Music, Science, and Natural Magic in Seventeenth-Century England (review)

Music, Science, and Natural Magic in Seventeenth-Century England. By Penelope Gouk. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999. [xii, 308 p. ISBN 0-300-07383-6. $35.]

Several scholars have investigated the connection between music and magic in the Renaissance. One of the fundamental studies on this subject, D. P. Walker's Spiritual and Demonic Magic from Ficino to Campanella (London: Warburg Institute, 1958), offered particular insight into Marsilio Ficino's magical songs. More recently, Gary Tomlinson argued in Music in Renaissance Magic: Toward a Historiography of Others (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993) that the ideological shift from magic to science coincided with, and perhaps affected, the change from musical mimesis to musical representation. In her new study, Penelope Gouk is more comprehensive than her predecessors as she teases out connections between natural magic, science, and music, demonstrating how discourses about music and new instrumental musical practices brought magical concerns to the emerging "new" science in the late seventeenth century. Gouk is inclusive in her method and in the broad range of sources she brings to bear on her subject. She marshals impressive evidence to prove her central thesis, but her diffuse style of argument sometimes obscures her focus and direction.

The first section, "Geographies" (chaps. 1-3), employs social geography to map "the position of music in relation to natural magic and the sciences at the cognitive and social levels" (p. 6). Gouk approaches the social level first, describing the importance of music literacy for the seventeenth-century gentleman. She seeks an explanation for the significance of music in the education of upper-class men in early Stuart court culture, a culture concerned with exploiting the harmonic model that music provided for human interactions, as represented in the courtly genres of the masque and the fantasia suite. While mentioning the early Stuart court, Gouk moves briskly to evidence from the latter half of the century. As she explains, music entertainments originally consumed by a small elite at court were enjoyed by a much larger audience after the Civil War and Interregnum, and with the Restoration came the reopening of the public theaters and the establishment of venues for public concerts of instrumental music. For Gouk's argument to be persuasive at this point, the reader must accept the primacy of instrumental over vocal music in late-seventeenth-century England. While subsequently she argues well for the influence of instrumental practices on scientific thought, here she underplays the importance of vocal theater music during the Restoration. Even as she acknowledges that many members of the Royal Society (founded in 1660 by Charles II to foster scientific inquiry) regularly attended the public theaters, she insists that "From a purely musical perspective, the new 'music houses' that sprang up in the period were a far more significant innovation than the public theatres" (p. 58). In fact, through the end of the century the playhouses continued to be the primary venue for audiences to hear professional musicians, and vocal theater music was frequently performed in these public concerts, as the printed songs from the period attest.

Whereas this manipulation of evidence prompts reservations, Gouk is convincing in showing the confluence between the physical worlds of experimental philosophy and music in her case study of Civil War and Interregnum Oxford. Because of the war, King Charles I and his court, including his royal physician William Harvey, fled to Oxford, remaining there until the surrender of the city to Parliamentary forces in 1646. Once in Oxford, Harvey began meeting informally with colleagues, pursuing experimental research on anatomy and embryology. The emergence of these experimental practices at Oxford coincided with the emergence of new venues for music, including the commercial music meeting, a phenomenon that also began in London in the 1640s. These meetings took place in tavern rooms and were enlivened by the presence at Oxford of royal court musicians. Thus, new commercial musical practices and new experimental practices developed...