Moot Thoughts & Musings

Musicologist Claude V. Palisca wrote the following about the era of music history we call the Baroque (roughly 1600-1750):

Behind the traits that mark music as baroque, then, are their reaon for being: the passions, or as they were more often called then, the affections. Affections are not the same as emotions. A 16th c poetic critic, Lorenzo Giacomini, defined an affection as “a spiritual movement or operation of the mind in which it is attracted or repelled by an object it has come to know.” He described it as a result of an imbalance in the animal spirits and vapors that flow continually throughout the body. An abundance of thin and agile spirits disposes a person to joyous affections, while torpid and impure vapors prepare the way for sorrow and fear. External and internal sensations stimulate the bodily mechanism to alter the state of the spirits. This activity is felt as a ‘movement of the affections,’ and the resulting state of imbalance is the affection. Once this state is reached, the body and mind tend to remain in the same affection until some new stimulus produces an alteration of the combination of vapors. Affection and passion are two terms for the same process, the former describing it from the point of view of the body, the latter from the standpoint of the mind. The alteration of the blood and spirits affects the body, while the mind passively suffers the disturbance. (In Baroque Music, 2d ed., Prentice-Hall, 1981)

In the late 16th/early 17th c. certain musicians, poets, scholars, and generally interested people were reading treatises by and about the Greeks concerning music. What struck them was how much power the Greeks said music had. Plato, in The Republic said that when educating the future citizens of the republic, they shouldn't listen to certain kinds of music, because it would make them bad people (or conversely, listening to good music would make them good people).

How these 17th c Italians saw this was more than just how we pose the problem concerning "today's youth" and listening to violent lyrics. If we are to read Paliscia's explanation properly, it's clear that they saw a real, physical process, as powerful as listening to the right music could actually make a sick person well. Music: the social panacea!

It became their task to recreate the music of the Greeks so that they could recreate the power they saw that the Greeks had. In their studies they saw that most of the music consisted of a single vocal line with instrumental accompaniment. So they started writing music that way. They also observed that the Greek plays were actually sung. Hence, the birth of opera in 1600-07, with the story of Orpheus, the god who used the power of music to enter Hades.

This past Thursday evening, this is the story I told my class. I'm astounded every time I go over the birth of opera how much faith this group of Florentines had in the power of music--how thoroughly it could affect an actual physical change and how much they wanted to recreate this power.

What the Greeks did, we'll never know fully. I do know that the past lives in the past, and what of the past lives in the present is necessarily reinvented by those who live in the present.