October 2007 Newsletter Vol. 36 No. 4
2007 Guggenheim Winners
Peter Pesic, Tutor and Musician-in-Residence, St. John’s College, Santa Fe, New Mexico, is working on a project titled “Interactions between music and natural philosophy.”
Connections between music and natural philosophy go far back, reaching past the disciplinary boundaries later erected between them. My project aims to find new ways to bridge these boundaries in the larger context of the musical dialogue between “ancients” and “moderns” announced by Vincenzo Galilei (father of Galileo) along with other contemporary dialogues animating natural philosophy, theology, and mathematics. This new approach to the history and philosophy of music also reflects on the nature, origins, and destiny of modern science. I would like to delineate this dialogue between music and natural philosophy, ancient and modern, in a serious book directed to the educated general reader but also poised on the scholarly edge of discovery, with full notes to guide further study and a new approach to making musical examples more readily accessible for the reader to hear directly.
The Western tradition began with music like the Gregorian chant, whose exalted impassivity reflects the “music of the spheres,” whose serene beauty transcends transient human passions. Yet ancient writers already recognized another strain of musical practice that stirred the passions through careful choice of musical mode. Intrigued by accounts of the expressive power of ancient tragic drama, Vincenzo Galilei and others called for a new music devoted to gaining power over the soul through evoking and moving the passions. In response, what we call opera emerged. Claudio Monteverdi’s L’Orfeo (1624) begins with La Musica herself proclaiming her power “to move even the iciest mind,” which Orpheus used to subdue the world, though his own passionate heart could not withstand his own powers.
Though the ancient natural philosophers contemplated the ideal order and beauty of the cosmos, the “new philosophy” of Bacon and Descartes sought power over nature. This quest for power rather than beauty haunts modern science and music. Music sought ever-expanding expressivity through harmonic ambiguity and dissonance in ways comparable to the new philosophy. What Aristotle considered the immovable Earth began to be understood as movable; likewise, the new music moved the icy, immovable soul. Monteverdi’s Orfeo did not merely use individual musical modes (in the way Plato identified martial or sensuous modes) but gained his power by changing the mode, using unstable chords that can function differently in two different keys at once, hence move between them and thereby move the soul. This theme showed its later potentialities when unstable isotopes mediated the alchemic transmutation of elements.
Yet power is problematic. The ever-heightened expressivity of late Romantic music finally collapsed because the dynamic of passion feeds on instability. Any single affect leads to boredom unless revived by a contrasting affect, which repeated and taken to the extreme can finally lead to satiation or emotional overload. Passion exhausts itself, “consumed by what it was nourished by”; passionlessness remains. Thus, many twentieth century composers turned away from Romantic to medieval models. The potent projects of science and music turn on the dialogue between power and beauty, now inextricably intertwined and so fatefully unfolding.