senses by providing irrational delight, while monophonic song spoke to the internal ear of the soul by activating the uniquely human rational mind. Calvin’s preface to the Geneva Psalter (1543, revised 1545), which became the standard Protestant statement on music, asserts this point that human song ought to involve understanding, for “the particular gift of humankind is to sing, knowing what he says” (cited in McDonald 2018: 456). In his view, understanding led to an alignment of the mind, heart, and emotions. Another Protestant publication, Pierre Viret’s (1511–1571) Commentary on the Lord’s Prayer, also emphasized the importance of understanding musical texts, this time by attacking “those papal songs that are sung in their churches, without understanding, and without heartfelt emotion either from the singers or those who hear it” (cited in McDonald 2018: 458). For Protestants like Calvin, who took these arguments the furthest, the logical endpoint of the complete paradigm shift towards congregational understanding was a demand for a drastically simplified musical style and the use of vernacular languages, which could be easily understood by the people.

With this valorization of cognitive engagement through music, one might expect to find at least some admiration for the intellectual prowess displayed in virtuosic compositional forms like Josquin’s and Okeghem’s mensuration canons. Not only did elaborate polyphony require extensive skill and training to create, but the act of decoding it while singing was certainly a challenging mental exercise for the singers (and perhaps for the most accomplished listeners), who could recognize the layers of musical and textual meaning embedded in the composition.

Numerous attacks on polyphony conceded exactly this point, but argued that encouraging the general congregation’s understanding of the textual content via simple (and even unskilled) musical settings was more useful to the church than engaging the minds of the professional choir through virtuosic displays of musical craft. In other words, no longer were the professional choir and clergy expected to pray, sing, and think on behalf of a passive congregation. The congregation became a potentially intelligent listening (and singing) body that could receive spiritual knowledge and model the fullest expression of humanity through intellectual engagement with liturgical song. Erasmus and his fellow Dutch humanist Matthaeus Herbenus (1451–1538) of Maastricht agreed on this point, reiterating that the rational understanding that should be music’s highest aim was for the intellectual and moral benefit of the congregation. In his treatise De natura cantus ac miraculis vocis (1496), Herbenus complains:

But what would [the ancients] have said about our songs which, before they can be imprinted in the memory, have already flown away? I should more rightly call them the daughters of Mercury! By these, the singers of our time completely deprive us of judgement, exerting themselves only in order to please their own feelings. As a matter of fact I myself have known certain songs which, proceeding with wondrous simplicity, captured the senses of some men in such a way that they completely shuddered at other, more artful songs, that leapt about like goats. Also, [I have known] men unlearned in music, [but] endowed with a natural gift and a certain grace in singing, who fashioned some vernacular songs with simple counterpoint in such a way that they not only aroused the love of their companions, but brought even experts in this art to particular astonishment, because their notes, being uttered in syllabic fashion, could be easily made out by all.

 --(Cited in Wegman 2005b: 175–6)

This denigration of high compositional craft as mere “artifice” smacks of the same anti-elitism promoted by Savonarola, which was also embedded in the fideistic and Skeptical challenges to disciplinary expertise.

Sextus Empiricus’ Against the Professors offered a systematic challenge to the academic disciplines of his day: grammar, rhetoric, geometry, arithmetic, astrology, music, logic, physics, and ethics. As one of the traditional academic disciplines since ancient times, music was one aspect of the authoritative knowledge structure that Skepticism challenged directly. Thus, Sextus Empiricus devoted the entirety of the sixth book of Against the Professors to summarizing and refuting all the dogmatic claims of experts regarding musical knowledge. Titled Against the Musicians, this book introduces the science of music and its definitions before outlining a number of established theories of music, mostly those transmitted by Plato and Aristotle. The second section goes on to undermine various practical observations regarding music. Sextus Empiricus’ conclusion, that we cannot evaluate or know either sound or time, leads to the startling inference that there is no legitimate scientific study of music (Veres 2020). Of course, the irony in Sextus’ work is that although he argues against the science of music, his meticulous summary of the various schools of ancient thought on music transmitted an imminently useful body of knowledge, which would have been particularly instructive for Renaissance readers interested in reviving their own musical practices through ancient philosophy. Thus, the work offers both disciplinary knowledge and a method for undermining confidence in that knowledge.

In a similarly paradoxical process, it was precisely the wide-scale attack on musical knowledge and the deskilling of church music in favor of simple congregational singing that ultimately launched an enduring music education campaign and produced a body of increasingly skilled amateurs. Protestants discovered quite quickly that congregation-led singing (with no professional choir) works best if the average congregation member has some ability to follow the tune! With the new interest in improving ordinary people’s singing skills, a wave of do-it-yourself music tutors and entry-level music prints emerged in Protestant lands.

Calvinists proved particularly innovative in their attempts to encourage music literacy at the most accessible level. They even put musical training-wheels on some editions of their already quite simple Genevan Psalter, marking each note of the monophonic tune with its proper solfège syllable. Because Calvinists were encouraged to own their own copy of the work, they could easily learn the tunes by their solfège syllables at home and bring this important skill into congregational singing during church services. These efforts to raise the musical literacy of the congregation paid off over time, as evidenced by the extraordinary popularity of printed polyphonic settings of the Genevan Psalter in the second half of the sixteenth century. These ranged from the simple and syllabic four-voice settings of Claude Goudimel (1514/20–1572) that were first printed at mid-century to the virtuosic vocal psalm settings of Claude Le Jeune’s (1528/30–1600) Dodecacorde (1598). We have thus come full circle: from the attacks on elaborate (skilled) music as a threat to knowledge, all the way back to a qualified reaffirmation of musical learning as a pathway to wisdom and a marker of moral and intellectual achievement, as long as this learning was handled appropriately. What counted as appropriate music and music-making, however, was far from settled.

(Un)Reasonable Sounds

It was music’s unique position as both scientia (the abstract body of knowledge passed down by expert authorities) and ars (embodied musical practices and skills) that posed the most enduring problem for those who sought to understand music’s role in the sense–knowledge paradigm. In the same way, music flummoxed a number of other related binaries of the period: rational and non-rational, mind and body, masculine and feminine, wisdom and folly, virtue and vice. Song was understandably the richest site for confronting these paradoxical relationships, for the union of sound, harmony, time, and semantic substance offered the most fertile ground for exploring the mind–body relationship, through a deep dive into the route between sense perception (hearing) and cognition (knowing) (Austern 2020: 98–114).

A preoccupation with the senses, and with their relationship to reason and morality, emerges clearly in the emblematic renditions of the five senses created in 1561 by Cornelis Cort after designs by Frans Floris and reimagined in numerous subsequent versions in the following decades (see Figure 2.2). In this influential iconographic formula, each sense (sight, hearing, taste, smell, touch) was personified by a woman and a representative animal. Hearing (Auditus) was depicted as a woman playing the lute, surrounded by numerous other instruments and several open music books. Beside her is a deer, which was associated with the virtue of prudence because of its extraordinary sense of hearing. The deer’s head is turned towards the woman, with its ears perked attentively as the woman tunes her lute. This careful act of tuning, which demanded both skill and finesse, beautifully mirrors the contemplative process of tuning the inner soul, understood in both the Platonic and Aristotelian traditions as a harmonizing of the rational and non-rational faculties.

Figure 2.2. Cornelis Cort after Frans Floris I, Hearing (1561). (Photo courtesy of Bibliothèque nationale de France, département Musique, VM PHOT MIRI-19 (109).)

The well-established moral and intellectual benefits of hearing had long served as music’s strongest claim to wisdom. In “On Listening to Lectures,” Plutarch (c. 46–119 ce) argues that while the vices can enter the soul by means of many senses, virtue can enter and take hold of young people only through their ears. The power of hearing works at one level on the passions, but more importantly, it activates the capacity to reason. This support for musical hearing as beneficial became an important justification for its prevalence in Christian worship and social life. However, Augustine’s famous worries about the sensual power of song, which raised concern over the irrational side of musical experience, also generated a long-lasting Christian anxiety about the dangerous intimacy between melody and text.

A survey of the many illustrations of the parable of the Wise and Foolish Virgins from the gospel of Matthew reveals just how unsure people of this time were about what moral stand to take regarding music. Two examples from around 1600 illustrate opposite views of music’s relationship to wisdom and foolishness. In Suzanne de Court’s (active 1575–1625) plate after a design by Hieronymus Wierix, music appears as an activity of the wise virgins, who are all depicted as industriously engaging in the traditional academic disciplines (scientia), while the foolish group lounges barefoot in a lazy, sensual stupor (see Figure 2.3). In Hieronymus Francken the Younger’s (1578–1623) painting of this scene, however, it is the foolish virgins who are playing musical instruments, while the wise virgins are silently busy with pious domestic work (see Figure 2.4). One reading of this contradiction is that the illustrations of the wise virgins with music on their side represents the more theoretical, learned side of music, as we see in Wierix’s version, where music is being “studied” as an academic discipline. (Note that none of the wise virgins are shown playing the instruments or reading from the part books that lie in their midst.) In pointed contrast, Francken’s depiction of the foolish virgins emphasizes making music as a practice, and like numerous similar representations of the foolish virgins from this period, it pairs a sonically vibrant scene of musicking with dancing, drinking, games, and other rowdy pastimes.

Figure 2.3. Suzanne de Court, Wise and Foolish Virgins (c. 1600). (photo © rmn-grand palais (musée de la renaissance, château d’ecouen)/mathieu rabeau.)
Figure 2.4. Hieronymus Francken II, Parable of the Wise and Foolish Virgins (c. 1616). (© hermitage museum. public domain.)

This persistent lack of clarity about whether music is scientia or ars—and whether it maps onto folly or wisdom—was clearly even more problematic when the musicking body was feminine. The stakes of virtue were always much higher for women, thus justifying intense concern over how girls and women practiced and performed music. Even more dangerous, however, was the supposed power of the female body to deprive the masculine mind of its reason through a sensual and eroticized vocal assault. For Augustine, Calvin, and numerous other church leaders across the ages, these concerns about the seductive voice were overtly feminized and involved warnings against the “effeminizing” effects of musical hearing.

Homer’s tale of Ulysses and the Sirens in book 12 of the Odyssey offered the most vivid example of this sensory danger, for it easily mapped onto the idea of a conflict between feminine sensuality and masculine rationality (Austern and Naroditskaya 2006). Generally appearing in the European imagination as monstrous women, the Sirens possessed magical singing voices that so enchanted the ear that passing sailors lost their will and reason entirely and were dashed upon the rocks. Brant brings up this tale in his Chapter 36 (“Of Complacency”) as a reminder of the sensory vigilance necessary to stay off the boat of fools. The tale of the Sirens was a continual reminder that music was caught in the sticky web of questions and doubts regarding the relationship between rational faculties and the sensory experience that feeds and informs our mind. In one major interpretative tradition, the Sirens offered excessive carnal pleasure through their song, and the antidote to this sensual assault was the power of knowledge. In the commentary for Andrea Alciato’s emblem of the Sirens, included in Toutes les emblemes (1558), these beautiful monsters were calling to the irrational aspect of the men; thus, “the best remedy against them that is available is study of the arts and sciences, and travel” (Alciato 1558: 143).

Knowledge, however, was not always the hero of this story. Cicero’s De finibus et malorum 5.18 suggested that what these singing monsters really offered their listeners was the lure of greater understanding and perfect knowledge, rather than carnal desire. Early modern Skeptics picked up on this line of critique, for wasn’t the temptation of perfect knowledge the original sin, used to tempt Eve and Adam in the garden? In their own time, it seemed clear that the Scholastic tradition had fallen into exactly this dangerous trap: it had recycled the confident platitudes of Aristotelian logic and sensory theory without taking into account the utter fallibility of the human faculties that were integral to these processes. The revival of interest in Skepticism thus exacerbated this problem of the senses, offering new philosophical arguments for mistrusting sensory experience, which had long been viewed with suspicion on purely religious grounds.

The traditional Aristotelian view of knowledge and the senses that came down from the Middle Ages placed high confidence in the senses as a route to knowledge, adopting the general dictum that nothing is in the intellect that is not first perceived with the senses. This system involved a three-part structure of “inner senses,” consisting of 1) the common sense, 2) the phantasy or imagination, and 3) memory. The common sense served a superior cognitive function as a “master sense” or “sense of sensing” that had the capacity to coordinate, distinguish, and process the data taken in through the five outer senses and translate this sensory information into mental images. According to Aristotle, the common sense was situated in the heart. After Avicenna (c. 980–1037), the common sense was thought to be located in Galen’s (129–216 ce) front ventricle of the brain, in close proximity to the connected inner senses of phantasy and imagination, which were found in the brain’s second ventricle. Phantasy and imagination were thought to be connected also to memory and the capacity to assess and store mental images in Galen’s third ventricle of the brain. Phantasy and imagination were thus the critical bridge (physically and cognitively) between the faculties of common sense and memory (Roodenburg 2014: 5).

The sixteenth-century assault on Aristotelian sense theory was marshaled separately on scientific and philosophical grounds. The medical attack came from Andreas Vesalius, whose treatise De humani corporis fabrica (1543) revolutionized the understanding of brain anatomy and thoroughly disproved the Aristotelian/Galenic basis for inner sense theory. On the philosophical side, Skepticism offered a systematic challenge to the confidence in the senses that had been presumed in the Aristotelian system. To be fair, the Aristotelian/Galenic tradition had long noted that the close physical link between common sense and phantasy was a reason to exercise caution. The Skeptics, however, felt that this tradition still gave far too much credence to the knowledge that can come through these fragile and corruptible human portals.

Montaigne most prominently articulated these Skeptic arguments against traditional theories of knowledge in his “Apology for Raymond Sebond” (1580), where he thoroughly proves the utter fallibility of human reason. In a substantial section near the end of the essay, Montaigne discusses the senses “in which lies the greatest foundation and proof of our ignorance” (2003: 539). He goes on to explain that “according to some, knowledge is nothing else but sensation. Whoever can force me to contradict the senses has me by the throat; he could not make me retreat any further. The senses are the beginning and the end of human knowledge.” “Attribute to them as little as you can,” he concludes, “still you must grant them this, that by way of them and by their mediation proceeds all our instruction” (Montaigne 2003: 540).

The Portuguese philosopher and physician Francisco Sanchez, who was widely known as “Sanchez the Skeptic,” made a similar argument in his most influential treatise, That Nothing Is Known (1581). Like Montaigne, Sanchez argued that because the senses are the sole portal to knowledge, and because they are corruptible or imperfect in their transmission, human reason cannot escape error. Early modern writings following in this Skeptical vein typically went into great detail about the numerous factors that could cause the senses to be deceived, mistaken, or confused—including illness, old age, overwhelmingly strong emotions, problems due to distance, natural phenomena, and preexisting biases.

Considering the primacy of hearing and sight in the Aristotelian framework, these two senses often merited special attention in the effort to chip away at confidence in the senses. In arguments mounted against trusting the sense of hearing, musical sound served as the most vivid example, with Skeptical writers typically citing the acoustic decay of sound and the natural echo as their main points of attack. Attention to these Skeptical arguments regarding the problem of sound decay reveals significant similarity to the invectives against polyphony discussed earlier.

Although the critics of polyphony put their arguments against sound and hearing to a very different use, the similarity reveals either a direct borrowing from the Skeptic tradition or, at the very least, an alignment with specific Skeptical concerns about the fragility of hearing. For example, Erasmus had voiced his discomfort with the impermanence of musical sound: “a ringing of voices that strikes the ears and soothes with trifling pleasures that die away instantly” (cited in Wegman 2005b: 37). Leonardo da Vinci’s (1452–1519) well-known argument for privileging sight over hearing is similar: harmony, when heard through the ears, “dies as soon as it is born, and dies as fast as it was born.” In his account, music “begins to waste away the very moment it comes into being” (cited in Wegman 2005b: 38). In a more detailed account, Herbenus argued against polyphony on the grounds of sensory fallibility, wedged at the intersection of acoustic ephemerality and the limits of human hearing. Herbenus, a Dutch scholar who was connected to both Erasmus and the Italian humanist circle, located his arguments against elaborate polyphony in exactly the sort of catalogue of the senses deployed in Skeptical writings. After discussing the problem with vision in the case of iridescence that does not allow the mind to form a judgment of it before it changes, he comes to hearing:

Now, what I say here about the sense of vision I could say about all others as well. For the senses need proper space for taking in the meanings: if that [space] is not granted, how can reason judge about those imperfectly formed ideas? In those songs, therefore, which fly past the ears so swiftly that they vanish before there could be a judgement of them, the capacity to judge is overwhelmed.

 --(Cited in Wegman 2005b: 176–7)

These earlier arguments about the fragility of musical hearing were echoed at the end of the century in Antoine de Chandieu’s (1534–1591) poetic masterpiece, the Octonaires sur la vanité et inconstance du monde, first published in all fifty Octonaires in 1583. Chandieu’s twelfth Octonaire outlines these well-worn Skeptical arguments against trusting the senses:

La beauté soudain passe, et eschappe à tes yeux:
Tu ois, puis tu n’ois plus le son melodieux:
Le vent t’oste l’odeur qui ton flairer contente:
Le plaisir du toucher a sa peine presente:
Et le goust favoureux n’a de long que trois doigts:
Est-ce donc sans raison, Mondain, que je t’accuse?
Ce que tu sens est vain, et ne sens toutesfois
Ceste grande vanité qui tous tes sens abuse. (Chandieu 1979: 52)

In this catalogue of the senses, Chandieu places hearing in the second place and uses a musical analogy (“You hear, then you hear no longer the melodious sound”), cited here in Josuah Sylvester’s liberal English paraphrase.

How swift is Beauty vanisht from thine Ey!
How sudden Musick drowned in thine Ear!
How soon doo Odours from thy Nostrils fly!
How short, touch-Pleasures (tipt with Pain and Fear)!
How sowre, Taste-sweetest, in small time’s expense-is!
Then, Epicure, well may wee blame thee, since,
All under Sense thus vain, Thou hast no sense
Of Vanity, which so besots thy Senses. (Sylvester 1621: 1178)

In the visual realm, Hendrick Goltzius’s portrayal of the five senses (1588) best captures this growing mistrust of the senses, which produce only frail, deceptive, or painful experience (see Figure 2.5). Goltzius portrays all five senses together in a narrow valley, in a vividly sensual reimagining of these figures that subtly warns of the dangers of sense perception. While Smell enjoys the scent of a cut (and already dying) flower, Taste, pictured in the lower foreground, eats an apple, in a clear reminder of Eve’s original sin. Sight lies above them, looking in a mirror while touching her nipple, and Touch flies above them while being bitten by the snake coiled around her arm. Hearing occupies a visually dominant position in the lower left foreground, with her beautifully sculpted nude back presented to the viewer as she plays a large bowed string instrument. Pointed towards the cavernous valley, her music will certainly produce the echo so frequently mentioned as the prime example of aural deception.

Figure 2.5. Hendrick Goltzius, The Five Senses (1588). (photo © bibliothèque nationale de france, département musique, vm phot miri-19 (78). public domain.)

Like iridescence in the visual domain, the echo offered a natural sense deception through its double and distorted effect on hearing and served as a clear reminder not to place too much confidence in any knowledge gained by these senses. Chandieu’s Octonaire 14 begins with the echo as a symbol of the overarching corruption of the senses:

Ce n’est rien qu’une Echo tout cest immonde Monde,
Sortant d’un bois, d’un roc, et d’une profonde onde,
Un son naissant-mourrant, une voix vifve-morte,
Un air rejaillissant, qu’un vent leger emporte,
Un parler contrefaict, qui est esvanoui
Si tost qu’il a trompé celuy qui l’a oui.
Tais-toy, fuy loin de moi, Echo, fuy, Monde immonde,
Demeure au bois, au roc, et en l’onde profonde.(Chandieu 1979: 55)
What is the World, but a vain Eccho’s Sounding,
From Woods, and Caves, and hollow Rocks rebounding
A new No-noise, a dead-live Voice, to summon
Deluded Ears to listen to a Dumb-one:
A speaking Fiction of a mocking Faëry:
A formall Answer, in Effect but aiëry
Hence, hence, vain Eccho, with thine idle Mocks:
Keep in thy Woods, sleep in thy Caves and Rocks. (Sylvester 1621: 1179)

Oddly enough, although Chandieu’s collection attracted polyphonic settings by Paschal de L’Estocart (1539–after 1587) and Claude Le Jeune, neither composer chose to set either of these two evocative octonaires with their alluring doubts and echoes.

The echo, in all of its messy musical and philosophical glory, became an object of particular fascination in Italy during this time, inspired by the popularity of Ovid’s account of Echo and Narcissus and no doubt nourished by the well-known debates across Europe regarding the sense of hearing. The repertoire associated with the concerto delle dame, a virtuoso trio of ladies who were sponsored by the court of Alfonso II d’Este, Duke of Ferrara in the late sixteenth century, includes numerous Echo texts. Two collections by Ludovico Agostini, The Echo, and Musical Enigma (1581) and The New Echo (1583), reveal how these broader concerns about the nature of hearing and the possibility of distortion/deception through “artifice” could be negotiated by skilled female voices. The centerpiece of Agostini’s second collection, the “Odi, Ninfa de gl’antri hor come io godo,” features numerous echo passages, in which the leading voice is followed closely by cascading echoes. The printed music for these settings invites improvisation and a display of creative vocal virtuosity by the echo voices, in effect beautifully distorting the leading (original) voice in a way that would have confirmed every Skeptic’s fear that the sense of hearing could delightfully mislead the listener (Stras 2018: 256).

Knowledge in Transit

Forms of global exploration launched between the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries destabilized traditional knowledge even further. On one hand, as European explorers and colonizers roamed the world, they documented an unexpected diversity in human physiognomy, language, religions, laws, and morals that offered Skeptics more fuel for their argument that all knowledge is really just opinion. On the other hand, these new explorations produced an abundance of fresh data regarding the world’s geography and peoples that, some hoped, could be used to build a storehouse of human knowledge.

Early seventeenth-century Catholics like Tomasso Campanello and Marin Mersenne took this moderate approach as they sought a way to move beyond the Skeptical problem. Mersenne’s The Truth of the Sciences, against Sceptics or Pyrrhonians (1625) takes the form of a dialogue between an alchemist, a Skeptic, and a Christian philosopher. The Christian is seeking a middle ground between the improbable claims of the alchemist and the Pyrrhonist’s flat denial of the possibility of knowledge. Ultimately, even as Mersenne acknowledged the reality of sense deception and the usefulness of the intellectual humility demanded by the Academics and Pyrrhonists, he argued for a mitigated form of Skepticism in which some confidence in knowledge could be rooted in probability and in a comparison of human nature and common experience (Clark 2016: 48). Like Mersenne, Campanello took a constructive approach to Skepticism in his Metaphysics (1638). In his account, despite the very real limits of sense knowledge, he allows that it is not necessary to know every particular to arrive at the universal. Thus, even if a “complete, perfect and total science” will always be out of reach, “a partial and imperfect one” can be pursued (cited in Paganini 2009: 299).

Music proved to be one of the most fascinating of human universals, although it quickly became evident that it was an example of radical local particularity, for music was not performed, understood, or appreciated in any degree of uniformity across the globe. As Francis Bacon remarked in a passage on the sense of hearing in his Sylva sylvarum (1626/7), “Wee see also that severall Aires, and tunes, doe please severall Nations, and Persons, according to the Sympathy they have with their Spirits” (cited in Gouk 1999: 164). For Bacon, the spirit involved the entire range of epistemological functions, from memory to cognition and understanding.

Travelers often recounted peculiar anecdotes in which music mediated the initial encounter with an unknown people and facilitated communication (or miscommunication). In 1625, Jesuit Jerónimo Lobo described how the Jesuits went into the Ethiopian kingdom of Dancali, which was under the authority of the Ethiopian emperor, and wanted to penetrate the country’s interior without paying the normal dues. As the tension escalated, a violinist played a piece of music that humorously imitated the braying of a donkey so realistically that the listeners “recognized it immediately with great applause without anybody having said them what it was about, because it was something completely familiar and frequent in their daily life” (cited in Damon-Guillot 2017: 49). Lobo’s account of this incident emphasizes music’s representational capacities, which were able to elicit comprehension among both the Dancali and the Jesuits because they shared a practical knowledge of donkeys. Popular musical anecdotes like this one offered a counterbalance to the instability of both sense perception and knowledge, reassuring readers that there might be some reliable form of knowledge after all, located in shared musical experience.

Some travel writers made an unusual effort to document unfamiliar music traditions by including transcriptions of Indigenous songs. Most famously, Jean de Léry notated five South American Tupinambá chants in his History of a Voyage Made in the Land of Brasil (1578), and Marc Lescarbot included transcriptions of three Mi’kmaq songs in his History of New France (1609). Gabriel Sagard borrowed these transcriptions by Léry and Lescarbot for his expanded 1636 History of Canada. In a radical act of colonial translation, Sagard printed four of these chants in short homophonic settings for four voices. The original chant was in the superius and was supported in the lower voices by a simple syllabic texture, resembling the simple polyphony of French Protestant and Catholic devotional music popular in the later sixteenth century (Bloechl 2005: 366–7).

In this way, the colonizing effort led to a complete reversal of the relationship between polyphony and knowledge. Whereas monophonic song had served as the rational ideal in the arguments against church polyphony, the colonial landscape transformed polyphony—at least to some ears—into a powerful symbol of European rationality and civilization (Irving 2010: 3). Thus, although florid polyphony was still not the ideal vehicle for ensuring the comprehension and cognition of texts, its symbolic value as a marker of European learning and religious authority made it the perfect cultural agent to promote colonial hegemony.

Sagard’s polyphonic transformations of Indigenous song are an early example of what eventually became a more widespread colonial phenomenon: musically binding cultural “others” into an unequal relationship that served European aesthetic and ideological interests at home and abroad. The travel literature and the strange musical translations thus co-opted foreign sounds and musical values into culturally recognizable and acceptable frameworks, made legible through the experience of wonder. As Olivia Bloechl explains:

The suspension of judgement that wonder induced in travelers and their readers was a momentary recognition of the limits of European knowledge and experience, yet it also provided an impetus for Europeans’ subsequent knowledge, interpretation, and other forms of empowered action in the colonial sphere.

 --(Bloechl 2005: 406)

These colonial music projects thus harnessed wonderment to achieve precisely the intellectual benefits most desired in the post-Skeptical era: a recognition of the limits of human knowledge and a route to empirical knowledge building, both leading to the calm, or perhaps smug, suspension of judgment.

Mersenne’s Universal Harmony (1636/7) may be the best-known treatise to borrow Indigenous song. The fourth tome includes both a Canadian dance song and a citation of Léry’s Tupinambá melodies, and they arrive as part of Mersenne’s more general preoccupation with accounting for the role of human diversity in his quest to identify universal musical knowledge. This work joined other large-scale projects, such as Michael Praetorius’s vast Syntagma Musicum (Music Encyclopedia, published in three volumes 1614–20). The second volume, De organographia (1619) and its Appendix (1620), attempts a comprehensive account of the musical instruments known at the time, classifying and analyzing diverse “exotic” instruments alongside instruments common in Europe in his period. His title page reveals his intent to document and illustrate the names, sound properties, and structural features of all musical instruments, both ancient and modern, including those that were foreign, barbarian, rustic, unfamiliar, Indigenous, artistic, pleasing, and familiar.

The encyclopedic format, which became increasingly popular during this period, offered a mode of knowledge transmission that appealed particularly to post-Skeptical readers, because it offered a balanced catalogue of knowledge on a stunning array of topics while resisting the impulse to form direct judgments or arguments. Thus, encyclopedias conceded to the core Skeptical impulse while offering a new kind of authoritative knowledge through a format designed to allow readers to weigh all the options and reach their own conclusions, or suspend judgment entirely.

Conclusion

Sextus Empiricus’ Against the Musicians makes it clear that the “science” of music that he wants to debunk is the abstract and theoretical knowledge that was prized as a learned discipline. He never criticizes the possibility of embodied knowing, achieved through practicing music as an ars. The seventeenth-century Skeptic François de La Mothe Le Vayer (1588–1672) followed this example in a short treatise called the “Skeptical Discourse on Music” that was clearly inspired by Sextus Empiricus’ Against the Musicians. In this work, La Mothe Le Vayer offers a detailed critique of diverse ancient and modern truths about music with the same conclusion: that a true science of music is untenable. Mersenne published La Mothe Le Vayer’s “Skeptical Discourse on Music” as an addition to his Harmonic Questions (1634), in which he offers a very modern response to his colleague’s Pyrrhonian conclusions. For Mersenne, the fact that music can be precisely measured and explained mechanically suggests a way forward from Skeptical doubt, leading to a more certain science based in observation and direct experimentation. Despite these gains, Mersenne continued to assert the superiority of theory over practice in his approach to musical knowledge (Christensen 2013: 61–3).

It was Bacon who took the mechanical and measurable possibilities of music as evidence of the need to relocate a musical science in embodied practice (ars, technē). In Sylva, Bacon explains:

Musick in the Practice, hath been well pursued; And in good Variety; but in the Theory, and especially in the Yeelding of the Causes of the Practique very weakly; being reduced unto certain Mysticall Subtleties, of no use, and not much Truth. Wee shall therefore after our manner, joyne the Contemplative and Active Part together.

 --(Cited in Gouk 1999: 159)

The elevation of intuitive and experiential knowledge (the kind practiced in a craft and known in a skill), which had long been seen as inferior to abstract knowledge, thus emerged as a viable route towards an intellectually skeptical empirical science. Descartes’ lute example, in which he locates memory—an aspect of cognition—in the hands, was representative of this broader valorization of physical intuition and immediate experience. In this way, this new attention to music’s many ways of knowing recast the frame of truth from compositional work to lived performance. Brant’s singing fool, the singing ladies of Ferrara with their elaborate echoes, and Descartes’ lute player all proposed to redefine musical knowledge. Once pure and abstract, it became a performative, fragile, and messy embodied experience involving the imperfect senses and organs of the musicians and listeners.

The Cultural Histories Series