Music in Renaissance Magic

"Magic enjoyed a vigorous revival in sixteenth-century Europe, attaining a prestige it had not held for over a millenium and becoming, for some, a kind of universal philosophy. Renaissance music also suggested a form of universal knowledge through revived interest in two ancient themes: the Pythagorean and Platonic "harmony of the celestial spheres" and the legendary effects of the music of bards like Orpheus, Arion, and David. In this climate, Renaissance philosophers drew many new and provocative connections between music and the occult sciences." "In Music in Renaissance Magic, Gary Tomlinson describes some of these connections and offers a fresh view of the development of early modern thought in Italy. He focuses on a period roughly between the lifetimes of two key figures: the philosopher, magician, and musician Marsilio Ficino (1433-1499) and the philosopher Tommaso Campanella (1568-1639). Under Ficino's influence, other philosophers gave special prominence to music, while music theorists sought to explain music's astrological and magical qualities." "Tomlinson details new links forged between cosmology and musical technique around 1500, against the background of a burgeoning familiarity with ancient thought in late fifteenth-century Europe. He also offers an original interpretation of Ficino's astrological songs and characterizes the widespread diffusion of Ficino's musical epistemology in the century after his death; analyzes the presence of music in early modern mysticism; and, with examples from Monteverdi, isolates magical and nonmagical premises reflected in musical expression around 1600." "Tomlinson pursues these topics both on the subjective plane of hermeneutic history and at the buried level of Michel Foucault's archaeology. From this fusion of approaches emerges a historiography sensitive to the intentions of the historical protagonists as well as to the discourses that helped shape their ideas. This study also broadens the customary purview of musicological studies, thus raising issues essential to postmodern historiography issues of cultural distance and our relationship to the others we encounter in our constructions of the past."--BOOK JACKET.

Beyond its central premise, the book can be read through the connected lenses of Fantasy, Nonfiction. Those themes offer useful points of attention as the characters, ideas, or world develop, especially where the book complicates the expectations of its primary category.