Historical Concordance of Music and Metaphysical Cosmology

This is still a draft, but the details (in particular in the sections about ancient music theory and mechanization) are evident for those with a passing knowledge of ancient philosophy, music and intellectual history, and even less history of physics. The general idea is expressed. The crucial section is "Monophony and the Autonomization of Music".

General Remarks#

The concept of music in the Western tradition is characterized by its being built upon various entities such as notes and pitches. One crucial point that distinguishes the Western tradition up until 20th century - and still a mainstream nowadays - is the mechanization of sound. This is manifested in many ways, an example of which is the fact that sound patterns are abstracted from the motor pattern that give rise to the sound, as can be seen in the staff notation which originiated from the neume notation.

It should be stressed that music in its Western sense, that is, the conceptualization of sound in terms of discrete notes and abstract sound patterns, is not the unique way percepted sound phenomena can be classified and organized. Here there's an intricate problem in the use of the word 'music' since in many cultures there might not be the notion of music as an autonomous discipline of art in the modern sense at all. In fact it is questionable whether one can speak of a unified notion of music throughout the history of Western civilization. Nonetheless, it is relatively clear that the music of Tuva, which unfolds around the timbre and the manipulation of the harmonics of a single fundamental frequency, is radically different from the traditional form of Western music, even before around 17th century when modal tradition is still in operation. Even some instances of Jazz, while heavily overlapping with contemporary classical music in their search for alternative shapes of sound, differ significantly from traditional Western music in their use of glissandi and overblowing, embouchure, changes of vibrato, reflecting the African origin of the Pentecostalism that shaped Gospel music and henceforward Jazz.

Ancient Music Theory#

Ancient music theory of the Greeks was concerned about ontological questions such as the essential nature of music and the fundamental principles that govern its appearances, and was not about musical practice; not about how a piece of music should be composed and performed. It was more that of mathematics in the modern sense. The important truths about music were, at least of the Pythagoreans, in its harmonious reflection of number which is the reality as opposed temporal and corruptible things. As an example, for Boethius there are celestial, human and instrumental music, the resonance manifested in instrumental music being only profane shadows of the numerical and geometrical basis of harmony, which is also reflected in the structure of the Ptolemic universe.

Monophony and the Autonomization of Music#

The history of written music in the Western tradition began around 9th century, in Hucbald's time, and at around the same time the instrument monochord was used to teach singers the Chant melodies, mainly to establish pitches and scales for singers. The monochord was the venerated tool of speculative canonics, and even in the 17th century was used by occultists such as Robert Fludd for speculations on celestial harmony of the Ptolemic universe. This marks the beginning of practical use of ancient music theory, and the instrumentalization and mechanization of voice.

The transition of the focus of music theory from purely mathematical and astronomical speculation in the sense of quadrivium to that of practice should be understood in light of the ritual nature of liturgical chants and its peculiar insistence upon the purity of sound. It is well-known that by the 5th century the use of accompanying instruments was regarded by many Church Fathers as dangerous spiritually. The musical expression of the Christian rite became unaccompanied monodic Chant, and in particular in the rite of the Latin church the accompanying vocal drone that can be heard in the Greek tradition is eliminated, culminating in Gregorian chant. The following quote from Tim Hodgkinson should be an adequate characterization of the monodic Chant, at least in the Latin tradition:

The voice, privileged as the essential carrier for the ritual, is represented as internal, inaccessible, dissociated from the physical being; singing and listening become activities of the soul rather than of the flesh. In the same moment, the dematerialization of sound: as the body is expelled from music it takes with it bodily time and all that is implied by the presence of bodily time in pre-Christian performance traditions. Sound becomes pure, an exactly regular vibration, without physical shape. Equally the church building closes itself physically from the profane world and insulates itself from natural sound; the presence of the outdoors sound-world is replaced by the magnifying reverberation of the indoors within the hard tall walls of the edifice. (Tim Hodgkinson, Holy Ghost)

Ritual is not art and does not concern itself with aesthetics. There are well-defined and given functional roles associated to rituals, and rituals are always practical means to achive something. The liturgical function of Christian rite is the fixation and integration of personhood directed towards the Word, which transcends the written text that is sang and needs to be comprehended via various means such as exegesis, the comprehened content itself being inexpressible, so there need not be and is no strict correspondence between the text and the sound proper. The only requirement is that the sound should be pure and should express the harmony of the Universe that was created through the Word, and thus, obeying the harmony expounded by ancient music theory. And by the theoretization of practiced music in a mathematical manner, the chanting voice that was corporeal and at the same time immannet, without precise external means of control, became instrumentalized and manipulatable.

It was during the Carolingian Renaissance that the music theory of antiquity was put into widespread practical use. A cultural unity needed to be formed inside Christendom, which was realized by the standardization of Latin as learned language and the disciplined spread of ancient learning. In particular liturgical chants were disciplined by the ancient music theory. Built upon the essentially Pythagorean music theory of antiquity, the conceptual harmony of the universe formalized and described in the speculative tradition of music theory became corporeal and concrete in the liturgical chants of the early Middle ages, foreshadowing the autonomy, individuation and becoming self-conscious of music as a discipline, as an instance of art in the modern sense. While previously the music abstracted and reduced to numerical representation of pitches and intervals - or rather the other way around, that is, the pitches and intervals are mere shadows of numbers and their ratios - is thought of as pertaining to the same harmony that binds the celestial bodies and hence the Universe, now, through the actual reception of music theory in the musical practice of the Christian Church, music became an actual embodiment of the harmony that constitutes the Universe, and thence became an autonomous universe of its own.

It was internal to this musical Universe, constrained and shaped by the numerical and geometrical harmony of the ancient Greeks, that all discourses in music unfolded. The logic of music making became systemized and increasingly autonomous, since there was an abstract principle, partaking in which the music was considered legitimate and rational. The constraints imposed upon musical practice became no longer that of practical tradition, no longer a well-defined and structured ritual process to be followed in more-or-less exact manner and possessing inherit practical function, but that of theoretical and speculative tradition. Notice the similarity to how medieval Canon law transformed the notion of Human law, from unchangeable and not subject to reason to changeable and subject to reason. Music obtained a rule of itself and became self-regulating.

Polyphony#

The emergence of polyphony in the late Middle ages accompanies the rise of the Mendicant orders and personal piety of the Gothic age, together with the nominalist metaphysics of Ockham and the political theory of Marsilius of Padua with their insistence on the autonomy of individual groups and their mistrust towards an underlying metaphysical and cosmological unity that everything partakes and should partake. While the Roman Church still holds an authoritative power over the written text and a monopoly over knowledge, simultaneously there are apocryphas, pseudepigrapha and various sects that gives different interpretation and exegesis to texts and holds different metaphysics of the universe.

It was an age obsessed with textual commentary. Over a text, multiple instances of comments and interpretations can be superimposed, hyperlinks between texts transformed previous text to hypertext, in short vertical structures were built over a text. Since in the monodic Chant purified music lost any inherit meaning and became a mere vehicle of ritual, there emerged a vacuum for commentary in the form of polyphony: the sound organized vertically, interacting with each other autonomously, in full analogy to how commentaries are built over commentaries and between different commentaries, and to how the interaction between individual and monadic groups such as guilds, universities, municipalities wove together and formed the cosmic order of the late Middle ages.

The process should be seen as endowed with positive feedbacks. The crucial problem for medieval musicians to solve for the contrapuntal singing to emerge was the conceptualization and notation of a hierarchy of rhythmic values. Notes that were already abstracted and devoided of physiological substrate, are now regarded as atomic units disassociated from scales and melodic lines, superimposed vertically and represented by discrete and abstract notations.

Mechanization#

In Rameau, who was roughly a contemporary of Newton, with the abandonment of modal thinking and the adoption and invention of classical harmony, the musical patterns are mechanized. Patterns are seen as mechanical objects that should be manipulated according to some engineering rules. The focus on the tonal nature of harmonics are replaced by the focus on the organization of mechanical patterns, unfolding horizontally as in mechanical dynamics. In particular, tuning systems like equal temperament that disregards anything close to the numerical-rational harmony in the Greek sense were beginning to be adopted, though not widespread until about 19th century.

At the same time, the classical problems of musical harmonics were treated as problems of mechanics, that of acoustics in proximity to its modern sense. Consonances, now seen in light of purely physiological consequences of coincidental vibrational frequencies, were no longer metaphysically distinct from dissonances, and the choice of consonances over dissonances are more that of context and taste rather than that of following a rule imposed by some cosmic order.