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6 Visualization and the Composition of Polyphonic Music This chapter is concerned with the impact of the art of memory on polyphonic music that was not improvised but written down, and more specifically with pieces that would not have come into existence without mensural notation . These pieces had a composer in the modern sense of the term, that is, they were put together by someone who conceived his music not only as something to be heard, but also as something to be seen. Before we turn to a discussion of the music, it will be useful to summarize the most salient points concerning the importance of visualization for memorization and composition of texts in literature. There is general agreement among writers in antiquity and the Middle Ages that the best way to commit material to memory is by means of associating it with visual images placed in a storehouse. In Mary Carruthers’s words, “there simply is no classical or Hebrew or medieval tradition regarding an ‘ear of the mind’ equivalent to that of the ‘eye of the mind.’”1 Cicero says this clearly in his De oratore when he argues that the sight is “the keenest of all of our senses.”2 This argument is further developed in the high Middle Ages by Thomas Aquinas, who states “that the sense of sight has a special dignity; it is more spiritual and more subtle than any other sense.”3 Similarly, Thomas Bradwardine reiterates the primacy of the visual image for memory: “Indeed memory is most powerfully affected by sensory impression, most 198 1. Carruthers, Book of Memory, 27. 2. De oratore, ed. and trans. Sutton and Rackham, 2.357. 3. Aquinas, Commentary on Aristotle’s De anima, trans. Foster and Humphries, Lectio 14 in bk. II, par. 417. strongly by vision; wherefore something occurs in memory as it customarily occurs in seeing.”4 In recent years, psychologists have confirmed the efficacy of ancient and medieval memory techniques. Stephen Kosslyn has shown that the ability to visualize is central to mental planning in any field, be it chess, a game of basketball , or musical composition.5 This ability to plan is closely linked to a highly developed visio-spatial long-term memory. A chess master is able to take one look at a chess game and then reconstruct the position of each player.6 He is not able to do this because he has a better memory than nonchess players, but because he has played chess for hours and hours, which enables him to do what psychologists refer to as “chunking.” In “chunking” one combines a number of separate items into a group.7 For example, a fouryear old child would see the letters H O U S E as separate items to be remembered , while an adult would retrieve the word “house” from long-term memory. Thus, “chunking” allows one to increase drastically the amount of information stored in long-term memory.8 We have seen in the previous chapter that musicians certainly were “chunking” when they memorized consonances, interval progressions, and formulas. But did they visualize as they composed? We know that they imagined the intervals on the hand or on the staff, but could they also have visualized what they were composing on the staff? I would like to suggest that there are two areas where visualization might have played an important role. First, the ability to visualize the staff allowed composers to work out polyphonic pieces in the mind without a wax tablet or parchment. And second, polyphonic compositions were sung by heart. Thus they needed to be clearly structured so that they could be remembered. I believe that periodic articulation9 might have been so popular because it visualization and composition 199 4. “Memoria vero maxime causatur a sensu, maxime quoque a visu, quare in memoria accidit sicut in visu accidere consuevit.” Thomas Bradwardine, “De memoria artificialis,” trans. Carruthers from Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, MS McClean 169, in Book of Memory, 281. 5. Kosslyn, Image and Mind; Ghosts in the Mind’s Machine; Image and Brain; see also his “Visual Mental Imagery.” Note, however, that even though according to one study, 97% of the members of Mensa, a group of people who perform exceptionally well on IQ tests, “reported experiencing vivid imagery” (Kosslyn, Ghosts in the Mind’s Machine, 195), there are significant differences in people’s ability to visualize. 6. Stefan Zweig, in his Schachnovelle, describes a chess player in Nazi Austria...

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