“The Temple of Music” by Robert Fludd (review)

The history of music theory as a discipline encompasses many genres of historical writing. On the broadest level, the sources divide into practical and speculative treatises. The practical treatises have been the mainstay of efforts to come to grips with how earlier musicians went about composing, performing, and teaching music as a performative practice. The pragmatic culture of the Carolingian period witnessed an explosion of such treatises and they, along with their many successors from later eras, reveal insights into musics that we continue to love even though (perhaps partly because) they are veiled by the shroud of historical distance.

Speculative treatises offer a different experience and present a quite different set of challenges. The speculative treatise traditionally attempts to get at the reality behind music’s sounding surface. The impetus behind this can be traced back to Pythagoras’s mythical observations in the blacksmith’s shop. By discerning that the consonances arose from specific ratios, Pythagoras took the intellectual leap to the assumption that the cosmos was ordered in a rational, mathematical manner. Music, in this sense, is not concerned with the performative as such but rather with the ontology of musical sound insofar as it participates in ontology per se, as well as with music as an epistemological study. How is it that the parts of the universe cohere? Of what does the Being of those parts consist? How is it that we are able to recognize the reality behind appearances?

Music in the latter, speculative, sense is, of course, music as a liberal art. As such it was categorized, by Boethius and his many followers, as part of the quadrivium— arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy. The interest in music as a liberal art encouraged many authors who were not themselves musicians to write about music as part of larger intellectual projects. The origins of such writings can be traced at least back to the late Roman period, with the most celebrated example being Boethius’s De institutione musica. However, whereas Boethius’s text is remarkably consistent (with some notable exceptions) and limits itself to two models (Nichomachus and Ptolemy), many other authors present a compendium of thoughts about music culled from numerous previous sources without having fully synthesized that information.

This subset of speculative writers, including such early figures as Macrobius and Martianus Capella from the early fifth century, often brings together ideas concerning music that are mutually contradictory or that their authors simply misunderstood. One might think that such an assessment would consign these texts to the dustbin of historical curiosity, but that is hardly the case. In fact, one might assert that these texts provide the modern scholar with the most important information regarding the history of music theory qua history of ideas. After all, many of these treatises were wildly popular and widely read and disseminated. These were the books that well-educated nonmusicians would have read regarding music. They were the “popular science” books of their day. As confused and inconsistent as their depiction of musical science might have been, these treatises represent the inconsistent and catch-all quality of musical knowledge held by the educated readers of their eras. This makes them fascinating, if obscure, objects of study.

The music section, “The Temple of Music,” of Robert Fludd’s massive Utriusque cosmi . . . historia (Oppenheim, 1617–18) is a key example of this genre from the early seventeenth century. The larger treatise has long intrigued historians of science, but it has garnered less attention from music scholars. This situation will doubtless change owing to Peter Hauge’s fine translation, appearing as an integral part of the “Music Theory in Britain, 1500–1700” from Ashgate. This publication opens with an introduction by Hauge that anticipates the contents of the treatise, places it briefly in historical context, and discusses its publication history as well as translation issues. The main body of the book contains the emended Latin...