Music, Science and Natural Magic in Seventeenth-Century England. (Reviews).Penelope Gouk, Music, Science and Natural Magic in Seventeenth-Century England New Haven New Haven, city (1990 pop. 130,474), New Haven co., S Conn., a port of entry where the Quinnipiac and other small rivers enter Long Island Sound; inc. 1784. Firearms and ammunition, clocks and watches, tools, rubber and paper products, and textiles are among the many and London: Yale University Yale University, at New Haven, Conn.; coeducational. Chartered as a collegiate school for men in 1701 largely as a result of the efforts of James Pierpont, it opened at Killingworth (now Clinton) in 1702, moved (1707) to Saybrook (now Old Saybrook), and in 1716 was Press, 1999. xii + 68 illustrations + 352 pp. $35. ISBN ISBN abbr. International Standard Book Number ISBN International Standard Book Number ISBN n abbr (= International Standard Book Number) → ISBN m : 0-300-07383-6. For nearly two decades Penelope Gouk has made important contributions to the history of science, most notably as the author of The Ivory Sundials of Nuremberg, 1500-1700 (1988), already a classic in the history of early scientific instruments. With the publication of the study under review, Gouk has, in effect, completed her work in this area by pulling together a number of different threads, all of which impinge on realms of scientific discourse. In her current book Gouk focuses on the connections among music, science and natural magic and argues that the changing musical practices in sixteenth-century Europe had a profound impact on seventeenth-century scientific thought. The manner in which Gouk unravels the intricate web of associations among the disciplines and practitioners is nothing less than ingeniousness. The book is divided into three parts with each part viewing in a different way Gouk's primary concern of how mutual influence occurred. "Geographies" (chaps. 1-3) establishes the boundaries among the three disciplines and explores ways in which they physically and cognitively overlapped. The "Gallery" (chap. 4) is at the center of the book and at the heart of Gouk's thesis. Its wide array of images (that includes, instruments, mnemonic Pronounced "ni-mon-ic." A memory aid. In programming, it is a name assigned to a machine function. For example, COM1 is the mnemonic assigned to serial port #1 on a PC. Programming languages are almost entirely mnemonics. aids, musical notation musical notation, symbols used to make a written record of musical sounds. Two different systems of letters were used to write down the instrumental and the vocal music of ancient Greece. In his five textbooks on music theory Boethius (c.A.D. 470–A.D. , tuning diagrams, dance steps, and more), descriptions of instrumental designs, and explanations of musical concepts (such as, solmization solmization or solfeggio System of designating musical notes by syllable names. It may have been invented by the 11th-century Italian monk Guido d'Arezzo when training his cathedral singers. , origin of the scale, harmony of the spheres, etc.) supplies comprehensive support for her view that musical models of all sorts informed and influenced those of science. "Narratives" (chaps. 4-6) considers Francis Bacon's role in the emerging science of acoustics, Robert Hooke's experiments with instruments, and Gouk's crowning point: music theory acted as a catalyst in the formation of the scientific method advocated by Isaac Newton. The force of this last claim must be greeted with some skepticism. An appendix of key literary sources about music from antiquity to circa 1700 is included, a bibliography of manuscripts, primary and secondary sources, and a limited index round out the volume. One of the main problems I see is that Gouk's study still bears many marks of its origins as a 1982 Ph.D. thesis (at the Warburg Institute The Warburg Institute is a research institution associated with the University of London. A member of the School of Advanced Study, its focus is the study of the influence of classical antiquity on all aspects of European civilization. , University of London For most practical purposes, ranging from admission of students to negotiating funding from the government, the 19 constituent colleges are treated as individual universities. Within the university federation they are known as Recognised Bodies ). Only a number of studies written during the last decade are listed in the bibliography or cited in notes. Notably absent is the outstanding work on the English Masque masque, courtly form of dramatic spectacle, popular in England in the first half of the 17th cent. The masque developed from the early 16th-century disguising, or mummery, in which disguised guests bearing presents would break into a festival and then join with their by Peter Walls, unarguably the most thorough study to date on the subject (Mu sic in the English Courtly Masque, 1604-1640, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1996). This omission is surprising because the masque, according to Gouk, is of special interest to her study due to its "intrinsically collaborative and experimental nature" and its "special association with magic" (31). The absence of recent studies in the history of education in England Until June 2007, Education in England was the responsibility of the Department for Education and Skills at national level and, in the case of publicly funded compulsory education, of Local Education Authorities. by such notable scholars as Roger Bray, Anthony Grafton, and Lisa Jardine is also regrettable. Gouk claims that "practical music theory merely required technical skills in performance" (68), and it would have been interesting to see her response to Bray' s finding that "practical music" in English universities (namely, Oxford and Cambridge) meant "composition, not performance" ("Music and the Quadrivium quad·riv·i·um n. pl. quad·riv·i·a The higher division of the seven liberal arts in the Middle Ages, composed of geometry, astronomy, arithmetic, and music. in Early Tudor England," Music & Letters, vol. 76, 1995). On the whole, this is an excellent book, with a provocative thesis, carefully and logically worked out. Penelope Gouk may not be the first historian to see a connection between natural magic and music, but she is one of the first to emphasize the developmental connection among science, magic, and music, and to emphasize music's central role as mediator; and Gouk may be the first to demonstrate that the application of the new science of experimentation to the study of music was partly responsible for stripping the mantle of mystery from natural magic and altering the path scientific discourse was to take. I have no doubt that this book will become a standard for many future interdisciplinary studies. |
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