‘The Temple of Music’ by Robert Fludd (review)

This important book is part of a series which, as the editor Jessie Anne Owens says, offers a window into musical culture that is ‘every bit as important as music itself’ (p. xiii).The inclusion in this series on British music theory of a translation of Robert Fludd’s ‘Templum Musicum’, part of his encyclopedic Utriusque cosmi . . . historia (Oppenheim, 1617–26), marks a significant shift in musicological opinion, which to date has given Fludd fairly short shrift. Both Barry Cooper in his ‘Englische Musiktheorie im 17. und 18. Jahrhundert’ (in Wilhelm Seidel and Barry Cooper (eds.), Entstehung nationaler Traditionen: Frankreich–England (Darmstadt, 1986), 145–256), and more recently Rebecca Herissone in Music Theory in Seventeenth-Century England (Oxford, 2000) mention Fludd (1574–1637) identify his work as chiefly speculative and therefore of marginal interest. Herissone, for example, emphasizes Fludd’s advocacy of ‘number mysticism in music’, which seems to run counter to the early modern English predilection for simplicity and a willingness to accept new ideas, such as the theory of keys, which reflected contemporary practice (Herissone, pp. 1–2).

In a nutshell, Peter Hauge effectively challenges this negative view of Fludd with his translation and erudite commentary on the ‘Temple of Music’, a work that seems to have been completed some time between 1596 and 1610. Locating it within a contemporary late-Renaissance context, Hauge demonstrates that this apparently popular treatise was designed as an overview of the rudiments of music aimed at the scholarly community (possibly with English readers chiefly in mind), much like Johann Heinrich Alsted’s later work of the same title. This latter treatise constituted part of Alsted’s Encyclopaedia (Herborn, 1630), and was translated by the musician and theorist John Birchensha and published as Templum Musicum . . . A Compendium of the Rudiments both of the Mathematical and Practical Part of Musick: Of which Subject not any Book is extant in our English Tongue (London, 1664). As Hauge rightly points out, what Herissone identifies as Fludd’s ‘number mysticism’ in the ‘Temple’ is in fact the author simply noticing that ‘without numbers and proportions music cannot be expressed—it cannot exist’ (pp. 15–16). While Fludd certainly believed that the whole cosmos was generated through numbers and proportions (and was therefore inherently musical), this should not lead us to discount his treatment of ‘real’ music.

Fludd’s ‘Temple’ has been overlooked by musicologists mainly because (a) it is in Latin, unlike most other seventeenth-century English music theory, and (b) it is embedded within his monumental history of the macrocosm and microcosm, a publication that led him into vituperative controversy with two prominent Continental natural philosophers, Johannes Kepler (1571–1630) and Marin Mersenne (1588–1648). As the authors respectively of Harmonices mundi libri V (Linz, 1619) and Harmonie universelle (Paris, 1636), Kepler and Mersenne—no less than Fludd—understood the universe to be harmonically constructed. But for reasons that lie beyond the scope of this review, these critics judged his entire philosophical method as false and his adherence to the Pythagorean division of the monochord as essentially outmoded. This opinion soon became orthodoxy, and while they have become icons of the Scientific Revolution, Fludd has been typecast as a misguided supporter of magical and mystical thinking that was swept away by the Enlightenment. (See Peter J. Ammann, ‘The Musical Theory and Philosophy of Robert Fludd’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 30 (1967), 198–227, and Robert S. Westman, ‘Nature, Art, and Psyche: Jung, Pauli, and the Kepler-Fludd Polemic’, in Brian Vickers (ed.), Occult and Scientific Mentalities in the Renaissance (Cambridge, 1984), 177–229.) This appraisal was further reinforced by the eighteenth-century music historian John Hawkins’s discovery that much of the ‘Temple’ was copied verbatim from the fourteenth-century English ‘Quatuor principalia musicae’ rather than being original to Fludd, and therefore deserved no interest (p. 7).

However, Fludd’s tendency to cut and paste...