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“Patheticall stories” and “uncontroulable perswasions”: Greek philosophy, the power of music over the passions, and the music of Henry Purcell

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“Patheticall stories” and “uncontroulable perswasions”: Greek philosophy, the power of music over the passions, and the music of Henry Purcell

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Content “Patheticall Stories” and “Uncontroulable Perswasions”:
Greek Philosophy, the Power of Music over the Passions, and the Music of Henry Purcell
by
William P. Rowley
A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(HISTORICAL MUSICOLOGY)
August 2024
Copyright 2024 William P. Rowley

ii
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This research has been made possible by many people to whom I owe my thanks. I will
always be grateful to my whole committee for their modeling of true academic excellence. I am
honored to be able to pass along your lessons to my own students.
I would like to thank my advisor, Adam Knight Gilbert, without whom this dissertation
would never have found wings. Throughout the course of my research, Dr. Gilbert stoked countless
research ideas and breakthroughs through his thoughtful lines of questioning, helped me make
connections between concepts across a wide span of disciplines, and modeled a commitment to
deep language study. Most importantly, he provided warm, patient, and kind support throughout the
long, arduous incubation of this project.
I am so appreciative of the advice and assistance of Emeritus Professor Bruce Alan Brown,
who generously gave of his time to carefully read, edit, and supply invaluable suggestions for this
manuscript. From the beginning, he encouraged me to apply my philosophical training to
musicological research, lending both legitimacy and inspiration to my interdisciplinary aspirations.
Without the guidance of Professor Leah Morrison, this dissertation would never have been
brought to completion. In addition to a firm grasp on music history and the Latin language, her
generous maintenance of the musicology graduate student writing group provided regular deadlines
that kept me moving through the most sluggish and grueling moments.
Many professors at the Thornton School of Music beyond those named here provided a
continuous stream of encouragement and support for my research. A special thank you to Lawrence
Green, whose connection of rhetoric and philosophy to music and the arts enabled knowledge that
would have taken me a dozen lifetimes to discover on my own; to Joanna Demers, whose deep and
creative engagement with aesthetic issues provided an essential early stimulus to this project; to
Bryan Simms, who displayed not only supreme intellectual and scholarly precision, but unparalleled

iii
humanity and compassion; to Rotem Gilbert, whose performance-oriented knowledge of music
history gave rise to endlessly useful insights; to Ken Cazan, whose connection of music to dance and
body language enabled me to delve more deeply into the psychology of gesture; to Chris Rozé, who
stimulated my rhetoric-based analysis of the music of Olivier Messiaen; and especially to Susan
Feldman, William Skeen, Jason Yoshida, and Shanon Zusman, whose magical drawing forth of
living music from dead strings continually amazed and inspired. It has been my genuine thrill and
honor to study with all of you. I am overwhelmed by the opportunity to work with you, as well as to
others whom I may have omitted, and for the gift of your art to the world.
Many Thornton staff have provided behind-the-scenes support that made my studies
possible. Special thanks to Phil Placenti, who showed remarkable hospitality and generosity from the
beginning; also to Job Springer, who has been expert in managing all of the maddening paperwork
required and retained a remarkable serenity and kindness along the way; to Gordon La Cross, whose
sense of humor and thoughtful conversation always provided needed relief along the way; and to
music librarian Andrew Justice, who has been so patient in allowing me to sit on several shelves’
worth of precious materials for a decade. Finally, I thank the Thornton School of Music for its
hearty financial support of the musicology program at the University of Southern California. Thank
you to the Oakley Endowed Fellowship for supplying funding to assist with the completion of this
dissertation, and to the Colburn Foundation, whose generous support of both early-music singers
and instrumentalists made my return to graduate study possible.
Along the way, I have been lucky to share the journey with so many talented fellow students.
A special camaraderie will always be shared with my musicology classmates with whom I endured
the famed screening exam, Alison Maggart and Karina Kallas. To fellow musicology students
Malachai Bandy, Adam Bregman, Eric Davis, Meagan Mason, Heather Moore, Cindy Taylor, and
others, thank you for inspiring me with your own excellence in scholarship.

iv
It has been the privilege of a lifetime to bring so much early music to life with such
outstanding singers, including Christina Bristow, Stacy Helley, Brandon Hynum, Jon Lee Keenan,
Joel Nesvadba, Kory Reid, Bianca Robles, and Lauren Buckley Schaer. Memories of our one-to-apart singing are some of the greatest of my lifetime.
I am grateful to my colleagues in the philosophy department at California State University
Fullerton, especially James Crippen, David Donley, Scott Galloway, Craig Ihara, Al Flores, Gary
Jason, Graham McFee, Ryan Nichols, Michael Russell, and Patrick Ryan. Your friendship and
collegiality have been an ongoing source of intellectual stimulation.
In addition to the many people above who contributed their remarks to versions of this
manuscript, I will forever be in debt to my writing coach, Audra Sim, for her expert skills in
organizing, editing, and formatting. Thank you also to Helen Alexander and Carabeth Wilson for
volunteering so much of their own time to think through the wide parameters of the project and for
making thoughtful comments on my endless drafts. Finally, to the late Terence Cochran, who did
not live to see the end of this journey but whose encouragement and wisdom made it possible.
I am overwhelmed by the thought of the countless ancestors who have made my life,
language, and learning possible. To my parents, John and Lenore, and to my father- and mother-inlaw, Gary and Elizabeth, thank you for facilitating my education from the earliest days and for
cheering me on through every step of this long road. To my children, Elizabeth and William, may
this project motivate you to persevere through the many trials of life with joy and thanksgiving.
Finally, to my courageous wife, Lisa, whose victorious battle with cancer made my finishing this
difficult project an easy task by comparison: this dissertation is dedicated to you.
William Rowley
Fullerton, California
June 2024

v
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Acknowledgments.............................................................................................................................................. ii
List of Tables..................................................................................................................................................... vii
List of Figures...................................................................................................................................................viii
Abstract................................................................................................................................................................ x
Introduction: Genesis and Structure of the Project...................................................................................... 1
Histories and Analyses of Musical Ideas, Philosophies, and Aesthetics surrounding the
Musical Culture of Henry Purcell and His Contemporaries: A Literature Review..................... 3
Main Questions and Contribution of this Dissertation....................................................................14
Structure of the Dissertation.................................................................................................................15
Chapter 1: The Power of Music: Ancient Greek Philosophy in Seventeenth-Century English
Musical Thought............................................................................................................................................... 18
The Concept of the Soul as Harmony in Early Modern English Musical Thought.................... 21
Ancient Greek Philosophers Commonly Drawn Upon in the Seventeenth Century................. 36
Pythagoras..................................................................................................................................... 37
Plato............................................................................................................................................... 38
Aristotle......................................................................................................................................... 40
Quintilianus................................................................................................................................... 42
Boethius......................................................................................................................................... 44
English Interpreters of Ancient Greek Musical Ideas...................................................................... 45
Thomas Wright (1561-1524)...................................................................................................... 46
Francis Bacon (1561-1626)......................................................................................................... 47
John Case (1539/46-1600)..........................................................................................................49
Thomas Morley (1557-1602) ..................................................................................................... 51
Isaac Vossius (1618-1689)...........................................................................................................52
Roger North (1653-1734)............................................................................................................54
John Hawkins (1719-1789)......................................................................................................... 57
Charles Burney (1726-1814)....................................................................................................... 58
Conclusion............................................................................................................................................... 59
Chapter 2: Sympathetic Motion: The Mechanics of Musical Motion in Seventeenth-Century
Theoretical Musical Discourse........................................................................................................................61
Cartesian Duality versus Aristotle’s Mimesis..................................................................................... 65
Theories of Causal Relation between Music and the Passions........................................................72
1. Theoretical Foundations: Music as the Motion of Air.......................................................73
2. Nascent Theories of Movement and the Soul: Dynamics of Heating and Cooling,
Stirring and Stilling, etc., in the Elements of Fire, Earth, Water, and Air........................75
3. Theoretical Integrations with Music: Rhythm as the Imitation of Bodily and
Emotional Processes in Music................................................................................................ 82
4. Theoretical Broadenings to the Mechanics of Musical Motion: The Sense of
Opposite Motive Forces in All Musical Elements...............................................................90
5. Theoretical Outcomes: Music’s Ability to Create Psychological Well-Being................. 93

vi
Music and the Cultivation of Morality and Good Character...........................................................96
Conclusion.............................................................................................................................................105
Chapter 3: Musical Motion and the Passions (Part I): Building a Mimetic Approach to Analysis
Using the Cecilian Odes.................................................................................................................................107
Thinking Rhythm and Pitch through Vossius and Bernhard........................................................ 109
Specific Correspondences between the Passions and Musical Gestures..................................... 115
Affective Analyses of the Cecilian Odes...........................................................................................120
Calm/Peaceful/Relaxing...........................................................................................................122
Joy/Pleasure................................................................................................................................127
Anger/Fury................................................................................................................................. 131
Sadness/Melancholy.................................................................................................................. 142
Conclusion.............................................................................................................................................146
Chapter 4: Musical Motion and the Passions (Part II): Applying the Mimetic Approach to
Analyses of Three Works by Henry Purcell............................................................................................... 147
“From Rosie Bowers”......................................................................................................................... 148
“Oh Solitude”........................................................................................................................................155
Sonata VI................................................................................................................................................ 167
Simultaneous Rhythmic, Melodic, and Harmonic Expansion and Contraction.............. 171
Imitative writing............................................................................................................... 171
Suspensions.......................................................................................................................175
Leaps.................................................................................................................................. 176
Avoiding resolution......................................................................................................... 177
Ornamental and structural dissonances........................................................................178
Increasing rhythmic intensity......................................................................................... 180
Final Remarks on Sonata VI..................................................................................................... 181
Conclusion.............................................................................................................................................182
Bibliography.....................................................................................................................................................183
Primary Sources.................................................................................................................................... 183
Secondary Sources................................................................................................................................191
Music Scores and Manuscripts........................................................................................................... 198
Libretti....................................................................................................................................................199
Appendix: Sonata VI by Henry Purcell........................................................................................................200

vii
LIST OF TABLES
Table 3.1: Representing the passions with musical figures in the Cecilian odes...................................119

viii
LIST OF FIGURES
Figure 3.1: John Blow, Begin the Song, 1684, “Music’s the cordial of a troubled Breast”......................123
Figure 3.2: G. B. Draghi, From Harmony, from Heav’nly Harmony, 1687, “The soft complaining
flute,” mm. 28-47............................................................................................................................................125
Figure 3.3: Henry Purcell, Welcome to All the Pleasures, 1683, opening chorus........................................128
Figure 3.4: Henry Purcell, Welcome to All the Pleasures, 1683, “While joys celestial”..............................130
Figure 3.5: Daniel Purcell, Ode for St. Cecilia’s Day, 1698, “Raise the voice, and raise the soul”......... 132
Figure 3.6: Henry Purcell, Hail! Bright Cecilia, 1692, “The fife and all the harmony of war”.............. 134
Figure 3.7: G. B. Draghi, From Harmony, from Heav’nly Harmony, 1687, “When nature
underneath”..................................................................................................................................................... 136
Figure 3.8: G. B. Draghi, From Harmony, from Heav’nly Harmony, 1687, “As from the pow’r of
sacred lays”.......................................................................................................................................................137
Figure 3.9: Henry Purcell, Hail! bright Cecilia, 1692, “Soul of the world”............................................... 139
Figure 3.10: Daniel Purcell, Ode for St. Cecilia’s Day, 1698, “The trumpet calls to arms”.....................141
Figure 3.11: Charles Le Brun, “La Tristesse,” 1732.................................................................................. 141
Figure 3.12: Henry Purcell, Hail! bright Cecilia, 1692, “’Tis nature’s voice”............................................143
Figure 3.13: G. B. Draghi, From Harmony, from Heav’nly Harmony, 1687, “The soft complaining
flute,” mm. 7-27.............................................................................................................................................. 144
Figure 3.14: Henry Purcell, Hail! bright Cecilia, 1692, “In vain the am’rous flute”................................ 145
Figure 4.1: Henry Purcell, “From Rosie Bowers,” in Don Quixote: The Music in the Three Plays of
Thomas Durfey, 1696.........................................................................................................................................149
Figure 4.2: D’Urfey, “From Rosie Bowers,” in The Comical History of Don Quixote, 1696.................... 151
Figure 4.3: Author’s reduction of mm. 1-24 of Henry Purcell’s “Oh Solitude”...................................158
Figure 4.4: Partially reduced ground bass for “Oh Solitude”.................................................................. 161
Figure 4.5: Henry Purcell, “Oh Solitude,” mm. 1-13................................................................................ 161
Figure 4.6: Henry Purcell, “Oh Solitude,” mm. 20-22..............................................................................164
Figure 4.7: Henry Purcell, “Oh Solitude,” mm. 26-29..............................................................................164

ix
Figure 4.8: Henry Purcell, “Oh Solitude,” mm. 56-63..............................................................................166
Figure 4.9: Henry Purcell, “Oh Solitude,” mm. 82-86..............................................................................166
Figure 4.10: Henry Purcell, Sonata VI, 1697, basso continuo..................................................................170
Figure 4.11: Author’s reduction of mm. 1-35 of Henry Purcell’s Sonata VI......................................... 172
Figure 4.12: Bernhard’s example illustrating passus duriusculus..................................................................179
Figure 4.13: Henry Purcell, Sonata VI, m. 165, 9/6 time signature in first violin part.........................179

x
ABSTRACT
“Patheticall Stories” and “Uncontroulable Perswasions”:
Greek Philosophy, the Power of Music over the Passions, and the Music of Henry Purcell
by
William P. Rowley
This dissertation examines the influence of Greek philosophy on early modern theories of
the mind and the passions in order to highlight the centrality of such themes in English language
discourse about the “power of music.” Arguing that intellectuals of many varieties saw music as a
fundamentally mimetic activity that literally moved the passions, this dissertation shows how detailed
examination of these philosophical views on music can be used to deepen a scholar or performer’s
understanding of the affective musico-rhetorical strategies and compositional structures employed
by Henry Purcell and his contemporaries. To establish the relationship between Greek philosophy
and early modern English thought, chapter 1 demonstrates that Pythagorean conceptions of the soul
as harmony and Aristotelian approaches to artistry as fundamentally mimetic activity were pervasive
themes in English-language writings from the Renaissance well into the eighteenth century. Chapter
2 analyses how these themes are undergirded by conceptions of the passions as mechanical forces,
making music important for moral and educational development. Chapters 3 and 4 then use the
rhythmic and contrapuntal methodologies of contemporaneous music theorists Isaac Vossius and
Christoph Bernhard to apply this mimetic view of music to the interpretation of works composed
during the English Restoration. Chapter 3 examines the Cecilian odes, music self-consciously
reflective on the nature of music’s power, while chapter 4 analyzes three works by Henry Purcell,

xi
ranging from the most obviously passion-centered (“From Rosie Bowers”) to untexted instrumental
music, revealing the pervasiveness of compositional structures designed to move auditors.

– Introduction –
Genesis and Structure of the Project
My return to graduate study in mid-life was mostly inspired by the music of Henry Purcell,
whose works are characterized by the most harmonically rich vocabulary, full of sweet dissonance
and resolution, inviting both the singer, string player, and scholar in me to dedicate myself to
learning more. Upon searching out contemporaneous writers describing musical life in the period,
the writings of Roger North, setting forth in diary style a wide range of reflections about music
performance, composition, analysis, and reception, compelled me to focus my project on his
thought. Although this project did not ultimately turn out to be about Roger North alone, it reflects
my original attraction to both North’s general interest in philosophical problems posed by music,
and especially his setting forth of a distinctively Aristotelian conception of what music was and how
it worked. In particular, North’s commitment to music as the mimesis of human nature caused me
to wonder how he arrived at these notions and who else might share direct connections to ancient
Greek philosophical thought.
A significant force that shaped my project was the database “Early English Books Online,”
which completed its first phase of development in 2009. In the database, nearly 25,000 books were
entered as full-text electronic editions, enabling them to be searchable by keyword. The availability
of this new modality enabled the primary-source-heavy approach to my writing of the philosophical
history of music presented in this dissertation. One of the great virtues of EEBO is that words can
be searched with their disambiguations included, thus a simple search for “music” would also return
instances of “musick,” “musicke,” “mufik,” or whatever alternate spelling might exist. Armed with
this technological aid, I began mining original manuscripts on EEBO for whatever instances there
were of “Pythagoras” or “Aristotle,” “mimesis” or “the soul as harmony,” or simply “music,” or any
1

of these combined with some other restrictive categorical term. This approach did in fact prove to
be a gold mine, enabling me to locate and cite directly a wide swath of literary genres: diaries,
prefaces, dedications, histories, sermons, and the like. I thereby entered directly into conversations
with intellectuals, educators, and artists such as Roger Ascham, John Case, Francis Bacon, Thomas
Wright, John Milton, John Dryden, and a long list of others, each of whom exhibit a strong interest
in philosophical problems related to music. I eventually realized that many of them were
commenting on a phenomenon they conceived of as “the power of music,” and that their
conception of this phenomenon, while ambiguous on the surface, seemed strangely consistent
across many thinkers and musicians’ writings, and was often deeply connected to the writers’
understanding of Greek philosophy, which could be either obliquely or overtly referenced. This led
me to construct my project around trying to understand this discourse of the “power of music”
more fully, drawing upon my knowledge and studies of Greek philosophy and how these
philosophical traditions informed early modern English ideas about music.
I found that these Greek philosophical traditions had been deeply absorbed into the
everyday discourses of early modern English music theorists, especially on topics regarding the
relationship of music to the passions and theories of mind. In particular, they drew upon Greek
philosophy to explain how music moved listeners and used the terminology and categorical
distinctions found in ancient thought. A vast number of scholarly studies have addressed related
topics, suggesting ways in which philosophical aesthetics, psychological language, and musical theory
might be brought together, but none of them have adequately recognized the influence of
Aristotelian views about music and art on early modern English musical thought. The following
literature review will survey a selection of the most relevant of these studies, explaining what they
have established so far while illuminating what is yet to be discovered.
2

Histories and Analyses of Musical Ideas, Philosophies, and Aesthetics surrounding the
Musical Culture of Henry Purcell and His Contemporaries: A Literature Review
This dissertation builds on prior scholarship that investigates the early modern era at the
intersection of music, philosophy, and science. Some of this work comes from the field of
intellectual or cultural history more generally, and some comes from the field of music history or
theory. In the ensuing discussion, I focus on scholarship that has attempted to address the question
of how English or continental thinkers of the early modern era conceptualized music’s ability to
affect the human mind or emotions. Some address this more broadly through investigations of
aesthetic, philosophical, or scientific notions of the time, while others address it more specifically
through historically and culturally grounded ways of interpreting the meanings of musical elements
such as melody or rhythm. Among the scholars I consulted on broader aesthetic, philosophical, and
scientific approaches to this topic, four have been especially informative: Maria Semi, Donald R.
Boomgaarden, Penelope Gouk, and Jamie Croy Kassler.
Maria Semi’s Music as a Science of Mankind in Eighteenth-Century Britain takes a similar approach
to my own study in several ways.1
Semi’s primary focus is the concept of musical pleasure and its
role in moral life. Her text covers the age of aesthetics proper, handling sources mostly from the
middle two quarters of the eighteenth century. Composed in two parts, the first part of the
monograph focuses on contributions to musico-aesthetic thought by philosophers, while the second
explores the contributions of music theorists to philosophical problems. The first part features
Joseph Addison, Anthony Ashley Cooper (3rd Earl of Shaftesbury), John Dennis, Francis
Hutcheson, Daniel Webb, Thomas Twining, Henry Home (Lord Kames), Adam Smith, and others;
while the second part considers Alexander Malcolm, John Frederick Lampe, Charles Avison, and
other music theorists in detail, ending with an examination of music historians Charles Burney and
1 Maria Semi, Music as a Science of Mankind in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2012).
3

John Hawkins and their reflections on aesthetic criticism. Semi concludes that the interchange
between literature, philosophy, and music formed essential bonds between the disciplines, without
which none of the great masterworks of music of the period, especially Purcell, would have been
possible. Sensualist theories of morality, such as those found in Thomas Reid, David Hume, and
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, are central to her analysis. Such theories assume that the moral sense is an
innate response and biological reaction to external stimuli. Moral responses of aversion and
attraction were thought to involve the nerves and therefore warrant classification as sensations that
precede intellectual judgments. Semi argues for the essential role of philosophy and intellectual
history in gaining a more complete picture of the music history of the period. While my study
overlaps with and relies on Semi’s in many particulars, mine seeks to uncover the historical
antecedents to such eighteenth-century views, focusing on earlier works from the seventeenth
century and revealing their connection to and influence on the more famous authors that populate
Semi’s work.
Like Semi’s book, Donald R. Boomgaarden’s Musical Thought in Britain and Germany during the
Early Eighteenth Century takes an approach that is similar to my own in its exploration of the
intersection of musical and philosophical thought, but centered on the eighteenth century,
specifically the earlier parts of the century.2
Boomgaarden’s central cast of English characters
includes Joseph Addison, Francis Hutcheson, Roger North, James Ralph, and others, and a crucial
element of his thesis is that developments in English musical thought profoundly affected Johann
Mattheson’s theories of musical figures and their correspondence to the passions. Boomgaarden
argues that Mattheson’s translations of The Spectator and Tatler, as well as the general effect of Locke
and Shaftesbury on Mattheson’s thought, had a profound effect on German aesthetics through the
2 Donald R. Boomgaarden, Musical Thought in Britain and Germany during the Early Eighteenth Century (Frankfurt am Main:
Peter Lang, 1987).
4

latter portion of the eighteenth century. My dissertation attempts to look more deeply into the
predecessors to Mattheson’s thought. While Boomgaarden suggests John Dryden along with
Addison and Steele as the origin of the modern form of art and literary criticism, and makes passing
mention of the controversies surrounding religious disputes over music, I will look further into these
topics via figures like Francis Bacon, Isaac Vossius, Thomas Mace, Thomas Wright, and several
other key predecessors who do not appear in Boomgaarden’s volume.
Fortunately, a few substantial studies have been made of seventeenth-century English
thought that relate to my interests. They mostly focus on the intersection of music and science, with
Penelope Gouk investigating the influences of old sciences, such as magic, the supernatural, and
occultism; while Jamie Croy Kassler emphasizes the new sciences, namely experimentalism and
innovative ways of modeling concepts of music and the mind. Penelope Gouk’s Music, Science and
Natural Magic in Seventeenth-Century England skillfully argues that music played a central role in the
mediation between scientific experimentation and magical theories of occult forces.3
In line with my
own observation that English thinkers of the seventeenth century were especially conscious of the
questions and mysteries of music, Gouk singles out early modern England as a particularly fertile
bed of activity for the discussion of music and science. Notably, Gouk’s essay, “Science and Music,
or the Science of Music: Some Little-Known Examples of ‘Music Theory’ between 1650 and 1750,”
published in Towards Tonality: Aspects of Baroque Music Theory, highlights the fecund English
conversation about the nature of music’s powers.4
Gouk casts the temporal boundaries of this article
from Athanasius Kircher’s Musurgia universalis in 1650 to Denis Diderot’s Encyclopédie from 1751,
3 Penelope Gouk, Music, Science, and Natural Magic in Seventeenth-Century England (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press,
1999).
4 Penelope Gouk, “Science and Music, or the Science of Music: Some Little-Known Examples of “Music Theory”
between 1650 and 1750,” in Towards Tonality: Aspects of Baroque Music Theory, by Thomas Christensen, Penelope Gouk,
Gérard Geay, Susan McClary, Markus Jans, Joel Lester, and Marc Vanscheeuwijck; ed. Peter Dejans, 41-70 (Leuven:
Leuven University Press, 2007).
5

naming them as two “fundamental texts for Western music theory.”5
Between those non-English
landmarks, she discusses the role of English experimental scientists Thomas Willis, Isaac Newton,
and George Cheyne as central figures to a new science of music that “had something important to
say about music’s effects on human nature.”6 Though Gouk claims that it was Mersenne who
determined experimentally the laws of harmony, influencing Rene Descartes, Robert Hooke, and
Isaac Newton, these new conceptions of music still posited a harmonious and mathematizable
universe connecting back to well-known stories of Pythagoras and the teachings of Boethius on
consonance and dissonance. Mersenne explained consonance based on acoustics and actual
sounding bodies rather than through a purely arithmetical model such as that of Boethius, and
further claimed that sound activates animal spirits with motions intrinsically similar to those found
in music. Gouk claims this new mechanical philosophy “was being developed by Descartes as an
alternative to Aristotelianism”7
; this dissertation will argue, however, that this is an
oversimplification, since much of Aristotle’s approach to aesthetics is retained even though aspects
of Aristotle’s metaphysics become obsolete. While Gouk argues for the replacement of outmoded
occult forces, I suggest that new scientific discoveries were seen to be consistent with Aristotelian
aesthetic viewpoints.
A preeminent scholar of Roger North, Jamie Kassler has produced a mountain of
publications that has had a central influence on this project from the earliest days. Of particular
substance is the volume of her writings entitled Music, Science, Philosophy: Models in the Universe of
Thought, which collects many of Kassler’s essays regarding what has been called “model theory,”
namely the idea that in every age, the latest forms of technology serve as models of the mind and its
5 Gouk, “Science and Music,” 41. 6 Gouk, “Science and Music,” 41. 7 Gouk, “Science and Music,” 44.
6

inner processes.8
Her earlier monograph from 1995, Inner Music: Hobbes, Hooke, and North on Internal
Character, explores the modeling of the human mind by the individuals listed in the title, and
concludes with an important additional step of linking such conceptions with moral virtue and inner
character development.9
Her gloss on philosophical ethics centers around neo-Stoicism and
particularly its focus on self-knowledge and self-restraint; I find, however, that her discussion of
character development addresses topics of great relevance to Aristotelian virtue ethics, inviting
additional conversation.
Beyond sources content to remain focused on philosophical issues, musicologists have used
such theoretical approaches to directly engage with musical genres, works, songs, and phrases. Such
applications of philosophical principles to the discussion and analysis of musical elements have been
fruitful, but tend to studies of times and places other than Restoration England. Several important
scholars who take such an approach were central to the genesis of this project.
Wye Jamison Allanbrook’s Rhythmic Gesture in Mozart: Le Nozze di Figaro and Don Giovanni is
an exemplary volume for any scholar who writes on the relation of rhythm to feeling and the
domain of ethical thought.10 Allanbrook claims that “music of the Classic period is pervasively
mimetic, not of Nature itself, but of our natures—of the world of men, their habits and actions.”11
She argues that Baroque dance rhythms in Mozart’s music serve as musico-poetic symbols of social
structures that express emotional, psychological, and moral content related to individual characters
in the operas. For Allanbrook, Mozart’s music functions as a kind of moral mimesis by which
audiences simultaneously receive both aesthetic and ethical education. To show the heritage of this
aesthetic of mimesis, she quotes both Aristotle’s Poetics and the Nicomachean Ethics and argues that his
8 Jamie Croy Kassler, Music, Science, Philosophy: Models in the Universe of Thought (New York: Routledge, 2001). 9 Jamie Croy Kassler, Inner Music: Hobbes, Hooke, and North on Internal Character (London: Athlone, 1995). 10 Wye Jamison Allanbrook, Rhythmic Gesture in Mozart: Le nozze di Figaro and Don Giovanni (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1983).
11 Allanbrook, Rhythmic Gesture in Mozart, 3.
7

view, namely that the purpose of art is to mirror human nature, was widely subscribed to in the
eighteenth century. Allanbrook’s analysis invites my own study to uncover this Aristotelian aesthetic
orientation in the seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century predecessors to Mozart’s time.
Allanbrook claims that mistaking a thinner doctrine of imitation (in which music mimics natural
sounds) for this richer view of mimesis overlooks a core concept governing music theory of the
eighteenth century. My project not only extends this view back to the seventeenth century, but also
investigates the deeper mechanical conceptualization of Aristotelian mimesis in this era via early
modern philosophies of the mind and passions.
Patricia M. Ranum’s The Harmonic Orator: The Phrasing and Rhetoric of the Melody in French
Baroque Airs articulates the connection between rhythmic and melodic contour as it relates to the
meaning of song texts.12 Her work serves as an interpretive guide to French Baroque music and
language designed to guide modern singers into appropriate period performance practice. Ranum
proceeds under the assumption that there exists in French Baroque music a distinctively French
musical character not translatable to speakers of other languages, since the accentual framework
particular to a specific language renders the music intelligible. Of particular interest to my study is
Ranum’s chapter on the musical representation of the passions. She draws heavily on the rhetoric of
Bernard Lamy and the art of Charles Le Brun in order to amplify musical examples drawn to
illustrate several passions. Her approach involves analysis of musical excerpts organized by specific
passion, usually of about four to eight bars, which mostly suggest that emotional content is signified
by melodic contour and pitch relationships. In her chapter entitled “The Soul in Motion: Expressing
the Passions,” Ranum suggests that melody is a rhetorical language that conveys specific affective
states through rhythmic articulation, pitch height, and melodic direction, which I also show taking
12 Patricia M. Ranum, The Harmonic Orator: The Phrasing and Rhetoric of the Melody in French Baroque Airs. N.p.: Penragon
Press, [2001].
8

place in the music of Henry Purcell and his contemporaries. I differ from Ranum, however, in
attributing this rhetorical quality to an Aristotelian understanding of musical mimesis among
musicians and thinkers of the time, whereas Ranum is more inclined to consider the writings of
Bernard Lamy, Denis Diderot, Jean-Baptiste Dubos, and other French theorists on their own terms
rather than tracing their intellectual forebears. While Ranum presents a distinctively French history,
my study reveals the debt English figures owe to classical Greek philosophy and comparatively
ancient modes of understanding.
Dietrich Bartel’s Musica Poetica argues that music and language have the same goals, namely
to heighten emotional content and more effectively persuade audiences.13 He provides an
encyclopedia of rhetorical figures, offering voluminous examples of how rhetoric has been applied
to music. He also surveys the sources and treatises that discuss rhetorical figures in music, focusing
primarily on German developments in musico-rhetorical thought.14 This dissertation will draw on
Bartel’s systematic terminology to analyze musical works composed in the English Baroque. Bartel
argues that England had no musical equivalent to the German Kantor, and that a Protestant ethos of
church music prohibited the composition of elaborate settings. However, Bartel does not explore
the extent to which the influence of recusant Catholic musicians, most notably William Byrd, had
upon the English church. In addition, Bartel does not account for the important of secular forms
such as the madrigal in social life. The church was not the only domain in which eloquent speech
was prized. The popularity of declamatory song stands as an additional indicator of the value of
musical communication practiced by English musicians. This dissertation will show that we can find
the same kind of structures that Bartel names in German Baroque music in the music of Purcell and
13 Dietrich Bartel, Musica Poetica (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1997). 14 Among the principal German theorists whom Bartel discusses are Joachim Burmeister, Johannes Nucius, Joachim
Thuringus, Athanasius Kircher, Elias Walther, Christoph Bernhard, Wolfgang Caspar Printz, Johann Georg Ahle, Tomas
Baltazar Janovka, Mauritius Johann Vogt, Johann Gottfried Walther, Johann Mattheson, Meinrad Speiss, Johann Adolf
Scheibe, and Johann Nikolaus Forkel.
9

his contemporaries, thus demonstrating that these musical structures have lines of transmission that
are more international than what is covered in Bartel’s project. While English figures such as Henry
Peacham, both the elder and younger, George Puttenham, Thomas Morley, Francis Bacon, and
Charles Butler make an appearance in Bartel’s text, they are confined mostly to the margins. This
dissertation will provide deeper glimpses into the rhetorical view of music held by early modern
English composers, musicians, and theorists.
An important study of English music from a rhetorical perspective is Robert Toft’s Tune thy
Musick to thy Hart: The Art of Eloquent Singing in England, 1597-1622, which reconstructs the
performance practice of early seventeenth-century lute song.15 Toft makes connections between
rhetorical and musical figures, devoting most of his attention to the subjects of pronunciatio and
elocutio, the elements of delivery and performance in eloquent speech. His text draws heavily upon
the work of Dietrich Bartel, though Toft tends to draw examples directly from early modern English
rhetorical texts. Since he focuses primarily upon vocal performance, his study involves extensive
discussion of vocal inflections and bodily gestures as the principal sources of musical
communication. Toft’s book catalogues rhetorical terms and connects them to musical examples,
and also supplies a collection of ornaments and graces from early century instructional manuals. He
then provides an analysis of several of the songs of John Dowland, showing how poetic
construction and grammatical elements drive phrasing, embellishment, and compositional
procedures. While Toft’s study focuses on music of the Elizabethan period from the first few
decades of the 1600s, this dissertation employs a similar rhetorical approach to understanding
Restoration music from the final decades of the century.
15 Robert Toft, Tune Thy Musicke to Thy Hart: The Art of Eloquent Singing in England, 1597-1622 (Toronto: University of
Toronto Press, 1993).
10

Stephanie D. Vial’s The Art of Musical Phrasing in the Eighteenth Century: Punctuating the Classical
“Period” examines the degree to which language shapes the analysis, interpretation, and performance
of musical lines.16 Exploring connections between rhetorical guidelines and performance practice,
Vial argues that rhythm and accent are the primary conveyors of musical meaning, and she suggests
that all melodic passages carry implicit linguistic punctuation. The responsibility of the performer
therefore becomes a conscious punctuation of phrases with pauses, accents, and other gestures that
render musical language meaningful, doing so in the same manner that eloquent or heightened
speech renders texts more intelligible. While Vial’s emphasis on the relation of speech patterns
applies to a general interpretation of any work in the eighteenth century, I am especially interested in
deepening an understanding of the rhetorical approach that composers themselves might already
have taken to crafting the musical lines themselves. The difference in time period aside, my
dissertation produces insights that are complementary to Vial’s in that I am offering ways to reveal
the musico-rhetorical structures that composers might already be using in a particular era, which
could then be integrated with the more general rhetorical approach to performance phrasing that
Vial proposes.
In contrast with the other studies discussed above, Peter Martens’s Isaac Vossius’s De
Poematum Cantu et Viribus Rhythmi, 1673: On the Music of Poetry and the Power of Rhythm is a translation
and critical analysis of Vossius’s treatise, which had been untranslated into English until then.
17 This
important work gave me new access to Vossius’s ideas. Controversial in his own day, Vossius was
mentioned by several of his contemporaries, including John Dryden, yet the finer details of his
treatise have mostly been overlooked. For Vossius, the rhythmic structure of music is the source of
16 Stephanie D. Vial, The Art of Musical Phrasing in the Eighteenth Century: Punctuating the Classical “Period” (Rochester, NY:
University of Rochester Press, 2008).
17 Isaac Vossius, Isaac Vossius’s “De poematum cantu et viribus rhythmi,” 1673: On the Music of Poetry and Power of Rhythm, ed.
Peter Martens, Music Theory in Britain, 1500–1700: Critical Editions (Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2022).
11

its power to move, suggesting a rhythmopoeia, or theory that poetic feet and basic rhythmic patterns
found in music constitute its rhetorical force over the passions. Vossius’s injection of rhetorical
erudition into the English conversation in the 1670s was significant, adding fuel to running debates
about the nature of music’s power. Vossius made a clear impact on later figures such as Roger
North, Johann Mattheson, and John Brown, and Martens’s volume is the first one solely devoted to
his musical thought. While previous second-hand commentators I had consulted on Vossius had
clearly illustrated his influence on early modern English discourse about music, reading Vossius’s
treatise first-hand gave me the detailed understanding of how he theorized rhythmopoeia that allowed
me to anchor my analyses of movement of the passions in rhythmic phenomena within the music.
Besides these broad histories and theories of musical aesthetics, another body of works that
drove my dissertation studies were the existing analyses and discussions of works by Henry Purcell
and his contemporaries. Ranging from general biographies to intricate analyses of his music, the role
of Greek philosophy has been mostly overlooked in Purcell scholarship, with several noteworthy
exceptions. Perhaps the most robust engagement of philosophy with Purcell’s music can be found in
studies by cultural historians. Like Penelope Gouk, Linda Austern’s research mightily integrates the
disparate fields of science, religion, and philosophy, seeking to articulate early modern worldviews
replete with magical, mystical, and occult forces.18 Austern offers an array of musical examples to
support her claims regarding early modern views of God, Nature, and whatever forces were thought
to undergird reality. While Austern demonstrates the wide diversity of viewpoints available in the
seventeenth century, emphasizing key differences between figures such as Francis Bacon and Robert
18 Of particular interest to Purcellians are Linda Phyllis Austern, “’Tis Nature’s Voice: Music, Natural Philosophy and the
Hidden World in Seventeenth-Century England,” in Music Theory and Natural Order from the Renaissance to the Early Twentieth
Century, edited by Suzannah Clark and Alexander Rehding, 30-67 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001); and
“Nature, Culture, Myth, and the Musician in Early Modern England,” Journal of the American Musicological Society 51, no. 1
(1998): 1–47.
12

Fludd, my study shows how intellectuals of the period, regardless of their divergent opinions, each
owe significant debts to Greek philosophy.
More direct musical analyses of the works of Henry Purcell employ contemporary
methodologies in their discussion, using Roman numeral tonal analysis to describe Purcell’s
harmonic procedures. Over sixty years ago, Michael Tilmouth looked closely at Purcell’s sonatas,
focusing especially on canonical procedures.19 Martin Adams also focused on contrapuntal aspects
of Purcell’s compositions, influencing perhaps the most active contemporary scholar making
detailed analyses of Purcell’s music, Alon Schab, whose analyses of Purcell’s use of inversion,
retrograde, stretto, and many other techniques are extensive and detailed.20 Though Schab draws
directly on the work of twentieth-century musicologist Leonard Meyer and his seminal Emotion and
Meaning in Music with productive results, Schab does perceive the value of historically oriented
rhetorical viewpoints, offering Joachim Burmeister, Christoph Bernhard, and Henry Peacham Jr. as
examples of rhetorical theorists of the period whose thought bears on Purcell’s music.21 While Schab
produces helpful analytical categories of his own (for example, naming the process of gradually
increasing energy as “cumulation”), he consciously puts off the project of linking musical phrases
with specific affective musico-rhetorical figures.22 He says, “I do not attempt to classify the
emotional response according to any pre-defined affect,” and adds in an endnote that he hopes to
explore such links in future research.23 Hopefully, my own study helps with some of these efforts.
Some studies connect Purcell’s music to rhetorical procedures, but in most cases, such links
are made only with the general value of persuasion or with various methods for improving one’s
19 See especially Michael Tilmouth, “The Technique and Forms of Purcell’s Sonatas,” Music & Letters 40, no. 2 (April
1959): 109–21. 20 Alon Schab, The Sonatas of Henry Purcell: Rhetoric and Reversal (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2018); and
“On the Ground and Off: A Comparative Study of Two Purcell Chaconnes,” Musical Times 151, no. 1912 (2010): 47–57. 21 Schab, Sonatas of Henry Purcell. 22 Schab, Sonatas of Henry Purcell, 51-56. 23 Schab, Sonatas of Henry Purcell, 46, 238n9.
13

craft. For example, Rebecca Herissone considers the role of imitatio (emulation of existing models)
to be a primary rhetorical value.24 Purcell himself made copies in his own hand of works by a wide
range of composers, and Herissone argues that such procedures were undertaken with the value of
gaining a deep understanding of the compositional structures that make such masterpieces masterful.
In another work, Herissone includes a valuable appendix listing the sources quoted in music theory
volumes produced in the seventeenth century, in which Thomas Morley, among many other authors,
directly quote Aristotle and other Greeks, though Herissone does not explore the details involved in
such references.25
Although the foregoing sources have engaged to some extent with classical Greek influences
on Purcell’s music, none have focused on the influence of Aristotelian ideas of art, specifically of
mimesis and representation and the role of music in education. My own research seeks to establish
an understanding of how early modern English thinkers and musicians leaned on Aristotelian and
other classical Greek philosophical views of mimesis and representation in order to explain the
power that music had to affect the passions, and how these conceptions of music and the passions
migrate into musical figures and structures. Such findings illuminate the path to rich musical
understanding which enable more compelling and effective performances.
Main Questions and Contribution of This Dissertation
This dissertation asks the following questions: How did people in the early modern English
era view the relationship between music and the passions? Specifically, how did early modern
English commentators, philosophers, theorists, and other intellectuals think about the relationship
24 See Rebecca Herissone, Musical Creativity in Restoration England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), chap. 1. 25 Rebecca Herissone, ed., The Ashgate Research Companion to Henry Purcell (Surrey, UK: Ashgate, 2012).
14

between music and the passions? And how did the composers of the era themselves articulate the
passions in music?
By attempting to answer these questions via an investigation of how early modern English
thinkers and musicians were influenced by classical Greek philosophy, especially the ideas of
Aristotle, this dissertation shows that the relationship between music and the passions was
conceived of as much more than a one-directional, superficial imitation of nature by music. Rather,
music and the passions were conceived of, in an Aristotelian vein, as mirrored phenomena, elements
with a shared nature that move in similar ways and embody a genuine resemblance to one another.
Emotions can be conceived in terms of rhythmic, movement-oriented gestures, and musical motions
occur in a similar way.
A key contribution of this dissertation is its application of this understanding of mimesis to
musical analysis. As mentioned above, although there are many analyses of the music of Purcell and
his contemporaries, the contemporary theoretical tools they use often lack this deep, early modern
perspective. By analyzing early modern English music with this view of mimesis, I show that
interpretation of this body of music can be enhanced with an approach where one explores how the
body might move with a certain passion being evoked in the music or text, and how that might
inform one’s performance of a phrase or passage, or a work as a whole. This approach incorporates
consideration of the movement, time, rhythm, and directionality of both the passions and music at
once in order to produce vivid, moving performances of this repertoire.
Structure of the Dissertation
Chapter 1 establishes the relationship between Greek philosophy and early modern English
thought with regard to theories about music and its ability to affect the passions. It demonstrates
that Pythagorean conceptions of the soul as harmony, along with Aristotelian approaches to artistry
15

as fundamentally mimetic activity, were pervasive themes in English-language writings from the
Renaissance well into the eighteenth century. It observes that seventeenth-century conceptions of
sympathetic resonance and its foundational assumption of the harmonious nature of the soul were
functionally underpinned by Aristotelian and other Greek philosophical notions of how music
moved audiences.
Chapter 2 delves further into how seventeenth-century English thinkers explained
sympathetic resonance by seeing specific mechanics of interior bodily motion as the corollary to
musical motion. The core of chapter 2 analyzes seventeenth-century English conceptions of the
passions as mechanical forces, elucidating five theoretical dimensions that are used fluidly in musicotheoretical discourses of the time to account for the mimetic nature of music and its power to affect
the passions. Chapter 2 closes by discussing how this deeply Aristotelian mimetic view of music
made music important for moral and educational development.
Chapters 3 and 4 demonstrate how the richer understanding of music’s mimetic power
developed over chapters 1 and 2 can illuminate the interpretation of seventeenth-century English
musical works. In chapter 3, I use examples from the Cecilian odes, a collection of roughly annual
compositions produced in the last twenty years of the seventeenth century that are dedicated to the
patroness of music and celebrating music itself, to illustrate a core set of passions and principles of
inner movement that can be commonly identified in early modern English music. Given that the
discourses of Aristotelian mimesis and sympathetic movement of the passions were typically found
in seventeenth-century commentaries on the great power of music over the passions, I reasoned that
the Cecilian odes, whose subjects were the celebration of music and its powers, would reveal
connections between the theories within these discourses and how the expression of the passions in
music actually occurred in compositions of the day. The texts of the Cecilian odes are rich with
obvious references to various passions, allowing for the ease of analyzing how composers chose to
16

musically evoke those passions. The odes also suggest various ways in which certain musical
instruments were thought to possess power over certain passions. Ultimately, this chapter
enumerates a set of musico-rhetorical figures used by Purcell and his contemporaries that become
useful for seeing how pieces from that era, whether instrumental or vocal, can be interpreted more
fully with reference to these same affect-laden musical gestures.
Chapter 4 analyzes three works by Henry Purcell: the most obviously passion-centered
“From Rosie Bowers”; a second vocal work with more nuanced interpretive challenges, “Oh
Solitude”; and one work of untexted instrumental music, Sonata VI. In this chapter, I engage the
rhythmic and contrapuntal methodologies of music theorists Isaac Vossius and Christoph Bernhard
to apply the Aristotelian mimetic view of the musical communication of the passions in musical
analysis. Vossius and Bernhard’s divergent approaches provide a dual set of lenses by which Purcell’s
techniques for expressing the passions can be examined with regard to how his music moves both
rhythmically and melodically, and how they can convey the passions with subtlety, nuance, as well as
rich dramaticism.
17

– Chapter 1 –
The Power of Music:
Ancient Greek Philosophy in Seventeenth-Century English Musical Thought
The idea that music has power to move the affections, alter mood and behavior, and assist in
the promotion of virtue and character formation presents puzzling questions and difficult problems,
which have been addressed by every age. For a span of nearly two hundred years in England, such
topics receive unusually rich treatment. Intellectuals and writers working within a wide set of genres
describe music as imbued with tremendous influence and causal efficacy. During the turbulent times
spanning the Tudor era, Commonwealth period, Restoration, and well into the eighteenth century,
discussion of the power of music was closely connected to scientific thought, political discourse, and
theological controversy. Musicians, booksellers, scientists, philosophers, poets, teachers, preachers,
diarists, medical doctors, and other intellectuals marveled at the remarkable power of music and
offered theories about music’s mysterious effects on listeners and performers. Often inquiring into
the mechanics of the nature of sound, of air, of the ear, of the soul, they added to their physical
theories additional ethical claims about the nature of music in education and society. In an era of
contentious political, theological, and scientific controversy, their views about the power of music
became intimately woven together with their larger ideas about the role music should play in these
social structures.
This dissertation focuses on the nature of these discussions as they took place in the long
seventeenth century, spanning approximately from the 1570s to the first few decades of the 1700s.
Although these discussions continued to have purchase into the late 1700s, it is their development in
this earlier century-and-a-half that has tended to be overlooked in present-day musicological
discussions. My argument is that, contrary to assumptions, intellectual interest in the power of music
18

over the passions was already flourishing long before the eighteenth century. In short, long before
discussions of musical aesthetics were absorbed in more abstract philosophical questions
surrounding beauty and pleasure, early modern English thinkers and musicians throughout the
seventeenth century, starting even as early as the late sixteenth century, had already been having
robust aesthetic discussions of how music impacted or moved the passions and senses. Throughout
these aesthetic investigations of the long seventeenth century, Greek philosophy was a central
source from which such writers drew their views. Classical authors were often directly named, as
citing ancient philosophy was used to supply weight, authority, and tradition to the expression and
defense of early modern ideas. Canonical figures such as Pythagoras, Plato, Aristotle, and Boethius
are regularly cited in connection to music, though comparatively lesser-known figures such as
Aristoxenus and Aristides Quintilianus also appear in discussions. In addition to philosophy, Greek
and Roman poetry and oratory are commonly cited for the purpose of articulating the nature of
music’s reported powers. The regular quotation of ancient figures by modern authors is far from
trivial, for their use of ancient categories of understanding pervades their philosophical views about
music and its effects. These references reveal beliefs about the nature of human psychology and
sensation, the mechanisms by which music was thought to be transformational, ideas about different
social functions of music, its role in education, and how works of music were understood and
interpreted. Education generally and music specifically were thought to be indispensable tools in
shaping the moral character of young people, echoing Plato’s concerns in the Republic about proper
musical training of the guardians to ensure moral rectitude. Music was believed to inspire courage,
cultivate worship, put aside fear and other negative states, as well as increase social bonding and
group identity. Theorists were so impressed by music’s motivating forces that they sought out ways
to explain the causal powers and inner workings of music and sound.
19

This first section in this chapter will highlight the degree to which musical thought in the
long seventeenth century was linked to neo-Pythagorean conceptions of the soul as harmony.
Present in the thought of many intellectuals of different types, the harmonious nature of the soul
was commonly expressed in connection with attempts to understand the causal efficacy of music on
the mind. Music’s power was believed to lie not only in its ability to present to listeners affective
content through a kind of language of the passions, but also in its capacity to cause changes of mind,
passion, temperament, and tuning of one’s dispositions, resulting in attendant changes in behavior
and attitude. These transformations are commonly thought to result in moral and educational
improvements of self and society. This discussion serves as a preamble to the core theoretical
discussion and analysis that will take place in chapter 2, which explains how these neo-Pythagorean
views of music were founded upon intricate conceptions of music’s sympathetic resonance and the
movement of the humors and passions in ways that were deeply influenced by a number of Greek
philosophers, not least of whom were Plato and Aristotle.
As further preparation for chapter 2, the second half of the present chapter will offer an
overview of the ancient Greek philosophers and seventeenth-century English thinkers who will
feature in my discussion in chapter 2. First, I will briefly introduce the ancient Greek philosophers
most influential upon the theories of seventeenth-century English intellectuals: Pythagoras, Plato,
Aristotle, Quintilianus, and Boethius. My discussion of each philosopher will highlight his main
philosophical contributions to seventeenth-century English musical thought and briefly trace the
transmission and influence of his works in early modern England. Next, I will introduce the key
early modern English thinkers and authors whose musical theories will feature in chapter 2. This
eclectic cast of intellectuals depended upon ancient Greek conceptions of music in various ways to
theorize the inner psychological mechanisms that they believed to be at work in music’s effects upon
the human spirit and soul. Ranging from figures as early as royal tutor to Elizabeth I, Roger Ascham,
20

to the authors of the first music histories in English, Charles Burney and John Hawkins, in the
1770s, the overviews presented here will introduce several thinkers and musicians, briefly discuss the
influence of their ideas during the long seventeenth century, and generally indicate the ways in which
they drew upon ancient Greek philosophy for their musical insights.
Ultimately, the goal of this dissertation is to illuminate the understandings of ancient Greek
music philosophical thought that could help to supply interpretations and animate performances of
early modern English music, and chapter 3 will use selections of music by Henry Purcell to illustrate
how the insights of chapters 1 and 2 could be applied. By facilitating greater awareness of how early
modern musicians conceived of music’s powers, I hope to increase understanding of early modern
compositional techniques and enable performers to offer more forceful and vivacious
interpretations of music from this period. Platonic, Aristotelian, and other ancient Greek
philosophical ways of thinking about the arts directly and substantively informed many aspects of
early modern English conceptions of music’s nature, operations, functions, and purpose. Via the
ensuing discussion in chapters 1 and 2, I will illustrate how musical works, figures, gestures, and
conventions—drawing upon Greek philosophical ideas about music—were thought to express the
inner nature of human psychological characteristics during Purcell’s time.
The Concept of the Soul as Harmony in Early Modern English Musical Thought
Discussions of the power of music in early modern England are littered with references to
classical sources, often containing direct citations of Plato, Aristotle, and other expressly
philosophical Greeks. Although authors draw upon philosophers for many aspects of their views, a
central theme is present, namely the identification of the human soul with harmony. This core
principle runs through the Pythagorean-Platonic tradition, conceiving of the soul as a kind of
21

harmony or proportion in which the elements that compose the soul are seen as balanced or
imbalanced, tempered or untempered, etc.1

At this time, such discussions of the soul were possible because conceptions of the soul were
many and varied, and definitions remained unsettled.2
Philosophical discussions of the relationship
between the soul and body were driven by problems arising from early modern scientific inquiry,
spanning a variety of topics and problems, from the nature of the senses and passions to the
function of the humors and bodily organs. Commentators highlighted contending theories and
acknowledge the general confusion that surrounds the subject. The unsettledness of this debate is
captured well in the highly popular inspirational book by Owen Feltham, Resolves: Divine, Moral,
Political (1628), a work offering theological contention, instruction in ethical behavior, and decrees
about civic duty. In entry LXIV, “Of the Soul,” Feltham provides brief philosophical entries on
divergent Greek views on the nature of the soul, mentioning Democritus, Diogenes, Varro, and
Epicurus by name and discussing their differences. He also parades different viewpoints without
naming names: “Some have called it an undetermined virtue; some, a self-moving number; some a
quintessence. Others have defined it to be nothing but harmony, conflated by the most even
composure of the four elements in man.”3
His commentary reveals his familiarity with Pythagorean
and humor theory-based theories of the soul, showing that these categories were commonplaces in
ordinary discourse about the nature of the soul. This discussion also shows how the openness of the
debate about what the soul was allowed different theories to be formed.
1 For treatment of the complexities involved in supplying a Pythagorean account of the soul, see Huffman, “The
Pythagorean Conception of the Soul from Pythagoras to Philoloaus,” in Body and Soul in Ancient Philosophy, ed. Dorothea
Frede and Burkhard Reis, 21-43 (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2009). The relation of music to the soul in Plato’s thought is
discussed in Francesco Pelosi, Plato on Music, Soul and Body (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010). 2 For a broad overview of such matters, see Paul S. MacDonald, History of the Concept of the Mind: Speculations about Soul,
Mind and Spirit from Homer to Hume (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2003). Particularly helpful for understanding Aristotelian
perspectives in late scholasticism and the early modern period is Dennis Des Chene, Life’s Form: Late Aristotelian
Conceptions of the Soul (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2000). 3 Owen Feltham, Resolves: Divine, Moral, Political (London: Whittaker, 1840), 165.
22

Generally speaking, the soul was conceived of as anything ranging from the mind or spirit to
one’s internal states, such as one’s emotions, passions, or anything related to human cognition.
Perhaps most famously, Descartes conceived of the human soul as a “thinking thing” (res cogitans)
and used several terms as exact synonyms for the word for “soul” (animus), describing the human
being as a “mind, or soul, or intellect or reason” (mens, sive animus, sive intellectus, sive ratio).4
In
somewhat similar fashion, a generation earlier, Francis Bacon conceived of the soul as a spiritual
entity responsible for cognition and understanding. And although he located the affections in the
body, he ultimately rejoined the affections with the soul by asserting that divine revelation ensured
the reunion of body and soul (or “affections” and “understanding,” as he put it) in one’s
resurrection in the Christian afterlife.5
Because moral behavior was seen as stemming from one’s
rational self, thinkers were deeply concerned about the means by which one could temper or
manipulate one’s emotions to achieve greater rationality, either by calming undesirable emotions or
enhancing desirable ones.
In particular, music was seen as a force that was especially effective at accomplishing such
transformations of inner dispositions. Adopting classical Greek conceptions that conceived of inner
psychological states as lying between two possible extreme poles, musical metaphors often described
the inner self as a string that might be too tightly wound or overly slack. These images are quite
ancient and can be found in several places in Plato’s writings. In the dialogue Phaedo, of which the
subject is the nature of the soul as a kind of tuning or harmony, Plato uses the character Simmias to
track a contending theory of the soul:
4 René Descartes, Meditationes de Prima Philosophia, ed. Artur Buchenau (Leipzig: Felicis Meineri, 1913; Project Gutenberg,
November 3, 2007), https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/23306/pg23306-images.html, “Meditatio II,” para. 21.
(All translations are my own except where otherwise noted.) Volumes on Descartes and his conceptions of soul and
mind fill many shelves, but a particularly useful historically oriented study is Lilli Alanen, Descartes’s Concept of
Mind (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009). 5 Francis Bacon, The Advancement of Learning, ed. Henry Morley (London: Cassell, 1893; Project Gutenberg, April 1, 2004,
updated April 12, 2021), https://www.gutenberg.org/files/5500/5500-h/5500-h.htm, Book I, section VIII, para. 6.
23

We Pythagoreans have a theory of the soul which is roughly like this. The body is held
together at a certain tension between the extremes of hot and cold, and dry and wet, and so
on, and our soul is a temperament or adjustment of these same extremes, when they are
combined in just the right proportion.6

Aristotle develops his moral philosophy along similar lines, using antinomies or poles to indicate
extreme states. In Book Two of the Nicomachean Ethics, he presents his “Doctrine of the Mean” as
the central tool by which virtue and vice are both defined and discovered. He claims that every
virtuous state lies between two vicious extremes of excess and deficiency. For example, courage
occupies a moderate middle ground between cowardice and foolhardiness, the former being a lack
and the latter an overabundance of the character trait in question. For Aristotle, all virtues that could
be enumerated lay on a continuum of this type.
Because the passions and affections operate according to the balance of opposites, and
virtue itself was conceived as the ability to make ethical choices between two extremes, we can see
that music was conceived as connected to psychology and morality not in a merely symbolic fashion.
Rather, it stood in a direct, mechanical, causal relationship that operated with and upon the
mechanisms that constructed the human frame. Music listening, performance, and composition were
the very means of programming a healthy body and mind. More generally, music was conceived as a
medicinal and a pedagogical tool essential to the production of properly functioning and virtuous
individuals, organizations, and societies. When used correctly, powerful transformation for the better
could be achieved; and if used improperly, music could stir unhealthy passions and debase the soul.
The language of Pythagoreanism as transmitted through Plato and Aristotle, with its notions
of the soul as an instrument and virtue as a kind of inner tuning, connected quite literally with the
conventional mechanisms of seventeenth-century psychology—passions, humors, spirits, etc.
Although many thinkers referred to the soul as harmony and somehow fundamentally musical, these
6 Plato, Phaedo, trans. Hugh Tredennick, in The Collected Dialogues of Plato Including the Letters, ed. Edith Hamilton and
Huntington Cairns, 40-98 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), 86a-d.
24

neo-Pythagorean themes were especially pronounced in the sermons and writings of divines and
preachers. John Reading, for instance (an Anglican priest who, in spite of his Puritan and Calvinist
convictions, remained loyal to Charles I against Cromwell), used Pythagorean conceptions of the
soul to justify having music in church services.7
During a time when Puritan divines were seeking to
ban polyphonic and instrumental music from churches, seeing them as immoral excesses, Reading
argued for the essential connection between music and the well-being of the soul. “Music hath such
natural proportion with the reasonable soul, that some defined the soul it self by harmony,” he
wrote.8
For Reading, music seemed to have an analogous set of structures with the soul, and he
conceived of the soul itself as being proportional or somehow harmonic in its nature.
Ralph Battell, a preacher who gave a sermon on the nobility of music at a 1693 St. Cecilia
Day celebration, defended church music by observing that “although we should lay aside the
subject-matter of the Psalm or Hymn, yet even the very Harmony of Sounds being carried from the
Ear to the spiritual Faculties of the Soul, is by a native power greatly available to bring to a perfect
temper whatsoever is there troubled.”9
Battell’s comment suggests that it is not in the words but
rather in the music itself—in the “very Harmony of Sounds”—that there is a power to bring “a
perfect temper” to the soul. The harmoniousness of the soul is valued as a kind of perfect balance of
inner elements that soothe the troubles of the spirit.
This theme of the fundamental musicality of the soul gave rise to comparisons of inner
states of people to musical instruments. The writings of Jacob Böhme (Anglicized as Behmen) were
7 Information about this particular John Reading is difficult to obtain, and only the Dictionary of National Biography
surfaces as a resource for what scant information seems available. See William Arthur Shaw, “Reading, John (1588-
1667),” Dictionary of National Biography, 1885-1900,
https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Dictionary_of_National_Biography,_1885-1900/Reading,_John_(1588-1667). 8 John Reading, A Sermon delivered in the Cathedral Church of Canterbury, Concerning Church-Musick (London: Printed by Tho.
Newcomb, 1663), 10. 9 Ralph Battell, The Lawfulness and Expediency Of Church-Musick Asserted, In A Sermon Preached at St. Brides-Church, Upon the
22d. of November, 1693. Being The Anniversary Meeting of Gentlemen, Lovers of Musick (London: Printed by J. Heptinstall for
John Carr, 1694).
25

translated into English in 1649 as Teutonicus philosophus. A German Lutheran writer, his mystical
works found interest in the hermetical circles in England, he wrote of the mind as an instrument that
was sounded by the spirit: “so also our minde is an Organ, or Instrument; but it Sounds onely
according to the Tune, and Note, of that Spirit, that doth possesse and act it.”10 Conceiving of the
mind as a musical instrument, he viewed the spirit as a set of volitional forces, acting almost as
musical compositions, that direct the actions of the instrument in a harmonious manner.
Such conceptions of the soul as fundamentally harmonic related directly to conceptions of
the body as being composed of humors. Black bile, yellow bile, cholera, and blood were commonly
conceived as the four basic elements that constructed the inner workings of the human
mechanism.11 A healthy state was achieved when these humors were balanced or harmonious,
meaning that the right amount of each was flowing through the human interior. Sickness, madness,
or any other negative condition was thought to result from an imbalanced, inharmonious, or
disproportionate amount of any of the four humors. The soul as a harmony was therefore a crucial
linking idea for the way in which many aspects of Greek philosophy—for example, the humors,
passions, and music of the spheres—came to be seen as integral to music.
For instance, Thomas Browne, who was a physician and esoteric speculative writer,
attempted to reconcile such older religious and philosophical beliefs and traditions with the
implications of modern scientific discoveries in his first publication, Religio Medici (1642), or “The
Religion of a Physician,” which pondered various questions in theology and ethics. “Whatsoever is
harmonically composed, delights in harmony,” Browne argued, suggesting a defense of the
10 Jakob Böhme, The Epistles of Jacob Behmen, aliter, Teutonicus philosophus. Very usefull and necessary for those that read his Writings,
and are very full of excellent and plaine Instructions how to attaine to The Life of Christ (London: Printed by M. Simmons for Gyles
Calvert, 1649). 11 A comprehensive popular history on the subject can be found in Noga Arikha, Passions and Tempers: A History of the
Humours (New York: Harper Collins, 2007). For a demonstration of Galen’s dependence on Aristotle and the
philosophical underpinnings of his thought, see Owsei Temkin, Galenism; Rise and Decline of a Medical Philosophy (Ithaca:
Cornell University Press, 1973).
26

appropriateness of music in church, since aural harmony transposed the listener into “profound
contemplation of the first composer.”12 In addition, he maintained the traditional
Platonic/Augustinian/Boethian notion that the term “music” properly referred not only to
harmonious sound, but to something that existed wherever there was “harmony, order or
proportion.” For Browne, this allowed us to “maintain the musick of the spheares” throughout all
domains of the world.
This need for a calibration of harmoniousness, for Browne, was descriptive of the inner self
as well. “I will not say with Plato, the Soul is an Harmony, but harmonicall, and hath its neerest
sympathy unto musicke,” he asserted.
13 Although Browne quibbled with whether the soul should be
seen as a harmony in itself or just to be described as harmonious, he nonetheless adopted Plato’s
Pythagorean perspective that music and the soul share a fundamental likeness or “sympathy.” The
meaning of the word “sympathy” could benefit from additional analysis, since at the root of the
word lies the Greek root pathos, often defined by English dictionaries as “suffering.” More relevant
to this discussion is the idea of pathos as the result of some external causal agent working upon
human feeling. Musical performance is seen as evoking passions, affections, or emotions in listeners
whose internal states move sympathetically with the musical action. For Browne, then, the
harmoniousness of the soul and of music is not a direct identity of some kind, but rather a
connection forged by sympathetic resonance, where the passions stirred in the listener are on the
receiving side of the causal chain. He continues: “thus some, whose temper of body agrees, and
humours the constitution of their soules, are borne Poets, though indeed all are naturally inclined
unto Rhythme.”14 For Browne, being “naturally inclined unto Rhythme,” or, in other words, being
naturally inclined to respond sympathetically to the harmonious rhythmic movements of music, is
12 Sir Thomas Browne, The Major Works, ed. C. A. Patrides (New York: Penguin Books, 1977), 149. 13 Browne, Major Works, 150. 14 Browne, Major Works, 150.
27

also dependent upon a harmonious inner humoral state—humors being the constitution of one’s
soul.
Importantly, the passions were conceived as the mechanisms by which the causal relations
between music and emotional states were powered. Insofar as the virtue of the soul is shaped by its
emotional states and responses, Bacon argues that music has the ability to shape the disposition of
the soul through its “operation upon manners; as, to encourage men, and make them warlike; to
make them soft and effeminate; to make them grave; to make them light; to make them gentle and
inclined to pity, etc.”15 All manner of psychological states seem to be under the influence of music
and Bacon conjectures a cause, namely that “the sense of hearing striketh the spirits more
immediately, than the other senses.” For Bacon, there is a clear causal chain interlinking the sense of
hearing with the spirits, resulting in alterations of mood and attitude. Like so many others, Bacon
claims that “tunes and airs, even in their own nature, have in themselves some affinity with the
affections” and that “tunes have a predisposition to the motion of the spirits in themselves.”
Somehow, it is movement that is shared and motion itself that exhibits an analogous or symmetrical
relationship uniting the substances of music and the passions via the animal spirits.16
If tunes and tempers shared properties, then music’s power could be used to solidify one’s
character and achieve inner moral resolve. The beneficial qualities of music could be transmitted to
the listener so that self-control and mastery over the passions become possible. In particular, Bacon
posits that self-control and resistance to vice are empowered by singing, using the myth of Orpheus
to exemplify his view on the salutary benefits of music:
But the most excellent remedy, in every temptation, is that of Orpheus, who, by loudly
chanting and resounding the praises of the gods, confounded the voices, and kept himself
15 Bacon, The Works of Lord Bacon, 100. 16 Bacon held views on the nature of animal or vital spirits that establish important foundations for this study, as he said
in The Advancement of Learning that “spirit is not a virtue, energy, entelechy, or some foolishness of that kind, but a real
body thin and invisible, yet having place, dimension, and real.” Quoted in translation in Perez Zagorin, Francis
Bacon (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2020), 114.
28

from hearing the music of the Sirens; for divine contemplations exceeded the pleasures of
sense, not only in power but also in sweetness.17
For Bacon, the act of singing can focus the attention, drown out potentially invasive thoughts,
engage divine contemplation, and provide something more satisfying than any other sensation.
Significantly, Bacon also claims that the causal relation does not only flow from music to the spirits,
but that the direction of causation can be reversed: “Though this variety of tunes doth dispose the
spirits to variety of passions, conform unto them, yet generally music feedeth that disposition of the
spirits which it findeth.”18 Thus, this sympathetic resonance between music and the passions not
only creates more desirable emotional states suggested by music, but is also activated when
previously existing states of mind happen upon music that mirrors attitudes already present in the
listener. For Bacon, this is an explanation as to why particular types of music might appeal (or not)
to certain groups or individuals.
More generally, this correlation between music and specific states of mind was believed to
subsist in the correlation between music (which wants to be harmonious) and the soul (which also
wants to be harmonious). In entry LXXXVIII, “Of Music,” Owen Feltham provides his own
account of how music works upon the passions: “We may see this, in that it is only in hollowed
instruments, which gather in the stirred air, and so cause a sound in the motion. The advantage it
gains upon the mind, is in respect of the nearness it have to the spirits composure, which being
ethereal, and harmonious must needs delight in that which is like them.”19 Feltham’s reference to
“spirits” leans on older Aristotelian, scholastic conceptions of the soul as “animal spirits,” which
were commonly thought to be fluids or ethereal substances that expand and contract, causing
17 Bacon, Bacon’s Essays and Wisdom of the Ancients (Cambridge, MA: Little, Brown, 1884). 18 Bacon, The Works of Lord Bacon. With an Introductory Essay, and a Portrait. In Two Volumes. Vol. I (London: Henry G.
Bohn, 1850), 100. 19 Feltham, Resolves, 136.
29

passions and emotions in a person.20 His causal account therefore reveals the degree to which his
explanation relies on the conception of the soul as being fundamentally related to harmony. When
the spirits rush to one or the other side of the expansion/contraction dichotomy, dispositions move
from tranquil to disturbed, resulting in heightened emotional states.
Another important figure who spoke of the relation of music to the soul and the passions
was Thomas Wright, whose 1601 treatise The Passions of the Minde in Generall marks an early
contribution to the psychology of emotion. While he struggles to supply a mechanism that would
explain the connection between music and the passions, he asserts his conviction that the soul is
fundamentally harmonious in its essential nature, stating that there is “a certaine sympathie,
correspondence, or proportion betwixt our souls and musicke: & no other cause can be yeelded.”21
For Wright, the idea of correspondence between the soul and music—such as through an alignment
of passions—evokes the idea of sympathetic resonance as well as a harmonious sense of proportion
between the two. Though by his own admission, the story is hazy and incomplete, Wright conceived
of the passions as forming the causal link in the relationship between the seemingly unrelated
substances of mind and music.22
By a hundred years later, the idea of sympathetic resonance between the soul and music was
well established, and scholars and scientists in the Royal Society trying to account for the power of
music further developed the idea of sympathetic resonance via the passions. Society member Robert
Hooke composed a Dissertation concerning the Causes of the Power and Effects of Music in an attempt “to
20 D.P. Walker traces the history of the concept of vital spirits from the Renaissance through the early modern period in,
“Medical Spirits in Philosophy and Theology from Ficino to Newton,” chap. 11 in Music, Spirit, and Language in the
Renaissance, ed. Penelope Gouk (London: Variorum Reprints, 1985). 21 Thomas Wright, The Passions Of The minde in generall (London: Printed by Valentine Simmes and Adam Islip for Walter
Burre and Thomas Thorpe, 1604), 168. 22 Erin Sullivan, “The Passions of Thomas Wright: Renaissance Emotion across Body and Soul,” in The Renaissance of
Emotion: Understanding Affect in Shakespeare and His Contemporaries, ed. Erin Sullivan and Richard Meek, 25–44 (Manchester,
UK: Manchester University Press, 2015). Among a broad range of issues surrounding Wright’s views, Sullivan
emphasizes the Thomistic (and therefore) Aristotelian foundations of Wright’s conception of the passions that he
acquired during his Jesuit education.
30

consider the nature of Musick in general, and how it comes to be so active upon the facultys and
Passions of men.”23 As Hooke was dismissive of all mythological accounts, his central investigation
was into the relationship of music to the nature of sound as vibrating motion, and he reported on a
variety of experiments conducted in order to test the effect of individual tones with different
duration and intensity in order to explain the power of music over the passions.
The scientific inquiry that Hooke made into motion as a fundamental activity of sympathetic
resonance reflected a longstanding concern among theorists. The tradition of representing music’s
activity upon the soul as being borne of motion stretches back well into the previous century. For
instance, Thomas Wright, in his Passions of the Minde in Generall, uses notably active language to
demonstrate the nature of music’s action upon the soul. Questioning how it is that music “stirreth
up these passions, and moveth so mightily these affections,” he wonders:
What hath the shaking or artificiall crispling of the ayre (which is in effect the substance of
musicke) to doe with rousing up choler, afflicting with melancholy, jubilating the heart with
pleasure, elevating the soule with devotion, alluring to lust, inducing to peace, exciting to
compassion, inviting to magninamitie?24
Musing on the nature of the causal relation between moving air and states of mind, Wright traces
these connections through the humors and pairs individual mental states with motion-laden
terminology that connotes directionality, activity, and other forceful descriptions. Thus, cholera is
roused, melancholy is an affliction (from the Latin root “fligere,” which conveys striking or dashing),
pleasure is the result of a jubilating heart (from “jubilare,” which is an onomatopoeic verb denoting
shouting or a hooray), devotion is an elevation, and so on.25 He is further fascinated by how music
accomplishes these effects on the body when it appears to be such an effervescent force. “It is not
so great a mervaile, that meat, drinke, exercise, and aire set passions aloft,” he says, “for these are
23 Quoted in Jamie Croy Kassler, The Science of Music in Britain, 1714-1830: A Catalogue of Writings, Lectures, and Inventions, 2
vols. (New York: Garland, 1979), 1:539.
24 Wright, Passions Of The minde, 168. 25 Latdict, “fligo, fligere, -, -,” accessed June 5, 2024, http://latin-dictionary.net/search/latin/fligere.
31

divers wayes qualified, and consequently apt to stirre up humors but what qualitie carie simple single
sounds and voices, to enable them to worke such wonders?”26 Employing the language of
Aristotelian metaphysics of “qualitie,”27 Wright appears to find the impact of food and exercise upon
human dispositions less mysterious than music, since they have a more substantive nature.28
A generation earlier, Oxford Aristotelian philosopher John Case suggested that since music
enters the soul through the ear by motion, so the soul receives new motions that alter its direction,
resulting in “new humors of the body, new affections of the mind, new manners and actions, and an
entire new man.”29 It is clear for Case that the effects of music result in nothing less than a complete
transformation of the self into something genuinely new. Thus, music as re-creation is no light turn
of phrase, but is connected to the action of music upon the passions as somehow fundamentally
transformative of a person’s moral and ethical character.
Significantly, seventeenth-century thinkers believed that, where the instilling of virtue was
concerned, music could not only achieve everything that spoken rhetoric could achieve,30 but that it
worked on the passions at an even deeper level, speaking much more directly to the soul. Thomas
Mace, a famed lutenist who lived well into his nineties before his death in 1706, saw in music’s
power over the inner life proof of music itself being a language with definite meanings. In Mace’s
26 Wright, Passions Of The minde, 168. 27 For an examination of Wright’s broadly Aristotelian conception of reality, see Sullivan, “Passions of Thomas Wright.”
Sullivan argues that Wright’s Aristotelianism flows from his Jesuit education, whose philosophical lineage itself stems
from Thomas Aquinas, who advocated for Aristotle’s works in the thirteenth century. 28 Under an Aristotelian conception of causation, food consists of a substantial form that is physically located in the
mouth and digestive system, then broken down by the body into waste. On the contrary, for Wright, music has no
definite location in the air, and the consumption and digestion of music by the ear shares no analogy to food and the
stomach.
29 John Case, Apologia Musices tam Vocalis Quam Instrumentalis et Mixtae (1588; hypertext critical edition by Dana F. Sutton,
in The Philological Museum [website], The Shakespeare Institute of the University of Birmingham, July 7, 2003; updated
October 29, 2003), http://www.philological.bham.ac.uk/music/trans.html. 30 This parallel drawn between music and rhetoric, which is fundamentally grounded in rhetoric’s persuasive power, is a
classical commonplace. Plato’s primary worry about the sophists is that their speech might be so persuasive as to
overwhelm dialectical reason. His criticism of art stems from the same concern, namely that it can be so captivating that
it may convince anyone of anything, however irrational.
32

estimation, musical rhetoric had the ability to convey “any Humour, Conceit, or Passion” to a listener
even more powerfully than spoken discourse:
Musick speaks so transcendently, and Communicates Its Notions so Intelligibly to the
Internal, Intellectual, and Incomprehensible Faculties of the Soul; so far beyond
all Language of Words, that I confess, and most solemnly affirm, I have been more Sensibly,
Fervently, and Zealously Captivated, and drawn into Divine Raptures, and Contemplations, by Those
Unexpressible Rhetorical, Uncontroulable Perswasions, and Instructions of Musicks Divine Language,
than ever yet I have been, by the best Verbal Rhetorick, that came from any Mans Mouth,
either in Pulpit, or elsewhere.31
For Mace, music’s rhetorical power is primarily one that captivates, draws in, and focuses the mind
on whatever subject the composer treats. Moreover, rhetoric and music both work at a primitive
level, engaging the passions and humors directly:
Those Influences, which come along with It, may aptly be compar’d, to Emanations,
Communications, or Distillations, of some Sweet, and Heavenly Genius, or Spirit; Mystically,
and Unapprehensibly (yet Effectually) Dispossessing the Soul, and Mind, of All Irregular
Disturbing, and Unquiet Motions; and Stills, and Fills It, with Quietness, Joy, and Peace;
Absolute Tranquility, and Unexpressible Satisfaction. I speak not by Roat, but by Experience,
and what I have often found, and felt.32
Mace’s discussion shares similar imagery with the classical stoic analogy of the virtuous soul as a
tranquil pond without ripples. Passions are conceived as disturbances and the goal of stoic advice is
to return the soul to an optimal state of tranquility where one exists undisturbed and unmoved.
Evocatively, Mace’s language is a concoction of metaphors, each reaching toward its own peculiar
way of trying to express both the workings of the underlying mechanisms as well as the subjective
experience of transformation felt by the listener.
Because music was believed to have such a direct impact on humors and moods, theories of
education and moral training were often based upon the proper use of music for achieving
intellectual and moral transformation. Interest in such uses of music was so strong that efforts were
31 Thomas Mace, Musick’s Monument, Or, A Remembrancer Of the Best Practical Musick, Both Divine, and Civil, that has ever been
known, to have been in the World […] (London: Printed by T. Ratcliff and N. Thompson, 1676), 118. 32 Mace, Musick’s Monument, 118.
33

made to import and translate relevant continental texts into English for consultation. Johann
Heinrich Alsted’s Templum Musicum (1614), which was translated by Royal Society member John
Birchensha into English in 1664, was especially influential for the unified vision it presented of how
the mechanical action of music operated on the mind.33 In particular, Alsted captured well the
sweeping scope of the areas of general physical and moral wellness that thinkers of the time found
attributable to the beneficial effects of music:
Musick doth penetrate the Interiors of the mind, it moveth Affections, promoveth
Contemplation, expelleth sorrow, disolveth bad Humours, exhilerateth the animal Spirits:
and so is beneficial to the Life of Men in general, to the Pious for Devotion, to the
Contemplative Life for Science, to the Solitary for Recreation, to the domestick and publick
Life for Moderation of mind, to the Health and the temperament of their Body, and to
the [...]34 for Delight.35
This positive view of music’s benefits was so popular that even in a century marked by intense
political and religious conflict, intellectuals from a variety of persuasions shared largely the same
ideas and beliefs regarding the positive relationship between music and morality. It is well known
that Puritan criticisms of music warned of its misuse, denounced its use in church, and condemned
theater and tavern. For example, Phillip Stubbes, author of many Puritan instructional and
devotional volumes, including The Anatomie of Abuses (1583), wrote that music might “first delight
the eares, but afterward corrupteth and depraveth the minde, making it weake, and quasie, and
inclined to all licentiousness of lyfe whatsoever.”36 What is less commonly emphasized is that even
such radical critics as Stubbes saw the abuse of music as a degradation of something basically good.
Stubbes recommended its use “in a mans secret chamber or soule for his owne solace or comfort to
33 Johann Heinrich Alsted, Templum Musicum: Or, The Musical Synopsis Of The Learned and Famous Johannes-Henricus-Alstedius,
Being A Compendium of the Rudiments both of the Mathematical and Practical Part of Musick: Of which Subject not any Book is extant in
our English Tongue, trans. John Birchensha (London: Printed by Will. Godbid for Peter Dring, 1664). This treatise on
music sits alongside Alsted’s other treatises on logic, metaphysics, theology, encyclopedism, Ramism, and Lullism,
reflecting Alsted’s passion for systematizing knowledge.
34 This word is completely smudged out in the manuscript.
35 Alsted, Templum Musicum, 3-4. 36 Quoted in The Praise of Musicke, 1586: An Edition with Commentary, ed. Hyun-Ah Kim, Music Theory in Britain, 1500–
1700: Critical Editions (New York: Routledge, 2018), 61.
34

drive away the fantasies of idle thoughts, solicitude, care, sorrowe and such other perturbations and
molestations of the minde.”37
Known for his Puritan leanings, John Milton, who wrote his treatise “On Education” half a
century after Stubbes wrote his, expressed similar ideas about music’s place in education. For
Milton, music had “a great power over dispositions and manners, to smooth and make them gentle
from rustic harshness and distemper’d passions,” leading him to make music a centerpiece of his
educational theory.38 In addition to recommending the physical activity of wrestling for building the
body, he commends the use of music for recreational purposes and for “composing their travail’d
spirits with the solemn and divine harmonies of musick heard, or learnt.” Milton seemed to believe
that both listening to and learning music had salutary effects. He recommends “Religious, martial, or
civil ditties” for such purposes, identifies the organ and lute as the most appropriate instruments,
and especially suggests listening to “grave and fancied descant, in lofty fugues” or to performances
by ensembles that might “with artful and unimaginable touches adorn and grace the well studied
chords of some choice Composer.”
Thus, for English thinkers of the seventeenth century, as poet Robert South summarizes
quite simply in the preface to his Musica Incantans (1700), music effects “a Serious Conformation of
the Mind to the right Notion of Things, and consequently an Aptitude and Inclination to the
Practice of Moral Vertues.”39 As has been demonstrated in the foregoing discussion, however, this
ability of music to “conform” the mind—this seemingly demure idea of sympathetic resonance—
extends the Aristotelian view of music as mimesis or representation to work with a particular
understanding of the movement of sound via humors and passions interior to the human body. It
37 Praise of Musicke, 61. 38 John Milton, Poems, &c. Upon Several Occasions. Both English and Latin, &c. Composed at several times. With a small Tractate of
Education To Mr. Hartlib (London: Printed for Tho. Dring, 1673), 113. 39 Robert South, Musica Incantans: or, The Power of Musick. A Poem. Written Originally in Latin by Dr. South. Translated: With a
Preface concerning the Natural Effects of Musick upon the Mind (London: Printed for William Turner, 1700).
35

operates upon the idea of the soul as harmony as the fundamental rationale for the coordination of
such movements, seeing the humors and passions as the constituent elements of the soul’s
harmonious functioning. In turn, the soul also leads such harmony, or lack of it, to be connected to
morality and virtue. But how did such thinkers account for the actual motion of the humors and
passions in the context of music? What motions did they observe or believe to be taking place, and
what parallels did they draw between these motions and the sonic motions possible in music? Such
questions are of significance to performances of seventeenth-century English music, which, as I will
show in chapter 3 via specific examples from the compositions of Henry Purcell, would often have
been delivered according to the ideals of harmonious and virtuous motion of the humors and
passions derived from this perspective of sympathetic resonance. Chapter 2 will therefore delve
further into the specific mechanics of interior bodily motion that early modern English thinkers saw
as the corollary to musical motion in sympathetic resonance. In preparation for that discussion, the
rest of this chapter will provide an overview of several ancient Greek philosophers important to
musical thought in early modern England, and will highlight the viewpoints of English thinkers
spanning two centuries, whose overlapping views on the power of music become central to analysis
supplied by later chapters.
Ancient Greek Philosophers Commonly Drawn Upon by Early Modern English Thinkers
While names of ancient philosophers and theorists are often present in early modern
writings in English, authors are mostly content to make references, summarize details, and borrow
concepts without directly engaging with primary sources in an extended manner. For this reason, I
will present a brief account of central figures along with references to key texts (when available),
which reveal some of the more detailed aspects of ancient theoretical positions on music that
36

English thinkers used to formulate their own ideas. While dozens of ancient intellectuals cast their
shadows over the long seventeenth century, the following are the most significant for my analysis.
Pythagoras
Perhaps the most commonly known element of Pythagorean philosophy that is relevant to
music history is his supposed discovery of the elemental ratios of music, namely, that an octave has a
2:1 ratio, a fifth 3:2, etc., correspond to the sizes and weights of sounding bodies (bells, strings, and
the like). The idea that musical pitches are composed of ratios reflects Pythagoras’s larger view of
the world, which claims that each and every aspect of the universe is quantifiable. The legend of his
supposed discovery of musical pitch was passed along by innumerable medieval commentators on
music, and his concept of the music of the spheres (namely that the stars and planets themselves
were thought to themselves possess musical ratios), was central to early modern English musical
thought, which likewise tended to use musical imagery to understand the whole of the cosmos.
Pythagoras’s ideas were also especially well known to early modern English thinkers through their
influence on Plato and Aristotle.
Although Pythagoras left no writing of his own, his ideas were handed down by oral
tradition to his followers, who then recounted them in tales and stories that were preserved in
written form. As with most philosophical traditions, Pythagoreans divided into sects and developed
specific aspects of Pythagoreanism that were of most interest to themselves. Primarily, this division
was twofold, including those who would focus on the mystical and moral teachings of Pythagoras,
the akousmatikoi, and other sects who emphasized his more expressly mathematical concepts, the
mathematikoi.
40 Nonetheless, both aspects of a Pythagorean worldview cast their influence throughout
40 Richard McKirahan, Philosophy before Socrates: An Introduction with Texts and Commentary, 2nd ed. (Indianapolis: Hackett,
2011), 88-89.
37

early modern musical thought, where the religious aspect related to ethics and the social in music,
while the scientific aspect related to the functioning of music and topics such as astronomy.
Plato
Though his student Aristotle would eventually receive the superlative medieval title “The
Philosopher,” perhaps no single philosopher is more familiar to early modern history than Plato. As
a follower of Socrates,41 Plato was compelled to use his teacher as the central character in his
dialogues, his preferred format for engaging in philosophy as a fundamentally conversational
activity.42 In several of Plato’s dialogues, the arts generally and music specifically figure prominently
in discussions of both ethics and metaphysics. While Cicero’s translation of the dialogue Timaeus was
the only continuously circulating work available in the Latin-speaking Middle Ages, Greek texts
arriving into Italy from the Byzantine world soon became available. Marsilio Ficino’s Latin
translation of Plato’s works and his modeling of the Florentine Academy after Plato’s school of the
same name were especially responsible for the transmission of Plato’s ideas into Renaissance
Europe.
43
The central figure in the Timaeus, rather than the usual Socrates, is Timaeus himself, who
delivers an extensive and uninterrupted mathematical account of the creation of the world by the
demiurge through geometry, proportion, and musical intervals. His vision of the creation of the
world is distinctly Pythagorean, with all of its attendant numerological speculation, and one of
Timaeus’s central claims about music is that it is useful for the ordering of the soul. As discussed
41 Like Pythagoras, Socrates left no writing of his own. Besides Plato’s dialogues, accounts of Socrates’s life and
teachings are recorded by Xenophon, Aristophanes, and several other contemporaries.
42 The name Plato itself is his wrestling nickname, meaning “broad,” referring at once to his wide shoulders and
expansive outlook, also hinting at his basic conception of philosophy as a dialectical exercise in which intellectual
strength results from engagement with an equally skilled competitor. 43 For a demonstration of the depth of Plato’s influence on Ficino’s thought, see Denis J.-J. Robichaud, Plato’s Persona:
Marsilio Ficino, Renaissance Humanism, and Platonic Traditions (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018).
38

earlier in this chapter, the relationship between the soul and harmony was foundational to musical
thought of the long seventeenth century. Timaeus saw harmony “as meant to correct any discord
which may have arisen in the courses of the soul, and to be our ally in bringing her into harmony
and agreement with herself,” and furthered music’s relationship to movement by discussing
harmony as having “motions akin to the revolutions of our souls.”44 These ideas were very
commonplace and often inspiring to thinkers of the seventeenth century, and, as I will show in
chapter 2, were developed further in their debates.
Plato’s final work, Laws, contains extensive discussion of music and its role in education and
society. Music is presented as a primary means of instilling virtue and is said to possess this power
from the fact that it is a fundamentally imitative art. Since the arts determine character, it is a
primary concern of the legislator to ensure that the appropriate moods and motions are exemplified
by the music, dance, and poetry found in a society. Throughout Laws, music’s therapeutic value is
described as stemming from the mirroring of external and internal movements, a quality that early
modern English thinkers also explored further.45
In the Republic, Plato’s masterwork containing a comprehensive account of most of his core
ideas, the arts have a central role in his idealized society. While he calls for artists to be present in a
healthy city, nonetheless, he possessed a strong impulse to purify the arts, to get rid of elements that
he perceived as harmful and amplify the elements that were good—an impulse very similar to that of
Puritans in seventeenth-century England. Famously, the artists of Plato’s Republic were strictly
censored. Just as Homer and other poets were deemed morally corrupt for their portrayal of wicked
gods and less-than-virtuous humans, much music was banned as well. Plato disallows the flute and
44 Plato, Timaeus, trans. Benjamin Jowett, in The Collected Dialogues of Plato Including the Letters, ed. Edith Hamilton and
Huntington Cairns, 1151-1211 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), 47d. 45 Plato, Laws, trans. A. E. Taylor, in The Collected Dialogues of Plato Including the Letters, ed. Edith Hamilton and Huntington
Cairns, 1225-1516 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989).
39

several other instruments, continuing to ban several modes of music that involve “dirges and
lamentations” as well as “soft and convivial” harmonies.46 He continues his argument, raising
questions about the relation of poetic meter to states of mind, passion, and character, ultimately
passing over several difficulties, suggesting that the inquirer consult Damon, the famed music
theorist and contemporary of Socrates.
Plato’s system of thought formed a framework widely shared by early modern English
thinkers in its many aspects and significantly shaped their discourse about music. Discussions of
music during the long seventeenth century followed Plato closely in his manner of connecting many
seemingly unrelated aspects of reality, reaching from the geometrical nature of the physical universe,
through the harmonious human soul and body, to an ethical perspective on virtue that includes
theories of music and music education. This systematic impulse is shared by early modern authors in
their own attempts to understand the relationship of music to mathematics, the passions to the
mind, and music instruction to moral virtue.47
Aristotle
No single philosopher casts as immense an influence over the Middle Ages and Renaissance
world as Aristotle. Known both for his narrow interests in biology and his vast systematic coverage
of multiple subjects, he was an ideal humanist model of both careful empirical study and broad
erudition. Many of his works enjoyed wide circulation, especially after they arrived in Medieval
Spain. Robert Grosseteste (c. 1168-1253), the first chancellor of Oxford University and Bishop of
Lincoln, translated several of his works into Latin, including the Nicomachean Ethics, which contained
46 Plato, Republic, trans. Paul Shorey, in The Collected Dialogues of Plato Including the Letters, ed. Edith Hamilton and
Huntington Cairns, 575-844 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), 398d-e. 47 A particularly encyclopedic study of polymathy, encyclopaedism, systematic thought, and the concept of universal
knowledge is the recent Peter Burke, The Polymath: A Cultural History from Leonardo Da Vinci to Susan Sontag (New
Haven: Yale University Press, 2020).
40

Aristotle’s general overview of virtue and the good life. This widely circulated volume expounded
upon Aristotle’s educational values, providing an overarching framework for his more specific
theories about art that are found in other works.48
Although Aristotle had supposedly written a technical treatise on music that was lost,49 his
extant body of work nonetheless includes several texts with key passages that reveal his thoughts on
the nature and importance of the arts. In book VIII of the Politics, Aristotle asserts the importance of
training the youth in the arts, concluding that art appreciation is essential for living a good life.
Famously, in the Poetics, Aristotle argues that all art forms, whether performed, painted, or written
are fundamentally “modes of imitation.”50 Rhetoric contains Aristotle’s advice on oratorical style and
delivery, suggesting that success involves “the right management of the voice to express the various
emotions—of speaking loudly, softly, or between the two; of high, low, or intermediate pitch; of the
various rhythms that suit various subjects.”51 Finally, Aristotle’s more extensive discussion of the
affections, ranging from basic sensations, to emotional states, to personality level dispositions, can
be found in his Categories.
52
Perhaps unexpectedly, important comments on music and the arts can be found in his
treatise Metaphysics, in which Aristotle wrestles with a wide range of questions about the relationship
48 For detailed accounts of the reception and interpretation of Aristotelian ethical works in the early modern period, see
“Aristotle’s Ethics in the Renaissance” by David A. Lines (171-93) and “The End of Ends? Aristotelian Themes in Early
Modern Ethics” by Donald Rutherford (194-221) in John Miller, ed., The Reception of Aristotle’s Ethics (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2012). 49 The lost treatise is mentioned in Warren Anderson and Thomas J. Mathiesen, “Aristotle,” Grove Music Online, article
published January 20, 2001, https://doi.org/10.1093/gmo/9781561592630.article.01247.
50 Aristotle, Poetics, trans. I. Bywater, in The Complete Works of Aristotle: The Revised Oxford Translation, ed. Jonathan Barnes,
2:2316-2340 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), 1447a15. Although Aristotle enumerates the art forms as
“epic poetry and tragedy, and also comedy, dithyrambic poetry, and most flute-playing and lyre-playing,” he is essentially
gesturing toward the whole panoply of art forms, including the visual arts, which were often also a part of stage sets, as
well as dance. Furthermore, the word used in Greek to refer to all the art forms collectively was mousike. 51 Aristotle, Rhetoric, trans. W. Rhys Roberts, in The Complete Works of Aristotle: The Revised Oxford Translation, ed. Jonathan
Barnes, 2:2152-2269 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), 1403b26-30. 52 Aristotle’s mention of the passions in Categories 9a28-10a10 simultaneously connects his metaphysics of qualities to his
observations about the manifestations of emotion in the body and their relation to personality traits, some of which he
claims arise from birth. Categories, trans. J. L. Ackrill, in The Complete Works of Aristotle: The Revised Oxford Translation, ed.
Jonathan Barnes, 1:3-24 (Princeton: Princeton University Press), 1995.
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between mathematical and material reality. Here, he steps back and forth between agreement and
disagreement with Plato and Pythagoreanism, but despite their many differences, Aristotle agrees
with Plato on a central point, namely, that art and beauty are themselves governed by inner
mathematical principles. He argues that “those who assert that the mathematical sciences say
nothing of the beautiful or the good are in error,” and that the “chief forms of beauty are order and
symmetry and definiteness.”53
Although early modern scientific investigations challenged Aristotle’s theories of physics, his
views of ethics and aesthetics continued to dominate the intellectual landscape during that time.
Popular polemical texts in the seventeenth century make direct reference to Aristotelian conceptions
of the relation of music to moral virtue, and similar summaries of essentially Aristotelian positions
on the arts are readily found in other contemporaneous texts. The Politics in particular is explicitly
cited by many early modern English writers, and is furthermore the central text by Aristotle that
addresses certain topics widely discussed by musical thinkers of the seventeenth century, such as the
relationship between the individual and collective, education and civil society, as well as specific
recommendations for how music ought to be used in government.
Quintilianus
By contrast with Plato and Aristotle, the name of Aristides Quintilianus is far less well
known to music scholarship today. His monumental treatise Peri Mousikes (“On Music”), which dates
from the third or fourth century C.E., is an exhaustive account of music that divides each aspect
into constituent parts, analyzing each in turn. Although Quintilianus draws on the then fivehundred-year-old works of Damon, Plato, and Aristotle, his central influence is Aristoxenus, an
53 Aristotle, Metaphysics, trans. W. D. Ross, in The Complete Works of Aristotle: The Revised Oxford Translation, ed. Jonathan
Barnes, 2:1552-1728 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), 1078a32-37.
42

ancient music theorist and student of Aristotle. Peri Mousikes reflects an Aristoxenian focus on
harmony, rhythm, and meter as the primary divisions of music.54 Like his predecessors, Peri Mousikes
also includes reflections on the ethical aspects of music and the relationship of music to the larger
physical and metaphysical aspects of reality. For Quintilianus, every musical element, be it rhythmic,
melodic, harmonic, or textual, participates in expanding and contracting mechanisms, mapping
directly onto the bodily expression of emotional states and the internal motions of the soul.
For such a comparatively minor figure, Quintilianus had remarkably widespread influence.
Peri Mousikes was drawn upon heavily by Gaffurius in the Renaissance, and was known to Giorgio
Valla, Vicenzo Galilei, and Girolamo Mei, Athanasius Kircher, and Marin Mersenne, among other
continental music theorists of the fifteenth to eighteenth centuries. The treatise was only available in
the original Greek until Meibom’s 1652 translation into Latin, after which it enjoyed a wider
circulation.55 Though broad in its scope, Peri Mousikes nonetheless managed at the same time to be
filled with intricate detail. Like Quintilianus himself, early modern music theorists were attracted to
the analysis of musical action as a physical, causal, quantifiable substance, but also to its larger
relationship to human emotions and social life. John Hawkins, in his landmark history of music of
1776, himself attests to both the technical precision and sweeping grandiosity of the treatise.
Describing Quintilianus’s treatise as “more scientific than that of the Latin writers,”56 Hawkins
nonetheless marveled at how Quintilianus’s conceptions of the power of music, such as his “chain
54 Aristides Quintilianus, On Music: In Three Books, trans. Thomas J. Mathiesen (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983).
Aside from the treatise Peri Mousikes, no other writings are extant and no biographical information is known about
Aristides Quintilianus.
55 Many ancient Greek texts were given to the Bodleian Library, and Sir Henry Savile donated works by Ptolemy and
Aristides Quintilianus to Oxford in 1609. John Selden hired Peter Turner to translate Greek music texts, with Edmund
Chilmead cataloguing Greek music theoretical texts in 1636. For these and other details, see Penelope Gouk, “Music” in
The History of the University of Oxford, Volume IV: Seventeenth-Century Oxford, edited by Nicholas Tyacke, 621-40 (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1997). 56 John Hawkins, A General History of the Science and Practice of Music, 2 vols. (New York: Dover, 1963), 1:61.
43

of very abstruse reasoning on the nature of the human soul,” was far more wide-ranging and
speculative than modern scientific thought seemed willing to permit.57
Boethius
Nearly a millennium after the famed philosophers of the school of Athens, Boethius (480-
524 C.E.) made a significant contribution to the history of music in his treatise De Institutione Musica.
Writing during the late Roman empire, Boethius himself leans heavily on Greek influences, naming
Plato and Pythagoras in his opening chapters. The writings of Boethius had an early reception in
English, being translated into middle English by Geoffrey Chaucer in the 1380s as Boecius de
consolacione philosophie (“The Consolations of Philosophy”).58 Boethius’s notion of musica is essentially
that which is fundamentally harmonious, and he delineates three types of music: musica mundana
(music of the spheres/astronomy/cosmology), musica humana (music corresponding to human
nature), and musica instrumentalis constituta (objects upon which humans make music). According to
Boethius, music is that which binds together different aspects of the world. “For what unites the
incorporeal nature of reason with the body if not a certain harmony and, as it were, a careful tuning
of low and high pitches as though producing one consonance?,” he asks. For Boethius, music, as the
unifying element of the world, is also intrinsically mathematical—proportionate, numerical, and
quantitative.
It is this proportional, rational quality of music, Boethius says, that “unites the parts of the soul,
which, according to Aristotle, is composed of the rational and the irrational.”59
57 Hawkins, General History, 1:82. 58 Chaucer’s prose translation was followed by a verse translation by John Walton in 1410. These sources leaned heavily
on multiple French translations produced starting in the thirteenth century, works which themselves were preceded by
Notker’s translation into Old High Germanic around 1000, suggesting the deep, canonical status of Boethius. For a
detailed account of Boethius’s texts, translations, and transmission, see Philip Edward Phillips, “The English
‘Consolation of Philosophy’: Translation and Reception,” Carmina Philosophiae 17 (2008): 97–126. 59 Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius, Fundamentals of Music, trans. Calvin M. Bower., ed. Claude V. Palisca (New Haven,
CT: Yale University Press, 1989), 10.
44

The influence of Boethius on early modern thought was ensured through his central place in
medieval educational practice, which was designed to transmit the quadrivium of arithmetic, music,
geometry, and astronomy. In addition to The Consolation of Philosophy, Boethius’s De institutione musica
was also canonical medieval instructional literature that spawned extensive commentary throughout
the Middle Ages.60 Key musical discussions in Boethius’s work that interested writers and thinkers of
the long seventeenth century concerned the music of the spheres, a theory of acoustics, a system of
pitch based in ratios, as well as assertions of the nature of relationships between music and moral
behavior.61
English Interpreters of Ancient Greek Musical Ideas
Early modern English writers were especially concerned with the role of music in human life
and culture and drew readily on Greek sources for inspiration and authority. From the appearance of
the earliest treatises in the English language, music was foundational in their formation of
psychological and social theories. Intellectuals near the beginning of the seventeenth century such as
Thomas Wright, John Case, and Francis Bacon attempted to explore the mysteries of the senses,
especially the sense of hearing, the nature of sound, and the inner faculties that enable audiation and
imagining of musical sounds. Their theories of the nature of sound, hearing, and music are tied
together with their understanding of human beings, both individually and collectively. In addition to
specifically psychological texts, writings about music abound with psychological speculation and
theories of sensation found in more general treatises. Thomas Morley and Isaac Vossius engaged
60 Boethius comprised core curriculum in musical studies at Oxford. A brief history of this relationship can be found in
Charles Francis Abdy Williams, A Short Historical Account of the Degrees in Music at Oxford and Cambridge: With a Chronological
List of Graduates in That Faculty from the Year 1463 (London: Novello, Ewer, 1893), 20-21. 61 A rich discussion of the common theme of the essential musical nature of reality in seventeenth-century England can
be found in Christopher Marsh, Music and Society in Early Modern England (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013),
40-50.
45

their readers with direct references to ancient Greek thought both by imitating their style and by
theorizing about the nature of ancient music in order to make their claims. Gentleman amateur and
theorist Roger North imports specifically Aristotelian claims about the nature of music’s influence
on the mind, and music historians Charles Burney and John Hawkins, who work squarely in the
eighteenth century, are themselves immersed in Greek ideas as late as the 1770s and can be seen
deliberating about the same issues that motivated theorists nearly two hundred years earlier. In each
case, we can see the long shadow cast by Plato, Aristotle, and many other Greek thinkers over the
nature of music and the human mind.
Thomas Wright (1561–1624)
Divided in his allegiances, Wright was both an English patriot and vocal recusant who
sought a middle way of reconciling Elizabethan monarchy with Catholicism. His most important
contribution to musical thought was his 1601 publication The Passions of the Minde in Generall, where
his tendency toward moderation manifests in his thesis that the passions must be controlled,
tempered, and properly adjudicated in order to “move the will to virtue.”62 Dividing philosophy into
natural and moral, “the one for Speculation, the other for Practise,” he emphasizes that his own
study stretches out equally distant into each of the two domains. Music is central to his analysis, and
he mentions the topic nearly seventy times in order to illustrate his positions. For Wright, the
passions are “not wholy to be extinguished (as the Stoicks seemed to affirme) but sometimes to be
moved, and stirred up for the service of vertue, as learnedly Plutarch teacheth.” To this end, he often
connects music’s marvelous powers to inner mechanisms by which the soul can be moved to its
variety of states or dispositions: “Musicke causeth mirth, ioy, and delight, the which abate, expell,
and quite destroy their contrary affections, and withall, rectifie the blood and spirits, and
62 Wright, Passions Of The minde, 1.
46

consequently disgest melancholy, and bring the body into a good temper.”63 Naming Galen several
times in his treatise, he maintains a humoral theory of the soul, an assumption shared by Robert
Burton in his more widely known psychological treatise The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621).64
For Wright, the humors may drive the passions, but a central means of discovering them in
oneself and others is through bodily gestures. These various movements of the body betray the
inner constitution of the self. Wright claims that there are four principal bodily movements by which
such passions are transmitted, namely, the “movement of the eyes, pronuntiation, managing of the
hands and body, manner of going.”65 In light of these claims, music thus shares a fundamental
connection to bodily gestures, since if music represents the passions, it is in its representation of
bodily gestures that it succeeds in communicating effectively. Given that Aristotle’s idea of mimesis
was grounded in the idea that music moved in the way that the body moved, Wright’s action- and
movement-based view of the power of music is a useful case for understanding the way that
Aristotelian mimetic theory functioned to explain musical meaning in the seventeenth century.
Francis Bacon (1561–1626)
Francis Bacon is most widely known for his extensive contributions to the evolution of
scientific thought in early seventeenth-century England. Receiving a Puritan education as a youth, he
was precocious enough to impress Queen Elizabeth at Cambridge with his powerful intellect. His
experimental method was motivated by an empirically minded approach to knowledge and was
popularized through the 1620 publication of Novum Organum. The title of the publication was a
direct reference to Aristotle’s Organon, which comprised six works on logic, language, and scientific
63 Wright, Passions Of The minde, 160. 64 Robert Burton, The Anatomy Of Melancholy, What It Is. With All The Kindes, Causes, Symptoms, Prognostickes, And Severall
Cures Of It (Oxford: Printed by John Lichfield and James Short, for Henry Cripps, 1621). 65 Wright, Passions Of The minde, 131.
47

understanding. Bacon’s inductive and experimental method directly influenced thinkers such as
Thomas Browne in his Religio Medici, and was also cited as an inspirational model by the later
Restoration-era founders of the Royal Society. In addition to his scientific writings, Bacon also wrote
extensively on politics, as he was himself a practicing lawyer at Gray’s Inn in the late 1500s, and was
later appointed Attorney General, then Lord Chancellor under James I.66
Bacon’s comments about music often emerge from his discussions of the science of sound
as moving air and resonating bodies. In the posthumous 1627 publication of selected writings
entitled Sylva Sylvarum, Bacon makes further connections between sound and psychology, asking
questions about the nature of pleasing and displeasing noises, and considering the grinding of rocks
or screeching sounds that “make a shivering or horror in the Body.”67 Connecting the cause of these
basic physiological responses back to the science of sound, he argues: “For all sounds, whether they
be sharp or flat, if they be sweet, have a roundness or equality; and if they be harsh, are unequal: For
a Discord itself is but a harshness of divers sounds meeting.”68 This aesthetic of proportion not only
governs his aesthetics of sound, but also of sight, for spheres and cubes have an intrinsic appeal but
irregular shapes do not make the sensation pleasing or attractive.
In spite of Bacon’s reputation as a modern thinker, we can see direct connections of his
ideas to those of his predecessors. In his 1605 book The Advancement of Learning, we can see Bacon
leaning on Greek thought to make his own arguments about the interconnection of disciplines to
one another, such as his point that “the poets did well to conjoin music and medicine in Apollo,
because the office of medicine is but to tune this curious harp of man’s body and to reduce it to
66 Studies of Francis Bacon were produced by the handful in the last decades of the nineteenth century, with some
focusing on the development of his scientific views and others exploring his complicated social and political life.
Recently reprinted, Abbott’s 1885 biography provides equal coverage of both. See Edwin Abbott Abbott, Francis Bacon:
An Account of His Life and Works (Hamburg: Severus Verlag, 2013). 67 Bacon, Sylva Sylvarum, or, A Natural History in Ten Centuries (London: Printed by J. R. for William Lee, 1670), 145. 68 Bacon, Sylva Sylvarum, 145.
48

harmony.” But Bacon also attempts to move beyond the ideas of the ancient Greek philosophers.
For instance, he pointedly articulates the need to further the work of Aristotle (whom he describes
as having “very ingeniously and diligently handled the factures of the body, but not the gestures of
the body”) in order to more fully connect the body to the passions via humoral theory.69 Like
Wright, Bacon sees the body and its motive states as mirrors of inner dispositions and attitudes. As
we will see, these concepts are central to the way music was understood to convey meaning by
moving in ways analogous to human emotional movements of the body when stimulated by the
passions.
John Case (1539/46–1600)
John Case was a product of Oxford University culture from childhood through his young
adulthood. Born in Oxfordshire, he was a college chorister as a boy and later received degrees at the
newly founded St. John’s College in 1568 and 1572. Though Case became a fellow of St. John’s
College, two years later he abandoned his fellowship, married, and began teaching philosophy and
logic on his own, publishing widely influential textbooks and instructional manuals.70 Known for his
commentaries on Aristotle in Latin, Case published on a wide array of topics, exhibiting skill in
philosophy, medicine, and music. “For just as the ills of the body are cured and soothed by
wholesome medicine, so are the mind’s vices by moral philosophy,” he wrote in his commentary on
Aristotle’s Ethics Speculum Moralium Quaestionum.
71 Case saw philosophy as “the yardstick of morals,
the teacher of the virtues, the sundial of life, the rule of actions,” and therefore also “that which
69 Bacon, Advancement of Learning, BOOK II, section X, para. 2. 70 The principal study of the life and works of John Case remains Charles B. Schmitt, John Case and Aristotelianism in
Renaissance England (Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 1983). 71 John Case, Speculum Moralium Quaestionum (1585; hypertext critical edition by Dana F. Sutton, in The Philological Museum
[website], The Shakespeare Institute of the University of Birmingham, September 18, 2002; updated April 12, 2003),
https://philological.cal.bham.ac.uk/speculum/fronteng.html.
49

teaches us how to banish the mind’s diseases, moderate the affections, guide the reason, and
ornament all life with the gems and decorations of the virtues.” This mirrored his views on the
reasons for musical education.
Case only seems to have composed a single treatise in which he dealt principally with music,
namely, his Apologia Musices, tam vocalis quam instrumentalis et mixtae (1588). Like many ancient Greek
philosophers in the Pythagorean tradition, he saw music as “proportion, since all concord and
harmony consists of numbers.” And, likewise, for Case, this harmoniousness “pertains to all things,
since (as Pythagoras, Democritus and Plato each) there is a certain melodic modulation and harmony
in all the effects of Nature.”72 Case also discusses music in several other writings. In Sphaera Civitatis,
his commentary on Aristotle’s Politics, he spends the entirety of Book VIII arguing, alongside his
hero Aristotle, that music education is a necessary aspect of creating a moral citizenry, principally
since it causes “peace and quiet of the mind.” Case further claims that since music is a science of
proportion and number, there is “no part of life, in leisure or in business, in peace or in war, which
is not refreshed by the use of music.”73 This echoes his claim in Apologia Musices that music education
is specifically well-suited to introduce joy into the learning process: “For just as there is a sweet
savor in learning which makes for pleasure, so there is an effort in learning which engenders tedium
and pain. But there is no effort in music…[it] sharpens the intellect with its wonderful influence
rather than tiring it with study.”74
The Praise of Musicke, an anonymous treatise in English, has long been erroneously attributed
to Case because it contains a defense of music similar in many ways to Case’s Apologia Musices.
However, a half century ago, J. W. Binns suggested many convincing reasons why the author could
72 Case, Apologia Musices. 73 John Case, Sphaera Civitatis (1588; hypertext critical edition by Dana F. Sutton, in The Philological Museum [website], The
Shakespeare Institute of the University of Birmingham, March 13, 2002),
https://philological.cal.bham.ac.uk/sphaera/8eng.html. 74 Case, Apologia Musices.
50

not have been Case, and contemporary scholar Hyun-Ah Kim concludes her analysis with the claim
that organist and composer John Bull was the author.75 Whatever its provenance may be, The Praise of
Musicke, too, evinces the direct influence of Aristotle, such as in the following assertion:
In a word Aristotles resolution touching the civil necessity is, that musick hath relation to
these three things, to delectation, to discipline, and to an happy life. To delectation, because
Musicke with the sweetnesse thereof, doeth refresh the minde and make it better able to
greater labours. To discipline, because it is a cause of breeding in us chastitie, temperance,
and other morall vertues. To an happy life, because that cannot consist without judgement
and liberall delectations, whereof Musicke is the chiefest.76
Thomas Morley (1557–1602)
Thomas Morley was famed for his importing and popularizing of “Musica Transalpina”—
musical compositions, styles, and techniques from Italy—which, like everything Italianate in the
Elizabethan age, became very in vogue. He presents his interest in amassing and printing this
storehouse of musical wisdom from a self-consciously philosophical orientation. In his arguments
for music’s purpose, value, and importance, Morley reveals his many deep connections to classical
philosophy and learning. He addresses the dedicatory letter of his A Plaine and Easie Introduction to
Practicall Musicke of 1597 to “Maister William Birde,” and opens the dedication by naming musical
“maisters,” alongside God and our parents, as those “whose benefites to us can never be requited.”77
For Morley, “maisters” are those musicians who have preceded us in skill and make our own
musicianship possible, and the purpose of musical study is nothing less than a kind of inner
transformation and creation of a new inner and artistic self. As Morley puts it, “maisters” are “those
by whose directions the faculties of the reasonable soule be stirred up to enter into contemplation,
75 Kim’s discussion of the authorship of the treatise can be found in Kim, Praise of Musicke, 27-49. 76 Praise of Musicke, 71. 77 Thomas Morley, A Plaine And Easie Introduction To Practicall Musicke, Set downe in forme of a dialogue: Devided into three partes,
The first teacheth to sing with all things necessary for the knowledge of pricktsong […] (London: Peter Short, 1597).
51

and searching of more then earthly things.”78 From this process, Morley says, “we obtaine a second
being, more to be wished and much more durable then that which any man since the worlds
creation hath received of his parents.”79 This ability of music to transform inner character, Morley
asserts, is why he has labored to produce this manual.
The influence of classical philosophy can be seen in several aspects of Morley’s work.
Following in Plato’s footsteps, Morley’s A Plaine and Easie Introduction to Practicall Musicke of 1597
takes the form of a dialogue, engaging the basic Platonic premise that knowledge is best produced
dialectically and in discussion and debate. Morley mentions Plato by name several times in the
treatise and shows familiarity with Plato’s dialogue Cratylus, which discusses the nature of language,
names, and meaning. Finally, illustrating the degree to which new ideas were legitimized by their
connection to ancient wisdom, Morley ends his dialogue not by boldly giving his own definition of
music, but rather by citing Plato, Boethius, Augustine, as well as Italian theorist Franchino Gaffurio
(1451-1522).
Isaac Vossius (1618–1689)
Son of famous Dutch rhetorician and scholar Gerhard Vossius, young Isaac showed early
intellectual promise. He learned Greek and Arabic in his youth and traveled extensively as a
teenager. He inherited his father’s passion for broad learning and went on to a career in professional
scholarship himself. Like Descartes, he served Queen Christina’s court in Sweden, accepting her
invitation to join the fervent intellectual environment there. After that court was dissolved, he made
his way to England where he would spend the last two decades of his life. Though not especially
prolific, he published broadly in several fields, spanning from meteorology to interpretation of the
78 Morley, dedication to Plaine And Easie Introduction. 79 Morley, dedication to Plaine And Easie Introduction.
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Greek Septuagint. In addition, he developed an impressive library of materials in an equally broad
range of subjects which is kept at the University of Leiden to this day.80
Elected to the Royal Society in England in 1664, Vossius kept company with that especially
fertile group of thinkers. He seems to have developed a reputation for being a stubborn contrarian,
and at the same time, credulous and willing to believe all manner of absurdities. While he fairly
quickly vanished from scholarly attention, Isaac Vossius remains a crucial figure in the history of
Baroque musical theory for his treatise discussing the relation of rhythm and meter to musical
phrases—De poematum cantu et viribus rhythmi. This treatise had little circulation and was not published
in English translation until 2016. However, it did have an important influence on Johann
Mattheson’s explication of the affective content of dance rhythms. (Interestingly, although
Mattheson possessed this treatise, he mistook it for the work of Isaac’s father Gerhard, whose fame
far outshone that of Isaac.)
Originally published in 1673, De poematum cantu et viribus rhythmi was a treatise on the
relationship between musical affects and poetic metrical feet, where Vossius chiefly advanced the
argument that rhythm was the primary conduit of meaning and affect. Crucially, he built his
argument on the premise that a sustained long tone had no semantic content—that, just as a single
word could not convey rich content, notes disconnected from their rhythmic constituents lost all
musical effectiveness. According to Vossius, since modern music no longer abided by strict poetic
meter, its affective power was significantly diminished compared to that of its ancient counterparts.
This view was sufficiently noteworthy that the music historian Charles Burney highlighted it when
discussing Vossius within an entry on his father: “Isaac Vossius says it is now above a thousand
years since musicians have lost that great power over the affections, which arose only from the true
80 A comprehensive biography of Isaac Vossius and a discussion of his influence can be found in Frans Felix Blok, Isaac
Vossius and His Circle: His Life until His Farewell to Queen Christina of Sweden, 1618-1655 (Groningen: E. Forsten, 2000).
53

science and use of Rhythm.”81 In the Grove Music Online article for Isaac’s father Gerhard, author
Heinrich Hüschen claims that De Poematum Cantu of the younger Vossius “influenced a number of
musicians in the 18th century, among them Bach,” though Hüschen does not trace this link.82
Vossius’s focus on rhythm in music assists my discussion in chapter 2 of movement and
time as key elements in multiple seventeenth-century theories of sympathetic resonance.
Philosophically, Vossius is a kind of mythological satyr—half empirical mechanist in conversation
with Descartes, the other half bearing more resemblance to Kircher, who, like Vossius, was
notorious for a mostly uncritical eclecticism.83 In De poematum cantu, for instance, Vossius’s
eclecticism is especially on display in his references to Plato. He repeats ancient tales of music
causing insanity (declaring that “this is why Plato expels composite feet” from his Republic); he also
bans particular modes (Vossius thought that modes were purely rhythmic) and poetic meters.84
Nonetheless, given Vossius’s emphasis on the importance of rhythm for conveying affective
content—particularly its ability to represent moods—his theories are an especially useful example of
how Aristotelian mimetic theory continued to undergird understandings of the power of music.
Roger North (1653–1734)
Like Samuel Pepys, Roger North is not known to historians for his occupational activities
(he was a lawyer by trade), but rather for his detailed memoirs on a wide variety of subjects. Like
81 Charles Burney, A General History of Music from the Earliest Ages to the Present Period, 2 vols. (New York: Dover
Publications, 1957), 1:85. 82 Heinrich Hüschen, “Vossius [Voss], Gerhard Johann,” Grove Music Online, article published January 20, 2001,
https://doi.org/10.1093/gmo/9781561592630.article.29697.
83 This picture of Isaac Vossius probably owes much to his own distancing of himself from his father’s conservative
rhetorical views and his sympathies with the Ramist orientations of Joseph Scaliger, Isaac Casaubon, and Claude
Saumaise. There is speculation of a connection between Vossius and Baruch Spinoza, but though they were part of the
same cultural milieu and there is definite evidence they met and discussed alchemy, other connections between them
remain mostly conjecture.
84 Isaac Vossius, Isaac Vossius’s “De poematum cantu et viribus rhythmi,” 1673: On the Music of Poetry and Power of Rhythm, ed.
Peter Martens, Music Theory in Britain, 1500–1700: Critical Editions (Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2022), 30.
54

Pepys’ memoirs, these writings were private musings never intended for publication. However, after
his death, Lives of the Norths was compiled and printed as a cross-section of his writings offering
behind-the-scenes accounts of his famous family.
Born into a long line of Barons, his father being the fourth, Roger North lived in an
extraordinarily wealthy, well-educated, and well-connected manner. In addition to his more
biographical memoirs stands a sizeable set of letters and essays on musical subjects. These range
from more complete works such as The Musical Grammarian, published late in his life in 1728, to
loose manuscripts covering a wide range of topics in music, often oriented toward the types of
physics-related topics that occupied the experimentally minded Royal Society. Running through
North’s writings is a constant train of references to Plato and Aristotle, as well as a very selfconsciously conceived theory of art and music centered on the musical mimesis of human emotions.
Perhaps most remarkable is the correspondence between North’s ideas and Aristotle’s in one
significant passage in his essay “Of Musical Ayre” (this essay contained nascent material that was
eventually revised into The Musical Grammarian). In this passage, North indicates a key premise of his
own theory of musical expression:
And in every musicall attempt reasonably designed, Humane Nature is the subject, and so
penetrant that thoughts, such as mankind occasionally have, and even speech itself, share in
that resemblance; so that an hearer shall put himself into the like condition, as if the state
represented were his owne.85
Although North does not explicitly attribute his ideas to Aristotle, his precepts bear evident parallels
to the following remarks in Aristotle’s Politics:
Besides, when men hear imitations, even apart from the rhythms and tunes themselves, their
feelings move in sympathy.… Rhythm and melody supply imitations of anger and
gentleness, and also of courage and temperance, and of all the qualities contrary to these, and
85 Roger North, Roger North on Music: Being a Selection from His Essays Written during the Years c. 1695–1728, transcr. and ed.
John Wilson (London: Novello, 1959), 110.
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of the other qualities of character, which hardly fall short of the actual affections, as we
know from our own experience, for in listening to such strains our souls undergo a change.86
Here, Aristotle’s word mimesis is translated as “imitations,”87 and of particular interest in the parallels
between the two passages is North’s use of the word “pantomime” to refer to mimesis, which
accentuates the linkage of the idea to its Greek roots.88 And, importantly, North expresses Aristotle’s
conviction that music causes listeners to have corresponding emotions. It is the ability to “share in
that resemblance,” North believes, that forms the essence of music’s power. For North, music does
not represent something abstract, but rather supplies penetrating experiences that engage human
feeling at the deepest level.
North’s memoirs and writings show the extent to which certain elements of ancient Greek
thought permeated musical discourse during the seventeenth century. Combined with North’s
creative interpretations of such classical concepts and his fusions of them with other popular
philosophical ideas of his day (such as Cartesian problematics of mind and body), these texts offer a
glimpse into how lay theories of musical affect may have circulated at the time, interacting with the
discussions of more intellectual circles in unexpected ways.
86 Aristotle, Politics, trans. B. Jowett, in The Complete Works of Aristotle: The Revised Oxford Translation, ed. Jonathan Barnes,
2:1986-2129 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), 1340a12-23. 87 Other translators choose “representations.” 88 One wonders if North was familiar with the work of his contemporary John Weaver, who published An Essay Towards
an History of Dancing in 1712, in which the word “pantomime” is used nearly 100 times. Weaver, An Essay Towards an
History Of Dancing, In which the whole Art and its Various Excellencies are in some Measure explain’d (London: Printed for Jacob
Tonson, 1712). This volume reveals Weaver’s interest in ancient Greek conceptions of dance and his attempt to recreate
them. Five years later, in 1717, Weaver produced a performance of his pantomime The Loves of Mars and Venus at Drury
Lane, which he described as “attempted in the imitation of the pantomimes of the ancient Greeks and Romans).
Weaver, The Loves Of Mars and Venus; A Dramatick Entertainment Of Dancing, Attempted in Imitation of the Pantomimes Of The
Ancient Greeks and Romans; As Perform’d at the Theatre in Drury-Lane (London: Printed for W. Mears, 1717). Whatever
North’s awareness of Weaver, we can see an Aristotelian conception of the arts present in each of their minds. For a
modern facsimile edition with commentary, see Richard Ralph, An Edition of John Weaver’s “An Essay towards an History of
Dancing” (1712) with a Critical Account of His Life, Writings, and Theatrical Productions, and an Introduction (PhD diss., University
of Oxford, 1977; Boston Spa, UK: British Library, Document Supply Centre).
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John Hawkins (1719–1789)
Friend of Samuel Johnson and member of his literary circle, John Hawkins is most relevant
to the historiography of music for his monumental General History of the Science and Practice of Music
published in 1776. Research and writing of this history spanned sixteen years and covered his
conception of music history from the beginning. Despite being composed in the mid- to late
eighteenth century, Hawkins’s monumental treatise was based on the foundational premise, drawn
from Aristotle, that was common in the long seventeenth century: the mimetic character of musical
expression. Beyond being “where imitation is intended, as in the songs of birds, or in the expression
of those various inflexions of the voice which accompany passion or exclamation, weeping,
laughing, and other of the human affections,” for Hawkins, music was deeply mimetic, where
everything in music represented something in human nature, making music “the sound and the thing
signified.”89
Hawkins’s history also contains extensive commentary on Greek music that is accompanied
by the retelling of ancient stories of music’s miraculous powers. For this, he often leans on the
writings of Athanasius Kircher, whose Musurgia Universalis of 1650 contains similar accounts of such
marvelous tales, such as King David’s use of music to soothe the troubled Saul. Although Hawkins
dismisses Kircher’s humor-based theories of music’s effects, Hawkins’s own remarks on music of
his time still retain an emphasis on the power of music to affect mood and behavior. For instance,
he is committed to a robust view of music’s ability to communicate and to affect the passions “by
sounds either simple and harmonical only in succession, or combined.” According to Hawkins,
“these the mind…recognizes as the language of nature; and the affections of joy, grief, and a
thousand nameless sensations, become subservient to their call.”90 Hawkins also makes direct
89 Hawkins, General History, 1:xx. 90 Hawkins, General History, 1:xxvii.
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connections between the arts of music and rhetoric, claiming that the two “bear a near resemblance;
the end of persuasion, or affecting the passions, being common to both.”91 Though writing near the
end of the eighteenth century, Hawkins is useful to the present study because his own work on
music history exhibits the still strong influence of ancient Greek sources and holds the affective
properties of music as a central concern.
Charles Burney (1726–1814)
Though Charles Burney is known to us principally for his work as a music historian, he was
himself a highly educated and well-trained musician who studied under several prominent organists
and composers, including Thomas Arne. He worked professionally as a keyboardist and composer,
producing mostly music for theater and opera, though he also composed an Ode for St Cecilia’s Day in
1759. Leaving for a continental research expedition in 1770, Burney traveled widely, conducting
research and meeting many prominent musicians in his travels, notably including the teenaged
Mozart. Upon his return, he published The Present State of Music in France and Italy in 1771. His first
volume of A General History of Music appeared five years later in 1776, competing in the same year
and over the same ground as John Hawkins’s similarly titled volumes on music history.
Although they occupy the same time, space, and subjects, Burney’s history proceeds in a
more skeptical and reductive manner than Hawkins’s. Whereas Hawkins often reports fanciful tales
and curious hypotheses from ancient times, Burney typically dismisses such stories and offers his
own simpler explanations. For example, when discussing the marvelous tales of ancient Greeks
about their music, he divides the effects of ancient music into three categories: civilizing power,
effect on the passions, and medicinal power. Burney speaks of music’s softening of rough Arcadian
character from wildness and savagery to a tame and compliant demeanor, but he also claims that the
91 Hawkins, General History, 1:xxx-xxxi.
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text of the poetry accompanying the music is a far greater motivation and influence than musical
sounds. Interestingly, in Burney’s history, the language of Greek humoral theory is abundant, but
such terms are used in a purely metaphorical vein, detached from the biomechanics of outmoded
Renaissance anatomical ideas. For Burney, all connotations of the word “humour” are about
comedy, and uses of the terms “sanguine” and “melancholy” receive a modern usage as mere
descriptions of moods and can simply be replaced by the terms “happy” and “sad.” Nonetheless, he
still sees the primary drivers of musical feeling as related to motion, especially the rhythm of the
spoken word and the overall rhythmic pacing of the music. Although he retains the sense from
ancient Greek music that musical modes, scales, and melodies can affect the passions, he sees that
effect as intrinsically tied to their rhythmic expression.
Conclusion
The individuals discussed above engaged in a broad multiplicity of disciplines and utilized a
wide array of artistic materials, and their intellectually active periods spanned approximately two
hundred years, from about the late 1500s to the late 1700s. Living mostly in London and working in
the English language, these intellectuals participated in overlapping social communities of various
sorts, often possessing an educational lineage to either Oxford or Cambridge, and were generally
members of a wealthy, literate, leisure class. Their work was characterized by common commitments
to scientific experimentation, moral and political theorizing, a strong recognition of the centrality of
the arts, and a predilection toward generating coherent views of the world that reconciled knowledge
from every discipline. This broad and holistically humanistic outlook was especially grounded in
classical literary sources, a shared intellectual kinship that shaped the discourses with which they
came to formulate very similar views about the power of music. In particular, their views of the arts
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were driven by Aristotelian and Platonic as well as broadly Greek philosophical conceptions of both
the human and the natural world.
In chapter 2, I will delve more deeply into their specific theories of sympathetic resonance
and other ways of conceiving of the direct, physical relationship between music and the passions.
Composers, performers, poets, theorists, and music historians of their day all saw music enacting its
influence on human psychology through widely shared conceptions of thought and action, and
bodies and souls, and the influence of music on diverse aspects of human life and culture.
Uncovering the details involved in such views spawns valuable insights for performers today, as they
make visible the psychological themes that run through the music of the baroque period and
beyond. Although the thinkers I have introduced here had the most extended commentary on these
topics, they were not the only authors of that time period to have considered these themes.
Therefore, I will supplement their views in the next chapter with those of an array of other
intellectual contemporaries, influences, students, and teachers.
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– Chapter 2 –
Sympathetic Motion:
The Mechanics of Musical Motion in Seventeenth-Century
Theoretical Musical Discourse

Seventeenth-century conceptions of sympathetic resonance and its foundational assumption
of the harmonious nature of the soul were functionally underpinned by Aristotelian and other Greek
philosophical notions of how music moved audiences.1
Despite the rapidly growing development of
new scientific understanding and the related discussions of the nature of physics and metaphysics,
these classical philosophical underpinnings—chiefly Greek modes of understanding the relation of
music to psychology and ethics—remained an important set of assumptions that continued to guide
musical thought throughout the era. In particular, Aristotle’s basic view of art as a fundamentally
mimetic or imitative activity led thinkers to speculate about the means and mechanisms by which
music made its connection with the body and soul. Somehow, it seemed, music, dance, and all
artistic activity resembled human life, and somehow, music represented essential features of inner
human nature, but how did it achieve these results? How were the basic musical materials of rhythm,
melody, and harmony able to convey to auditors something basic about human existence?
Many seventeenth-century thinkers wrestled over the difficulty of finding satisfying
explanations. Thomas Wright, for instance, elaborated upon his curiosity in his Passions of the Minde in
Generall:
1 Roger Mathew Grant, who traces Cartesian and Spinozist views of the passions and their influence on eighteenthcentury aesthetic debates, claims that there “emerged a new and much overlooked stage in the Affektenlehre” wherein
“certain eighteenth-century music theorists began to posit a mode whereby music aroused affect in listeners through
sympathetic resonance.” Grant claims that such views culminated in those of E. T. A. Hoffmann and other figures in
German romantic music aesthetics. “Music Lessons on Affect and Its Objects,” Representations 144, no. 1 (Fall 2018): 36.
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But to knit up this discourse, there remaineth a question to be answered, as difficult as any
whatsoever in all naturall or morall Phylosophy, viz. How musicke stirreth up these passions,
and moveth so mightily these affections? What hath the shaking or ratificiall [sic]2
crispling
of the ayre (which is in effect the substance of musicke) to doe with rousing up choller,
afflicting with melancholy, jubilating the heart with pleasure, elevating the soule with
devotion, alluring to lust, inducing to peace, exciting to compassion, inviting to
magninamitie?3
Especially interested in what “qualitie” enabled “simple single sounds and voices” to “worke such
wonders,” Wright understood the philosophical complexities implied by the simple question of how
music moves people. This question very quickly leads one to the problem of how exactly the soul
and the body are supposed to communicate or correspond. Attempting to supply a “science of the
spirit,” John Flavel’s Pneumatologia described his puzzlement over “how the Soul comes to
sympathize with the Body”—as if they were “the strings of two Musical Instruments”—as “a
wonderful Mystery, and a rare Secret.” According to Flavel, the fact that such sympathetic resonance
occurs “is plain and sensible to any man,” but “we know not how.”4
Many treatises and active
philosophical correspondences between early modern intellectuals pursued knowledge about the
soul and body—if it could be retrieved—and reveal how the question of music’s power was
connected to fundamental metaphysical questions of the day.
The need to know exactly how—by what causal mechanisms—music could move the body
and soul was further complicated by the even more intractable set of problems surrounding the
connection between mind and body themselves. Perhaps the most (in)famous consideration of the
mind’s interaction with the body in the early modern period can be found in the philosophical
writings of René Descartes. Descartes famously conjectured that the human person, being
2 Though this spelling has uncritically been reproduced by secondary sources, this seems to be a misprint of “artificiall,”
which can be found in the same context on the next page: “nothing else but a certaine artificiall shaking, crispling or
tickling of the ayre” (170). 3 Wright, Passions Of The minde, 168. 4 John Flavel, Pneumatologia. A Treatise Of the Soul of Man: Wherein The Divine Original, excellent and immortal Nature of the Soul
are opened; its Love and Inclination to the Body, with the necessity of its separation from it, considered and improved […] (London:
Printed for Francis Tyton, 1685), 138.
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composed of mind and body, was a composite of two distinct essences that did not mix. The body,
Descartes asserted, was a physical, non-thinking, extended5
, and material substance, while the mind
was a mental, thinking, non-extended, and intellectual soul. Crucially, he conceived of the soul as a
purely immaterial substance that had no physical properties whatsoever. A practical problem
therefore immediately arose for any application of a strictly dualist Cartesian framework in an
intellectual inquiry, especially when it concerned psychological phenomena that recognized the
immediacy of emotional experience as containing equal quantities of both mental and bodily
phenomena. Without being able to contemplate any mixing of material substance into intellect or
intellect into the physical world, Cartesians found themselves unable to make any connection
between mental and bodily states. Yet, practical observation of psychological phenomena demanded
that such connections be acknowledged and explained.6

Concerns over these issues were analyzed in great depth in the several correspondences
Descartes had with notable figures, such as Marin Mersenne, Queen Christina of Sweden, Princess
Elizabeth of Bohemia, and several others, each of whom questioned his fundamental premise
regarding the absolutely separate substantial nature of mind and body.7
In particular, the experience
of music was a troubling phenomenon that highlighted the vulnerabilities of the Cartesian paradigm.
Since sound was generally understood to be moving air, and the soul, according to Descartes, had
no physical properties, it seemed impossible to explain how the former could have any impact on
the latter. In the Cartesian paradigm, a purely physical substance could not interact at all with a
purely mental substance, as they were believed to possess no shared attributes. This inability to
5 “Extended” here effectively means “three-dimensional.” 6 Few philosophical issues have filled more pages than the so-called “mind/body problem.” As usual, considerations
regarding the nature of the intellect and its relation to material reality reach back to the earliest Greeks. For a helpful
recent study, see Marcelo D. Boeri, Yasuhira Y. Kanayama, and Jorge Mittelmann, eds., Soul and Mind in Greek Thought:
Psychological Issues in Plato and Aristotle (Cham, Switzerland: Springer International Publishing, 2018). 7 These correspondences are neatly collected in volume 3 of René Descartes, The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, 3 vols.,
trans. John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff, Dugald Murdoch, and Anthony Kenny (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1991).
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explain interactions between physical and mental phenomena was patently limiting when attempting
to account for music’s impact on the attitudes and behaviors of listeners.
As a result, many musical thinkers continued to draw upon longstanding Aristotelian ideas
when explaining musical phenomena, adopting non-Cartesian approaches to explaining music’s
effects on the humors and passions. In particular, the idea of mimesis, as put forth by Aristotle, had
especially strong purchase upon their lines of reasoning. Although present-day interpretations of
Aristotelian mimesis conceive of representation as largely symbolic, many seventeenth-century
thinkers conceptualized music as a mimesis that operated by direct, active movement upon human
bodies to produce effects in the mind. Specifically, their accounts often involved an active, external
sonic agent in music shaping—via the body—a fundamentally receptive and attuned inner self or
soul. In this chapter, I analyze and present five key elaborations of these non-Cartesian, Aristotelian
explanations of music’s effects on the emotions. Although no one explanation is fully satisfying on
its own, together they begin to present a more complete picture of how thinkers and musicians of
the long seventeenth century conceived of music’s direct, physical ability to move the body and
emotions. One could say that, across the discourse, there was indeed a kind of completeness to the
philosophical framework that emerged, and that even though no one thinker may have articulated it
in its entirety, the consistent uses of its various parts across the artistic field led to a relatively regular
sense of how the connection between music, body, and feeling took place. I conclude the chapter
with a discussion of how this philosophical framework illuminates the strong connections between
music and virtue in the seventeenth century. But before I embark on the analyses, I first offer some
background on how Aristotle’s mimetic theory continued to hold sway in the face of the Cartesian
problematic.

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Cartesian Duality versus Aristotle’s Mimesis
Descartes’s ideas stimulated discussion of key philosophical problems surrounding the
attempt to understand the world through mechanical principles. One especially important center of
such inquiry was a group of English intellectuals who spent the interregnum in self-imposed exile,
mainly in Paris. Through the patronage of William Cavendish, English philosophers Thomas
Hobbes, Sir Kenelm Digby, Walter Charleton, and others traveled in his entourage and connected
with prominent French thinkers such as Pierre Gassendi, Marin Mersenne, and René Descartes. A
figure central to this intellectual society was Lady Margaret Cavendish, who met William Cavendish
in France where she served as lady-in-waiting to exiled Queen Henrietta Maria. A prolific writer in a
broad variety of subjects, Margaret Cavendish wrote extensively on philosophical problems raised by
new scientific understanding, publishing several works on the subject in the 1660s.8
Other important
English figures who discussed issues surrounding the new mechanical philosophy were the
“Cambridge Platonists,” including Henry More and Ralph Cudworth, who directly engaged with
Cartesian philosophy, and focused specifically on the metaphysical insufficiencies of Descartes’s
ideas.9
Royal Society members Lord William Brouncker and John Wallis, on the other hand, focused
on Descartes’s mathematical theories, specifically his analytical geometry and its application to optics
and planetary motion.10 Beyond circulation among such philosophical elites, Descartes’s writings
8 The last few decades have seen a massive surge of publications on Margaret Cavendish. For a useful collection of some
of her philosophical writings, see David Cunning, Margaret Cavendish: Essential Writings (New York: Oxford University
Press, 2019). For a single-volume study focusing on the specifics of Cavendish’s metaphysical views, see Lisa T.
Sarasohn, The Natural Philosophy of Margaret Cavendish: Reason and Fancy during the Scientific Revolution (Baltimore, MD: Johns
Hopkins University Press, 2010). 9 For a discussion of the issues involved in More’s complicated relationship to Cartesian philosophy, see John Henry, “A
Cambridge Platonist’s Materialism: Henry More and the Concept of Soul,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 49,
no. 1 (1986): 172–95. 10 Thomas Thomson’s 1812 account of the founding of the society has been recently reprinted as History of the Royal
Society: From Its Institution to the End of the Eighteenth Century (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011). For the
influence of Cartesian thought on members of the Royal Society, see Angus Armitage, “René Descartes (1596-1650) and
the Early Royal Society,” Notes and Records of the Royal Society of London 8, no. 1 (1950): 1–19. For a discussion of the
influence of music on the early proceedings of the Royal Society, see Katherine Butler, “Myth, Science, and the Power of
Music in the Early Decades of the Royal Society,” Journal of the History of Ideas 76, no. 1 (2015): 47–68 .
65

also became widely known with more popular audiences. In one of his diary entries, Samuel Pepys
expresses his intention to purchase Descartes’s Compendium Musicae as well as his excitement at the
prospect.11
Especially relevant to this chapter is the impact Descartes had upon Roger North, who
studied Cartesian philosophy as an undergraduate at Cambridge in the 1660s and commented
afterward on the strong impact it left upon him. In particular, North seemed to have been inspired
by Descartes’s “Discourse on Method,” specifically its demands for epistemological rigor and
metaphysical parsimony.12 Although North expressed wariness and acknowledged the danger of an
overly radical skepticism, he was galvanized by Descartes’s goal of methodological reductionism,
which persuaded North of the usefulness of reducing all physical events to pure mechanical action.
“My great aim hath been at a system of nature,” North wrote, “upon the Cartesian or rather
mechanical principles, believing all the common phenomena of nature might be resolved into
them.”13 Of the common phenomena to which the Cartesian method could be applied, nothing
seemed to interest North as much as music and understanding its inner workings in the mind; yet,
headway in this very inquiry seemed to elude the mechanical, reductionist explanatory model that
Descartes provided. Like many of Descartes’s interlocutors, North was especially puzzled by exactly
how external, physical causes transformed into internal psychological effects, a problem that he
articulated as that of the relation of psychological experiences to material causation. “The active caus
[sic] is no other than pure percussion of the air upon the auricular membrane; whence then proceeds
11 Pepys reports his purchase of the volume in his diary entry for April 3, 1668. “Friday 3 April 1668,” in The Diary of
Samuel Pepys: Daily Entries from the 17th Century London Diary, https://www.pepysdiary.com/diary/1668/04/03/. On
Christmas Day of that same year, however, Pepys wrote after listening to a reading aloud of Descartes’s Compendium
Musicae: “I understand not, nor think he did well that writ it, though a most learned man.” “Friday 25 December 1668,”
in Diary of Samuel Pepys, https://www.pepysdiary.com/diary/1668/12/25/. 12 These details are discussed by John Wilson in Roger North, Roger North on Music: Being a Selection from His Essays Written
during the Years c. 1695–1728, transcr. and ed. John Wilson (London: Novello, 1959), xvi. 13 Roger North, The Autobiography of the Hon. Roger North (London: David Nutt, 1877), 21.
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the passions of the mind?” he asked.14 In other words, he wondered, how could a material account
of aural phenomena explain how they gave rise to sensations and emotions?
Thomas Wright and Francis Bacon had puzzled over the same thing a century prior, but
scientific investigation had made little progress on human psychology in the meantime. And while
Descartes’s provocative writings led to advancements in mathematics and the material sciences, his
metaphysical accounts of God and the human soul—the latter being the concept through which
human psychology was typically examined—remained riddled with logical problems and left many
intellectuals unsatisfied. While advancements in the material sciences successfully replaced
Aristotelian physics of act and potential, there was continued engagement with Aristotle in several
other aspects of philosophy, most importantly his account of human psychology and the nature of
the soul as a kind of material object. These aspects of Aristotelian philosophy, although ignored by
common textbook-level accounts of the early modern period, remained a compelling set of
explanations for many thinkers throughout the seventeenth century. The Aristotelian tradition of
stitching together art, psychology, and ethics in a continuous and connected braid remained in the
consciousness of many commentators, who went on to provide their own accounts of music and its
relationship to human thought and behavior based on these premises. In particular, Aristotle’s
account of art and music as fundamentally mimetic activity was a core concept in the aesthetic
perspectives of many early modern intellectuals.
This area of discourse was especially related to the question of how material phenomena
gave rise to psychological effects, because the Aristotelian mimetic account of art turned on the
ability of sound and movement to provoke intellectual states in an immediate chain of cause and
effect. For early modern Aristotelians, music received its power from being made of the same
14 Roger North, Roger North’s “The musicall grammarian,” 1728, ed. Mary Chan and Jamie C. Kassler (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1990), 95.
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movements that composed the human intellect. Music somehow mirrored mind, and the soul was
the kind of thing that could somehow be harmonious, sympathetic, consonant, or their opposites.
Present-day scholarly discussions of musical expression and interpretation often do not engage
directly with such original Greek philosophical definitions of the word mimesis, which Aristotle uses
in his Poetics to describe the fundamental purpose of the arts. Usually translated in scholarly writings
today as “imitation,” contemporary discussions of mimesis often understand the concept to apply to
the mimicry of bird sounds, sonic descriptions of water, and other devices of so-called “word
painting.”
A prime example can be found in Richard Taruskin’s expansive Oxford History of Western
Music.
15 In the course of his discussion of “Concerti Madrigaleschi,” Taruskin presents Vivaldi’s Le
quattro stagioni (“The four seasons”) and its musical of imitations of nature as exemplars of what he
calls a “representative style.” “As a look at the first movement of La primavera will show,” he says,
“the concerto form, with its constant and fluid components, proved easy to adapt to illustrative or
narrative purposes.” He then adds a parenthetical comment to frame the ensuing discussion: “From
here on we can use the literary critic’s word mimesis—Greek for “imitation”—to encompass the
gamut of illustrative or narrative functions.” Taruskin’s attribution of mimesis to the field of literary
criticism illustrates the degree to which the concept has been disconnected from Aristotle’s theories
in musicological discourse about the seventeenth century. In particular, his restriction of the mimetic
to “illustrative or narrative purposes” is a much more superficial interpretation of the idea of
mimesis to which seventeenth-century Aristotelians subscribed. For seventeenth-century
Aristotelians, all music was, at all times, substantially involved in the representation or imitation of
human inner emotional response states. Far from being a simple pictorialism or madrigalistic word
15 Richard Taruskin, Music in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries, vol. 2 of The Oxford History of Western Music (New York:
Oxford University Press, 2010), 227.
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painting, Aristotelian mimesis was much broader and expansive in its significance, as it was an
assertion of music’s fundamental identity as a representation of emotions—not just to superficially
mimic certain ideas or feelings at certain times by choice, but rather to deeply imitate, in its every
move, the inner emotional states of listeners. It was a basic theory of how music could move
listeners at all. In some of Aristotle’s classic examples, he offers “fear and courage” as prime
instances of the sorts of inner human emotional states that are commonly represented and
articulated by music.
Claude Palisca, the renowned historian of baroque music, adopts a similarly superficial
interpretation of mimesis in his monumental essay “Theories of the Affections and Imitation,”
which offers a comprehensive account of Italian, Spanish, and English discourses on the relationship
between the music and the passions from the early 1500s through the end of the seventeenth
century.16 Even though Palisca explains that the Latin passio is a translation of the Greek pathos,
which he defines as “something a person feels as a passive subject,” he nonetheless conceptualizes
representation—the mechanism that produces passions—as an aesthetic interpretive hermeneutic
that listeners in the seventeenth century could choose to adopt.17 He points out, for instance, that by
the later eighteenth century, French figures such as Michel-Paul Guy de Chabanon denied that music
was representative, arguing that music could be enjoyed on its own terms and for itself alone. To
Palisca, Chabanon’s aesthetic turn signaled the end of the era that conceived of music as imitative.
Despite Palisca’s awareness of the Greek roots of the idea of the passions, then, his
conceptualization of representation was still based on a superficial understanding of mimesis as
merely a way of listening that listeners could use—or not use—to interpret music (or that
composers could use or not use as a compositional tool).
16 Claude V. Palisca, “Theories of the Affections and Imitation,” in Music and Ideas in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries,
179-202 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2006). 17 Palisca, “Theories of the Affections,” 181.
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Such an interpretation of mimesis causes problems when we try to understand how
seventeenth-century thinkers saw music as related to morals or virtues. This becomes more evident
if we look at another example from Taruskin’s Oxford History of Western Music. Discussing Vivaldi’s
compositional approach in The Four Seasons, Taruskin claims that it “takes us back to a venerable
“trope,” or mimetic convention, whereby water is evoked by means of a rising-and-falling contour.”
He goes on to point out:
The technical name for this trope is metonymy, the representation of an object through one of
its attributes. Such effects were a stock device for “word painting” in sixteenth century
madrigals, and “madrigalism” would not be a bad term to use to characterize Vivaldi’s
mimetic devices as well, despite the transfer to the instrumental medium.18
While metonymical word painting and madrigalisms were certainly important compositional devices
during the long seventeenth century, the assumption that such devices constitute the whole of
representation obscures the fuller way in which mimesis was seen as pervading all musical
expression, whether it was using such devices in any given moment or not. Madrigalisms and word
painting are not enough to account for how seventeenth-century thinkers saw the passions as
bearing a direct relation, correspondence, and connection to behavior, character, and moral life, and
how they thought this could take place in music. For seventeenth-century thinkers, this connection
did not occur by some kind of poetic imagination; rather, music transmitted its powers in a direct,
material, causal manner. For Aristotelians of the age, music did not shape a person merely through
rational reflection. Instead, it possessed the ability to transform in a more basic manner, as a kind of
assault on the senses that was able to affect not only the musically literate elite who understood
compositional conventions and clever techniques, but also animals and children. Conceived in this
manner, music connected directly to the Aristotelian conception of rhetoric, which held persuasion
as its central goal. Since thinkers of the seventeenth century saw music itself as motion, they also
18 Taruskin, Music in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries, 229.
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understood it to possess the ability to move others precisely due to its mimetic or representative
ways of functioning. This connection to persuasion was the key link between music and ethos—
notions of ethics, character, and morality. If music truly possessed such persuasive power over
people, their emotions, and their character, it followed that music had a kind of moral potency that
could be used for good or ill.
Scholars have not been entirely unaware, however, of the import of Aristotelian ideas of
mimesis in the long seventeenth century. Although titans Palisca and Taruskin miss some of the
magnitude of Aristotle’s mimetic theory, Herbert M. Schueller’s 1948 essay “‘Imitation’ and
‘Expression’ in British Music Criticism in the 18th Century” articulates key connections between
these concepts in the eighteenth century and the ideas of Plato and Aristotle. “No doctrine has had
greater vogue in the history of esthetic theory than that of imitation,” says Schueller in the opening
line of his essay.19 He quotes Plato’s Laws as suggesting that “music imitates the characters of men,”
and cites Aristotle’s claim in the Politics that rhythms and melodies are able to convey “realistic
imitations of anger and mildness, as well as of courage, temperance, and their opposites.”20 He also
notes that Aristotle thought rhythmic movements “bear a close resemblance to movements in the
soul.”21 Importantly, Schueller connects these ideas to those of English figures such as Thomas
Hobbes and Daniel Webb, who both shared the view that rhythms resemble inner states. Moreover,
Schueller observes that Charles Avison claimed, as late as 1752, that musical imitation succeeds
when hearers recognize a “Similitude between the Sounds and the Things which they describe”—
“Things” here referring to psychological states such as the passions.22 Schueller therefore shows that
19 Herbert M. Schueller, “‘Imitation’ and ‘Expression’ in British Music Criticism in the 18th Century,” Musical Quarterly
34, no. 4 (October 1, 1948): 544.
20 Schueller, “‘Imitation’ and ‘Expression,’” 555. 21 Schueller, “‘Imitation’ and ‘Expression,’” 555. 22 Schueller, “‘Imitation’ and ‘Expression,’” 550.
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the deep mimetic view of music’s effects persisted well into the eighteenth century, and that it
formed a rich tradition in English musical discourse.
As the following section will show, early modern thinkers understood Aristotle’s mimetic
theory as a fundamental explanation of how all music worked, not just specific ornamental instances
of “word painting” or madrigalisms intended as clever compositional devices. Importantly, instances
of mimesis were not considered to be perceived via purely intellectual, rational judgments of music,
but rather as connected directly to emotional and bodily responses to music. Correspondingly, music
was thought to be successful when it transported the listener from one state of passion to another,
setting listeners’ bodies into sympathetic, analogical internal motions. Moreover, as I will explore
further in chapter 3, since thinkers who shared this concept of musical mimesis believed that all
music of every sort was necessarily representative of the passions, their judgments about what made
music better or worse were always connected to judgments of how effective composers or
performers were at achieving or conveying such passions.
Theories of Causal Relation between Music and the Passions
Long before the popularity of Descartes, many early modern thinkers did not regard the soul
as a purely immaterial substance. In the 1580s, for instance, John Case reinvigorated an Aristotelian
conception of the soul as something intrinsically defined by movement and common to all living,
self-moving, animate beings.23 A few generations later, Margaret Cavendish articulated several
reasons for her disagreement with immaterialist conceptions of the soul in her interactions with the
23 As usual, such viewpoints have predecessors reaching into ancient thought, and the definition of the soul as that
which causes motion can be found as early as Thales, one of the earliest Greek philosophers. Aristotle reports that
“Thales, too, to judge from what is recorded about him seems to have held soul to be a motive force, since he said that
the magnet has a soul in it because it moves the iron.” Aristotle, On the Soul, trans. J. A. Smith, in The Complete Works of
Aristotle: The Revised Oxford Translation, ed. Jonathan Barnes, 1:641-92 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995),
405a19.
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thought of Descartes, Mersenne, and in conversation with other visitors to her salon. She concluded,
like Case, that the soul somehow existed most fundamentally as a kind of movement.24 The
following section of this chapter articulates how such motion-based theories of the soul, mind,
senses, passions, sound, and music were thought to form a transformational chain that made a
strong impact on inner human character. The five subheadings below present several types of
general theories of the basic mechanics of music and sound and their relation to emotion and
character found in early modern English writings. When such thinkers conceive of the relationships
between rhythm, the body, and the passions, they lean heavily on Greek philosophical predecessors
for their ideas. Charting these theories uncovers widely shared conceptions of the nature of musical
communication and its connection to the movements and rhythms of embodied human existence.
1. Theoretical Foundations: Music as the Motion of Air
Empirical proof that sound was the motion of the medium of air did not come until the
mid-seventeenth century with Robert Boyle, who used Evangelista Torricelli’s 1643 invention of a
vacuum chamber to carry out experiments on sounds (and other objects such as gases, insects, and
plants). In 1660, Boyle published a compendium of these vacuum-chamber experiments under the
title New Experiments Physico-Mechanical, Touching the Spring of the Air, and Its Effect in which he carefully
described his procedures and detailed observed results.25 It was the silent jingling of bells inside an
air-pumped vacuum chamber that indubitably demonstrated the nature of sound to be, in fact,
moving air.
24 Specific details of her view are discussed in Jay Stevenson, “The Mechanist-Vitalist Soul of Margaret Cavendish.”
Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900 36, no. 3 (1996): 527–43. 25 Robert Boyle, New Experiments Physico-Mechanical, Touching The Spring of the Air, and its Effects, Made, for the most part, in a
New Pnuematical Engine […] (London: Printed by Miles Flesher for Richard Davis, 1682).
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But, long before it was proven empirically, many thinkers conceived of sound as moving air.
In the late sixteenth century, Oxford Aristotelian philosopher John Case’s Apologia musices, tam vocalis
quam instrumentalis et mixtae (1588) described music as “in aure per motu aeris recipti,” or “being
received into the ear by the motion of air.”26 This echoed Aristotle himself, who suggested in De
Anima that sound was the movement of air.27 In addition, according to Aristotelian metaphysics, the
essence of the soul (anima) was its motion. Case therefore argued that, since music entered the soul
through the ear by motion, so the soul received new motions that altered its direction, resulting in
“new humors of the body, new affections of the mind, new manners and actions, and an entire new
man.”28 Furthermore, for Case, the connection between soul and body was itself constituted of air;
as such, it was the motion of air—music—that possessed properties that acted on the psyche. Sonic
motions were seen as literally imbued with properties that impressed similar corresponding
affections upon human internal motions.
Notably, because air was seen as being able to operate on the psyche (soul), the soul itself
was also seen as composed of some kind of airy substance, resulting in the claim that music and the
soul were somehow themselves consubstantial. This was quite contrary to Cartesian thought, which
famously claimed that the soul was an immaterial substance that shared no common attribute or
property with the physical/material world. This concept of the soul as physically substantive and
possessing the means of motion was fundamental to seventeenth-century thinkers’ ability to explain
the harmoniousness of the soul. In particular, it allowed them to explain the soul itself as composed
of parts that could move in certain ways, some of which might be harmonious or discordant with
other parts, and that might harmonize with one another or not. In a Cartesian worldview, the idea of
26 Case, Apologia Musices. 27 Aristotle, On the Soul, trans. J. A. Smith, 420a27-b5. “What has the power of producing sound is what has the power of
setting in movement a single mass of air which is continuous from the impinging body up to the organ of hearing.”
28 Case, Apologia Musices. The original reads: “Facile penetret, audientisque affectum novo affect impresso, phantasiam
nova phantasia, animumque totu quasi novo ingress animo moveat et afficiat.”
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harmoniousness was a mere metaphor, but for many seventeenth-century thinkers, the
harmoniousness of the soul was conceived of in a much more material, concrete, physical, and
substantial manner.
2. Nascent Theories of Movement and the Soul: Dynamics of Heating and Cooling, Stirring and Stilling, etc., in the
Elements of Fire, Earth, Water, and Air
In both ancient Greek thought and well into modern times, thinkers have tended to resort to
the use of metaphor to capture the full implications of such an abstract and tangled notion as the
soul and its causal relations. Writers have felt compelled to describe the soul by analogy to elemental
forces that they thought somehow captured its essential nature or activity. Thus, the explanatory use
of imagery connected to fire, water, and air, which can be traced back to Greek elemental theory,
regularly finds its way into early modern accounts of the soul. Such accounts supply connections
between mind and world through the physical oppositions of heating and cooling, stirring and
stilling, swelling and reducing, and many similar antinomies found throughout the material world.
Conceptions of the soul as a fiery substance can often be found in the context of religious
discussions, such as those of nonconformist minister Edmund Calamy the Elder (1600–1666), who
published a collection of sermons entitled The Art of Divine Meditation in which the soul was
conceived as a pair of bellows. The purpose of divine meditation, he argued, was to “help you to get
your affections warmed and heated by the things you meditate upon; for the work of the
understanding is nothing else but to be as a Divine pair of bellows, to kindle and inflame the heart
and affections.”29 Like the air that fills the metaphorical bellows, the fire that the bellows fuel is able
to move one’s passions, which it does by heating them. Accounts such as this, while highly
29 Edmund Calamy, The Art of Divine Meditation (London: Printed for Thomas Parkhurst, 1680), 189-190.
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poeticized, leave the impression that the activity of the soul is a kind of heating, implying a certain
liveliness or increase of activity.
Besides fire, Ancient Greek philosophers and seventeenth-century intellectuals also leaned at
times on conceptions of mental action that used analogies to earth, typically comparing memory to a
kind of tablet or malleable substance upon which memories could be written. Most familiar to
readers is likely John Locke’s well-known image of the mind being a tabula rasa, or blank slate, upon
which experience writes. What is less commonly known is that such imagery stretches back into
Plato’s writings. In his dialogue Theaetetus, Plato conceives of the mind as a block of wax that is
“harder in some, softer in others, and sometimes of just the right consistency.”30 Since, for Plato and
Locke, the human mind is a kind of semi-solid object upon which impressions may be written and
retained, one’s memory can therefore be more or less resistant to being carved with grooves,
channels, and indentations, just as the earth, being of varying levels of pliability, can be easier or
harder to dig into. Once again, there is the ideal of a mean between two opposite poles, where being
of “just the right consistency” is desirable.
Attempting to understand the soul with recourse to basic elemental substances can be traced
back into ancient philosophical thought in other important ways. Water, especially, was used by the
Stoics to explain the movements of the soul. Epictetus, a Roman former slave who composed witty
aphorisms and pithy wisdom sayings in the Stoic tradition, compared the soul to a vessel of water:
“The soul is like a vase filled with water; while the semblances of things fall like rays upon its
surface. If the water is moved, the ray will seem to be moved likewise, though it is in reality without
motion.”31 Here, Epictetus places the action in terms of stillness and disturbance, echoing the
30 Plato, Theaetetus, trans. F. M. Cornford, in The Collected Dialogues of Plato Including the Letters, ed. Edith Hamilton and
Huntington Cairns, 845-919 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989), 191d. 31 Epictetus, Discourses, trans. Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Perseus Digital Library (website), Tufts University,
http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/collection?collection=Perseus:collection:Greco-Roman, bk. 3, in the discourse
“What is the chief concern of a good man; and in what we chiefly ought to train ourselves?,” 2017.
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traditional Stoic value of inner tranquility and freedom from disturbing tremors of the passions. Of
course, the important connection for the purposes of this thesis is his reduction of the soul’s action
to basic contrary motions. Although I was not able to find direct uses of this analogy for
understanding the soul in the long seventeenth century, thinkers of the time were aware of how
water could be a conduit for sound. Isaac Vossius noted, for instance, only a few short years after
Robert Hooke’s experiment with air:
People commonly think sound is vibration of air, and conclude this especially from the
argument that in the absence of air no sound is heard. But the weakness of this argument
can be inferred from the fact that sound is heard and heard forcefully under water, where
there is no air. Therefore, you would be more correct if you say that sound is vibration or
movement of bodies themselves when they are struck. But since motion or vibration is not
perceptible unless there is another medium which receives that vibration, it is therefore
necessary that air, or water, or a similar body capable of motion be present.32

Regardless of the medium, musical motions were considered to be translated through an
intermediary substance, which itself transfers its motion to the soul, causing new internal
movements, and thus, new ideas, thoughts, and sensations that were not present before being
activated by an external motive force. Mimetic transfers from music through moving substance to
the soul thus only become possible when the soul is the kind of thing that shares common attributes
and properties with the rest of the moving world. Such material conceptions of the mind and soul
via the four basic elements of nature are clearly at odds with the Cartesian view that the soul has no
physical properties. However, while fiery images of heating and cooling, liquid metaphors of stirring
and stilling, earthly models of too much resistance or too little, airy conceptions of expansion and
contraction, and the like, do not correspond to the requirement of Cartesian immateriality, they do
share something more primitive with Descartes’s conception of reality, namely the reduction of all
phenomena to mechanistic operations. Imagining inner mental action in terms of such motion,
change, agitation, and disturbance served as a basic framework for understanding how the soul
32 Vossius, De poematum cantu, 66.
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operated, and music was conceived as something that itself operated on the soul in precisely the
same way. The character of each mental state and its corresponding musical experience were
explained by recourse to these states of motion, which were conceived as titrations between binary
oppositions. Conceiving of passions or affections in terms of basic directional orientation remained
part of the common discourse of music and the passions throughout the long seventeenth century.
Because music was believed to be such an effective means of moving the passions, the value of
music itself became discussed in terms of how effective it was at accomplishing such movement and,
ideally, achieving certain desired internal states. As we have seen, music criticism of the time often
specifically addressed music as a potent force which possessed the power to calm or excite, make
tranquil or agitated, and so on.
An especially popular analogy for the operations of the soul in the seventeenth century, as it
turns out, was comparison of the soul to a wide variety of musical instruments and their operations.
For example, Jacob Böhme used fiery language when describing the soul but took it one step further
and, adding metaphor upon metaphor, also conceived of the soul as a kind of musical instrument.
As he wrote in the preface to Teutonicus philosophus,
so also our minde is an Organ, or Instrument; but it Sounds onely according to the Tune,
and Note, of that Spirit, that doth possesse and act it: And we doe convert, and assimulate
all things according to that Spirit, and will that is ruling, and predominant in us; and therein
the minde, thoughts, and sences, are enkindled, and enflamed.33
Despite the more complicated appearance of such analogies, they often remained dependent upon
more primary causal relationships between basic substances. Böhme’s suggestion that the mind
could be “enkindled and enflamed” leaned on fiery imagery in order to describe the inner working
relationship of mental activity.
33 Böhme, Epistles [Teutonicus philosophus], A3.
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Nonetheless, despite the many comparisons to the elements, images of the soul and mind in
the early modern period were often of technological innovations or other mechanical devices, and
musical instruments presented themselves as an especially fertile analogy. Various intellectual and
sensitive functions of the soul, for instance, were conceived in terms of the parts and operations of
instrument families: strings, winds, pipe organs, drums, and the like, each kind being used to
demonstrate different aspects of psychological and sensory functioning. Strings operated by
vibration, whether plucked, bowed, or hammered; winds and organs manipulated a column of
moving air; and drums, like the eardrum, were a stretched membrane onto which various motions
could be transmitted by different strikes and impacts. Each family of instruments thus functions
mechanically in its own way, each receiving its sounding properties through the transfer of basic
motions from one part of a system to another. Such mimetic analogies—where one part of a system
mimics another in its motion—provided seventeenth-century thinkers with robust imagery that
offered novel explanations of and insights into mental operation.
In her work Inner Music: Hobbes, Hooke, and North on Internal Character, Jamie Kassler explores
how early modern thinkers used specifically musical models to understand mental structure.34 Each
with its own variations on the physical workings of the mind, the musical models of Hobbes,
Hooke, and North span nearly a hundred years, but share many important characteristics. Kassler
succinctly summarizes the view of Hobbes, who “conceived internal character to be a bundle of
musical strings to be slackened and tightened by paideia.”35 This imagery harkens directly back to
claims made by Plato and Aristotle, who likewise conceived of the soul as a substance that is
adjusted and attuned by paideia (παιδεία), which is the Greek term for education or learning. In the
34 See especially Jamie Croy Kassler, Inner Music: Hobbes, Hooke, and North on Internal Character (London: Athlone, 1995),
chap. 1. Kassler suggests that the above figures functioned as important predecessors of several eighteenth-century
French intellectuals, arguing that mechanical conceptions of thought were central to the philosophies of Diderot,
d’Alembert, and Rousseau, among others.
35 Kassler, Inner Music, 51.
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Republic, for instance, Plato discussed the balancing of physical and musical education, comparing
this kind of management of the inner self to the tuning of a stringed instrument. In order to find the
appropriate ratio of physical to musical education, Plato says in Book III, the two “may be relaxed
or drawn tighter until they are duly harmonized”36; or, in the words of another translation, they
“might be harmonized with one another by being stretched and relaxed to the appropriate degree.”37
The stringed-instrument imagery persuasively suggests a tuning or harmonizing of the self to an
appropriate middle position between extremes, evoking Aristotle’s ethical framework where every
virtue lies at the mean between vices on either end. The musical-instrument analogy therefore served
as a framework for imagining how the soul might be properly adjusted to achieve harmonious
intermediate states between vices on either side.
In Book IV of The Republic, Plato elaborates on the same topic, taking the musical analogy
further so that it goes beyond the instrument to the music itself. Musical and physical training
become “concordant,” he argues, as they together contribute to “tightening and nurturing the
[intellect] with fine words and learning, while relaxing, soothing, and making gentle the [passions] by
means of harmony and rhythm.”38 For Plato, the fact that a person’s inner character was itself a
mechanism of tension and relaxation connected it to the performance of music, which, being an
engagement with harmony and rhythm, allowed for movement between pairs of conflictual
properties such as dissonant-consonant, rough-smooth, tense-relaxed, and the like. Since the
virtuous state was achieved by moderating and balancing inner characteristics through a kind of
deliberate tensing and relaxing of mental musculature, music itself was seen as a calisthenic tool for
achieving increased and decreased levels of tension in the “strings” of the soul.
36 Plato, The Republic, trans. Benjamin Jowett, The Internet Classics Archive (website), Massachusetts Institute of
Technology, https://classics.mit.edu/Plato/republic.html, 411e. 37 Plato, The Republic, trans. C. D. C. Reeve (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2004), 411e. 38 Plato, Republic, trans. C. D. C. Reeve, 442a.
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The musical instrument, which functioned as a clearly material, substantial embodiment of
music’s properties, was a persuasive way for Plato and Aristotle—as well as seventeenth-century
writers such as Böhme—to express the mechanical aspects of the soul’s movements as musical
movements, creating an easier conceptual path to thinking of music as something that affected the
soul. Plato’s likening of musical education to the calisthenics of physical education is also telling in
how it conceived of music as a connection between the soul and the body. In other words, the
classical Greek philosophical conception of music—and the early modern thought that took after
it—were more than just theories of music; they were theories that explained how the soul could be
connected to the body at all. As can be seen in the Pneumatologia of Presbyterian clergyman and
prolific author John Flavel (c. 1627–1691), analogies to musical instruments were employed to do
the explaining: “The Soul and Body are as the strings of two Musical Instruments, set exactly at one
height, if one be touched, the other trembles. They laugh and cry, are sick and well together.”39
Flavel’s image borrowed from the findings of experiments run by members of the Royal Society,
which used the sympathetic vibration of lute strings to attempt to understand the mystery of action
at a distance. The theory of sympathetic resonance, which has been seen across most of the writings
we have encountered so far, was therefore more than just a curiosity of nature or an explanation of a
niche musical phenomenon; rather, it stood as the best scientific account of the relationship between
the soul and the body at the time. As Flavel noted, “This is a wonderful Mystery, and a rare Secret
(as a Learned Man observes), how the Soul comes to sympathize with the Body.… But that it doth
so, though we know not how, is plain and sensible to any Man.”40 And it was the theory of
sympathetic resonance that allowed Flavel and others to feel that they had insight into how music
39 Flavel, Pneumatologia, 138. 40 Flavel, Pneumatologia, 138.
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made its mysterious connection between the inner world of the soul and an external world of bodily,
material activity.
3. Theoretical Integrations with Music: Rhythm as the Imitation of Bodily and Emotional Processes in Music
Beyond the movement of imagined substances in the body, theories of music’s mental and
emotional effects greatly emphasized the importance of correspondence between musical motion
and tangible, observable, physical bodily motion. For seventeenth-century theorists sympathetic to
Aristotelian accounts of the mimetic function of music, all human activities—character traits and
emotional states, each with its own accompanying individuated bodily movements—become
translatable into sound. Since bodily movements and human gestures were conceived as basically
rhythmic activities, this meant that rhythm itself could musically mirror human affections and
forcefully transmit the corresponding affective information back to the listener. The effectiveness of
rhythm as a mimetic transmitter of human experience is explained by Aristotle himself. Observing in
the Poetics that, “in the music of the flute and of the lyre” as well as “that of the shepherd’s pipe,”
“‘harmony’ and rhythm alone are employed,” Aristotle asserts that “in dancing, rhythm alone is used
without ‘harmony’; for even dancing imitates character, emotion, and action, by rhythmical
movement.”41 For Aristotle, bodily movements were rhetorical in the way they persuaded viewers of
certain feelings, meanings, and ideas through “rhythmical movement.” In particular, Aristotle
suggested, this happened because dancers imitated “character, emotion, and action” (“ἦθε καί πάθε
καί πράξεις”/“ethe, pathe, and praxein”), a mimesis that took place by shaping, forming, or
schematizing rhythms (“σχηματίζομενον ρυθμόν μιμούνται”/“schematizomenon rythmon
mimountai”).42
41 Aristotle, Poetics, ed. and trans. Stephen Halliwell, Loeb Classical Library 199 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 1995; reprint, 2005), 1447a22-30. 42 Greek text quoted from Aristotle, Poetics, ed. and trans. Halliwell, 1447a27.
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The primacy of rhythm in musical mimesis was observed and appreciated by many theorists
throughout the long seventeenth century. Locating the bulk of music’s rhetorical communicative
power in rhythm, they saw it as pointing to a fundamental truth of how musical meaning—or
effective mimesis in music—was achieved. Charles Burney, in his history of music composed in the
1770s, assumes the primacy of rhythm for moving the passions in his discussion of ancient Greek
modes. Burney conjectured, given the powers that the Greeks attributed to the modes’ abilities to
move the passions, that the Greek modes must have had some rhythmic component. “There must
have been other characteristic and strong-marked distinctions: as the kind of poetry to which the
music was set; the rhythm or measure; the nature of certain melodies invented and used by particular
nations,” Burney wrote in the section on Greek modes.43 Later, addressing ancient Greek concepts
of rhythm, Burney suggested that rhythm was “the principal point in their music, without which they
regarded melody as wholly unmeaning and lifeless…and that, without it, music can have no power
over the human passions.”44 Burney’s interpretations of Greek music greatly shaped how he
understood the music of the long seventeenth century. “In modern music,” he wrote, “a change of
key, without a change of time, is not sufficient to animate or depress the spirits much: measure must
occur as an auxiliary.”45
At the same time, few theorists believed that rhythm alone was what moved listeners in
music. Rather, most also included in their theory a central place for pitch, in both melodic and
harmonic terms. This perspective went back to the ancient Greek philosophers. As we saw earlier,
Aristotle, for instance, described dance as purely rhythmic, but music as containing both rhythm
(ρυθμός/rhythmos) and harmony (αρμονία/harmonia.) And while Aristotle implied that the medium of
dance showed how rhythm itself was sufficient to produce effective mimesis, in music specifically,
43 Burney, General History of Music, 1:61. 44 Burney, General History of Music, 1:71. 45 Burney, General History of Music, 1:61.
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both harmony and rhythm combine mimetically in order to produce a robust, emotionally charged,
and highly communicative musical rhetoric. The complicated interdependency of rhythmic and
harmonic relationships in terms of their mimetic force provided early modern thinkers with a
complicated series of difficulties to contemplate. Therefore, commentators attempted to untangle
similarities and differences between rhythm and pitch, supplying their own explanations of their
motive force. Roger North, for instance, differentiated sharply between rhythmic and harmonic
influences on people: “And so musick consists of harmony, and measure, which is called time. And
in effect, harmony works upon the thought, and the time upon the actions, of humane kind.”46
Perhaps swayed by a Cartesian dualistic mind-body paradigm, he assigned harmony a purely
intellectual function, and suggested that rhythm was somehow the primary catalyst for operating on
human “actions,” whatever those might turn out to be.
This interest in rhythm, however, revealed that there were mysteries yet to be unraveled
about how it functioned in musical mimesis. North’s concept of human “action,” for instance,
which rhythm was supposed to drive, remained a vague one. For Aristotle, the term usually
translated as “action” is πράξεις/praxeis, which suggests the English cognate “practice,” but what
exactly being motivated into action by music might entail is left to the reader’s imagination.
Although Aristotle makes many bold claims in the Politics, he notoriously stops short of giving much
attention to the details of how rhythm interacted with the body. Instead, he merely suggests that one
might understand the process from one’s own experience: “Rhythm and melody supply imitations of
anger and gentleness, also of courage and temperance, and of all the qualities contrary to these, and
of the other qualities of character, which hardly fall short of the actual affections, as we know from
our own experience, for in listening to such strains our souls undergo a change.”47 Unfortunately,
46 North, Roger North on Music, 119. 47 Aristotle, Politics, trans. Benjamin Jowett, in The Complete Works of Aristotle: The Revised Oxford Translation, ed. Jonathan
Barnes, 2:2126 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995), 1340a19-22.
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Aristotle’s treatise on music is lost, so beyond his cursory treatment of the subject in Politics, we
never see a full philosophical account of exactly how Aristotle might have worked through the details
regarding exactly how music was able to effectively imitate human affective states through both
rhythmic and melodic mimesis.
This gap in Aristotle’s own discussion led several early modern intellectuals to continue to
try to account for the mysterious relationship between musical rhythm and the passions. In the
1670s, Isaac Vossius offered a remarkable theory of musical rhythm in his De poematum cantu et viribus
rhythmi. A treatise popular in its own day among English thinkers, who read it in the original Latin,
(the treatise became available in English in 2023, when Peter Martens translated it as On the Music of
Poetry and Power of Rhythm), it was discussed by Burney in his history. Vossius, like Burney, felt that
some crucial understanding of how the power of music functioned had been lost since the ancient
Greeks, and for Burney, Vossius supplied that crucial link specifically in the realm of rhythm. As
previously mentioned in chapter 1, Burney wrote: “Isaac Vossius says it is now above a thousand
years since musicians have lost that great power over the affections, which arose only from the true
science and use of Rhythm.”48 Accordingly, Vossius opens his essay decrying the insipid nature of
modern melody and harkening back to a romanticized ancient music, which he claims outperformed
music of his own day in its ability to persuade and impassion listeners. Counting recitative among his
dislikes, he faults it for lack of repetition and symmetry, and for being “entirely devoid of rhythm,”
which, for Vossius, is “the spirit of song.”49 Having dispatched with his laments over the losses since
that bygone era, he then goes on to offer his own explanations of the nature of rhythmic meaning
and its connection to poetic meter.
48 Burney, General History of Music, 1:85. 49 Vossius, De poematum cantu, 23.
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Vossius’s theory is, at base, one that attributes psychological import to each of the poetic
feet. As he claims, the poetic feet communicate “not only visible movements of the body but also
hidden feelings and various habits of the soul.”50 Moreover, each of the feet possesses a distinct
“force and efficacy” by which they transfer these movements, feelings, and habits to listeners. For
example, the pyrrhic foot ( ˘ ˘ ) (short/short) “flies rather than flows” and “is suitable merely for
portraying rapid movements.” The spondee ( – – ) (long/long) conveys “a slow and noble gait” and
is employed for “serious and sacred subjects.” The iamb ( ˘ – ) (short/long) represents aggression
and force, being “not only fierce and warlike, but sharp and angry.” Diametrically opposed to the
iamb is the trochee ( – ˘ ) (long/short), which Vossius interprets as “completely frail and effeminate”
and suitable for expressing “gentle and amorous affects.”
Crucially, Vossius goes on to develop a rhythmic theory that then elaborates the musical and
psychological states of the poetic feet as sets of oppositional motions. For Vossius, the pyrrhic and
iambic feet tend to be correlated with similar energies: masculine, strengthening, rising, energizing,
and so on. The spondee and trochee, on the other hand, suggest the opposite: feminine, weakening,
falling, enervating, and so on. Thus, for Vossius, each foot conveys meaningful psychological
motion, seemingly based upon the relative length or brevity of its starting syllable (the pyrrhic and
iambic feet both beginning with a short syllable, and the spondee and trochee both beginning with a
long one). My review of his treatise suggests that he conceived of a wide variety of sets of
oppositional psychological movements or forces that the combining of poetic feet could move
between: energizing/enervating, strengthening/weakening, light/heavy, masculine/feminine,
wildness/nobility, disturbing/settling, arsis/thesis, rising/falling, excited/sluggish and the like. For
Vossius, the hearing of such elemental rhythmic motions was moving in the same way that bodily
acts of laughter, weeping, and yawning were affectively contagious. Accordingly, Vossius’s critique of
50 Vossius, De poematum cantu, 27.
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the weakness of modern music stemmed from the proliferation of ornamentation, which, in his
view, obscured the simple and elemental rhythms, making affective content unclear and the music
ultimately annoying rather than pleasing. Although Vossius’s criticism of modern music gave him a
reputation of being a cranky traditionalist, his broader appeal to antinomic motion was, as we have
seen, a commonplace in the long seventeenth century’s absorption of Plato’s elaborations of
Aristotle’s mimetic theory, which also blended well with the Cartesian penchant for binaries.51
Several other English figures seem to have been influenced by Vossius and shared his view
that, within this framework of oppositional motion, rhythmic structures were the primary
transmitters of emotional content. The poet John Dryden, for instance, demonstrated his affinity for
this basic theoretical orientation in the preface he wrote to the score of Albion and Albanius (1680),
an opera by Louis Grabu for which he had written the libretto. In the preface, he praises “the
Learned Monsieur Vossius” as an expert antiquarian and the most knowledgeable source on ancient
Greek music, and demonstrates familiarity with Vossian principles and methodology.52 Although he
does not attribute specific ideas to Vossius, he introduces the concept of rhythmus as a principle
uniting mathematics with the rhythmic feet of poetic verse and emphasizes the sound of words
themselves as the source of aesthetic power. He further claims that recitative is intrinsically
masculine, while arias “must abound in the softness and variety of Numbers,” showing the influence
of the oppositional psychological pairs presented by Vossius in De poematum cantu.
53
51 While not extensive, Vossius had some correspondence with Descartes and likely had personal interactions with him
while serving at the court of Queen Christina of Sweden. Descartes kept a much more extensive correspondence with
Mersenne, who himself was very clearly committed to the idea that poetic feet are the primary sources of affective
information. These ideas can be seen in Augustine, from whom Mersenne drew obvious influence. Such influences are
well traced in D. T. Mace, “Musical Humanism, the Doctrine of Rhythmus, and the Saint Cecilia Odes of Dryden,”
Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 27, no. 1 (January 1964): 251–292. 52 Dryden, Albion and Albanius: an opera. Perform’d at the Queens Theatre, in Dorset Garden. Written by Mr. Dryden (London:
Printed for Jacob Tonson, 1685).
53 Dryden, Albion and Albanius.
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Beyond vocal music, these ideas of rhythm’s primacy in music’s affective power also applied
to instrumental music and music in general. Burney, for instance, found it worthwhile to argue that
the affective power of the Greek modes was due not simply to their scalar pitch content, but rather,
and more importantly, to corresponding rhythmic characteristics that had once been attached to
each mode but had since been lost to modern musical understanding. He cites Teodato Osio’s
L’armonia del nudo parlare (1637) as one historical antecedent of his view, in which Osio postulates
that ancient modes are equivalent to poetic rhythmic figures such as spondee, trochee, iamb, etc.54
From there, Burney conjectured, “a change of mode would be a change of style and of measure,”
and “the names of the musical modes had much the same use as our technical terms, grazioso, grave,
allegro, con furia.”55 Mapping these modern Italian technical descriptive terms evocatively onto the
Greek modes, he muses that “mere modulation, though it has its effects, …can boast of none like
those said to have been operated by a change to the soft Lydian, or grave Dorian, to the furious
Phrygian.”56
Over half a century earlier, Roger North expressed sentiments similar to Burney’s when he
gave a vivid description of the affects of various new Italian expressive and tempo markings. First
excusing adagios for their rhythmic lack—“The Adagios are designed for pure and pute harmony, for
which reason measure of time is so little regarded in them”—he went on to give colorful accounts
of the rhythmic expressivity of the other terms:
The Grave comes neerer a sober conversation, and the Allegro light and chirping. The Tremolo
is fear and suspicion, the Andante is a walking about full of concerne, the Ricercata is a
searching about for somewhat out of the way; the Affectuoso is expostulating, or amour; and so
54 In his entry on Osio in The Cyclopaedia, Abraham Rees claims to have “procured this little book with great eagerness, in
hopes that we should find some acute and ingenious reflections on recitative,” but observes that the work “is written in
an obscure and mysterious style, bordering on pedantry; nor is it easy to say, after perusal, what is the author’s
intention.” The Cyclopaedia; or, Universal Dictionary of Arts, Sciences, and Literature (London: Printed for Longman, Hurst,
Rees, Orme, & Brown, 1819).
55 Burney, A General History of Music, 1:62. Italics in the original. 56 Burney, A General History of Music, 1:62. Italics in the original.
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every other manner, as masters are pleased to titule them, are but so many states of humane
life, as they have a fancy to represent or imitate.57
North’s descriptions leaned heavily on substantive connections between rhythmic properties and the
emotional moods of various “states of humane life.” For instance, the “chirping” quality of the
Allegro, invoking the sonic substance of bird song, suggested the tempo’s basic lightness, quickness,
and alertness, while the tremolo—being a kind of shaking or forceful, wide vibrato—seemed to
connect to substantive bodily manifestations of fear, such as a shaky voice, a jittery body, trembling
hands, and the like. At the end, importantly, North concluded that the fundamental task of music
was to “represent or imitate,” conveying his conscious commitment to a mimetic-theoretical
understanding of music’s essential function.
In the telling of the history of music, it is easy to overlook contributions of relatively minor
figures such as Isaac Vossius or Roger North, and common to emphasize Johann Mattheson
specifically and the German tradition generally of “Musica Poetica” (Figurenlehre) as early exemplars of
those seeking to account for music’s means of communicating. More broadly speaking, general
accounts of musical aesthetics often begin in the eighteenth century with, among others, Francis
Hutcheson’s 1725 publication An Inquiry into the Original of Our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue as a starting
point for English considerations of such matters.58 However, as this chapter has highlighted, the
contributions of later eighteenth-century authors such as Hutcheson, Harris, and Shaftesbury
emerge from an already simmering cauldron of discussion, dispute, and speculation spanning over a
century prior in figures ranging from Case to Cavendish. In particular, we have seen several
seventeenth-century neo-Aristotelian approaches to understanding the nature of music’s motive
forces, each of which emphasizes the ability of musical rhythms to affect the passions and traces
57 North, Roger North on Music, 123. 58 See, for example, Peter le Huray and James Day, eds., Music and Aesthetics in the Eighteenth and Early-Nineteenth Centuries
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981).
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such powers specifically to rhythmic movements that present affective states as being composed of
oppositional extremes that exert inner force on those who come into contact with music.
4. Theoretical Broadenings to the Mechanics of Musical Motion: The Sense of Opposite Motive Forces in All Musical
Elements
The conception of music, the passions, and human character in terms of such polar
oppositions, it should not be surprising to discover, reaches back to the Greeks and late antiquity. In
the third and fourth century of the common era, Aristides Quintilianus said that musical
compositions fundamentally differed in character (ethos) and that “we call one through which we
arouse mournful emotions ‘depressing,’ one through which we lift up the spirit ‘exalting,’ and one
through which we bring the soul round to peacefulness ‘intermediate.’”59 Unlike Vossius, who
sought to reduce music’s power to the oppositional movements of rhythm alone, Quintilianus
conceived of all aspects of music—of music as a whole—in oppositional terms. Interestingly, his
extreme poles of “exalting” and “depressing” with a calm, peaceful intermediate state suggested a
vertical movement orientation to these emotions: musical and human bodily movements each
transfer their energies in either an upward or downward direction. What Descartes and the early
moderns conceived as the “fast” emotions (namely joy, happiness, victory, etc.) Quintilianus
pictured as somehow basically upward, correlating with outwardness or expansion. By contrast, the
“slow” emotions (namely sadness, melancholy, defeat, etc.) he conceived as downward, correlating
with inwardness or contraction. Specifically, the word “depressing” is translated from Quintilianus’s
use of the word systaltikos, which connotes a genuine opposition to the concept of diastatikos, which
renowned historian of ancient Greek music Andrew Barker translates as “expanding.”
59 Andrew Barker, ed., Greek Musical Writings, vol. 2, Harmonic and Acoustic Theory, Cambridge Readings in the Literature of
Music (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 432.
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Quintilianus’s theory of oppositions can therefore be interpreted as reducing all body
movements, emotions, and musical motions to an arsis-thesis framework, in which every human
action consists of both a lifting or rising and a settling or falling. Therefore, mimetic transfer of
meaning and import to listeners is immediate, given the intrinsic arsis-thesis unity between human
action and musical action. That is, every bodily gesture resulting from a passion matches it in basic
directional orientation: happy heads lift up, with open eyes and a raised brow, while sad faces droop,
eyes closing and facial features sagging towards the ground.60 Such motions constitute the substance
of musical mimesis and make artistic communication possible. Quintilianus himself inherited this
arsis-thesis framework from his predecessors several centuries prior, with lineage tracing through
Aristoxenus and Aristotle to Damon (the latter of whom Plato cites in Republic as a musical expert).61
The arsis-thesis theoretical orientation was also foundational to the thought of Boethius, the
late classical figure whose writings proved very influential in early modern English scholarly circles.62
In The Consolation of Philosophy, Boethius pondered how to respond to the loss of fortune and the
miseries that attended it. His main character “Lady Wisdom” offered consolation, saying, “Therefore
let us have the Perswasives of Sweet Rhetorick, which then only proceeds in the Right way, when she
60 The drawings of French artist Charles LeBrun (1619-1690) are often cited as demonstration that artists of the period
were preoccupied with the passions as central to the meaning and purpose of art. A masterful close examination of the
art and correspondence of Le Brun can be found in Jennifer Montagu, The Expression of the Passions: The Origin and Influence
of Charles Le Brun’s “Conférence sur l'expression générale et particulière,” (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1994). 61 For extended treatment of Aristoxenus’s influence on late classical music theory, see Thomas J. Mathiesen, Apollo’s
Lyre: Greek Music and Music Theory in Antiquity and the Middle Ages (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1999; ACLS
Humanities Ebook, 2010), 287-354. For discussion of the influence of Damon on Plato, see Warren Anderson, Ethos and
Education in Greek Music: The Evidence of Poetry and Philosophy (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1966), 74-81. Plato
writes: “Then, I said, we must take Damon into our counsels; and he will tell us what rhythms are expressive of
meanness, or insolence, or fury, or other unworthiness, and what are to be reserved for the expression of opposite
feelings. And I think that I have an indistinct recollection of his mentioning a complex Cretic rhythm; also a dactylic or
heroic, and he arranged them in some manner which I do not quite understand, making the rhythms equal in the rise and
fall of the foot, long and short alternating; and, unless I am mistaken, he spoke of an iambic as well as of a
trochaic rhythm, and assigned to them short and long quantities. Also in some cases he appeared to praise or censure the
movement of the foot quite as much as the rhythm; or perhaps a combination of the two; for I am not certain what he
meant. These matters, however, as I was saying, had better be referred to Damon himself, for the analysis of the subject
would be difficult, you know.” Republic, trans. Jowett, 400b. 62 Boethius’s work, unlike that of Quintilianus, has an early history in English, being translated by Geoffrey Chaucer in
1478 as Boecius de consolacione philosophie.
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forsakes not our Instructions: and with Her let Musick, who is one of our House-hold Servants Sing
Notes sometimes Light, and sometimes Grave.”63 For Boethius, reflecting the antinomies of
Quintilianus, music’s function was to operate primarily between two fundamental affective
orientations. In this case, “light and grave” simultaneously conveyed connections to both the air and
the ground, terms that not only connoted elemental properties of the universe, but also the ability of
music to convey an analogous frivolity or severity in its practical application.
This dividing of music’s affective states into two opposite polar extremes was a key feature
in the thought of several other prominent early modern intellectuals who retained fundamentally
classical conceptions of the power of music. It was evident in the thought of Francis Bacon. “It hath
been anciently held and observed,” Bacon wrote, “that the sense of hearing, and the kinds of music,
have most operation upon manners; as, to encourage men, and make them warlike; to make them
soft and effeminate; to make them grave; to make them light; to make them gentle and inclined to
pity, etc.”64 Here, Bacon conceived of the power of music as residing in its ability to move human
passions between dichotomous states such as grave/light, warlike/pitiful, etc, just as we have seen in
Boethius and Quintilianus. And, importantly, he identified the mechanism by which such effects
were transferred as a kind of sympathetic resonance, commenting that “tunes have a predisposition
to the motion of the spirits in themselves,” and so “it is no marvel if they alter the spirits.”65 Bacon
concluded, “And therefore we see, that tunes and airs, even in their own nature, have in themselves
some affinity with the affections; as there be merry tunes, doleful tunes, solemn tunes; tunes
inclining mens minds to pity; warlike tunes, etc.”66
63 Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius, Summum Bonum, Or, An Explication Of Divine Goodness, In the Words of the Most
Renowned Boetius. Translated By a Lover of Truth, and Virtue [The consolation of philosophy], trans. Edmund Elys (Oxford:
Printed by H. Hall, for Ric. Davis, 1674), 40-41. 64 Bacon, Works of Francis Bacon, 2:389. 65 Bacon, Works of Francis Bacon, 2:389. 66 Bacon, Works of Francis Bacon, 2:389.
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Bacon’s views align closely with those of his contemporary Thomas Wright, whose Passions of
the Minde in Generall invoked “a certaine sympathie, correspondence, or proportion betwixt our souls
and musicke.67 For both Wright and Bacon, the concept of sympathy was synonymous with
proportion, revealing the traces of ancient Pythagorean thought. For Bacon, Wright, and similarly
oriented thinkers, the right management of the passions comprised the substance of moral character,
leading to the cultivation of a life of virtue that stemmed directly from balancing, regulating, and
managing these inner forces that exerted such tremendous power over human life. As has been seen
repeatedly, classical antecedents to this view are common, such as Aristides Quintilianus’s argument
why music is useful for producing good health: “These were called ethoses” he said, referring to
various types of musical movements and their effect on the passions as “exalting,” “depressing,” or
“intermediate,” “since the states of the soul were first observed and set right by them.”68 The exact
mechanics by which such characters were achieved were therefore of great interest to seventeenthcentury thinkers, as they were key to explaining how listening to or performing music was a central
way in which one educated oneself about the nature of passions and moral character.
5. Theoretical Outcomes: Music’s Ability to Create Psychological Well-Being
The capstone to seventeenth-century mechanical theories of sympathetic resonance was the
fact the theorists saw music as uniquely effective at helping to create the desirable opposite motive
forces for psychological well-being. One particularly insightful presentation of this quality of music
came from the aristocratic intellectual Margaret Cavendish. As Duchess of Newcastle, she was a
prolific writer of plays and speculative philosophy. While marginalized from the philosophical
67 Wright, Passions Of The minde, 168. 68 Quintilianus, On Music, 93.
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mainstream on account of her sex and eccentric character,69 she produced philosophical reflections
that anticipated positions found in Locke, Hobbes, and Hume, as well as in trending ideas in
philosophy of mind at the time.70 In her Philosophical Letters, or Modest Reflections upon Some Opinions in
Natural Philosophy, Cavendish claimed that “the Mind or natural Soul of Man…is in perpetual
motion,” and connected this general metaphysical conception to her theory on the power of music
to heal mental ailments.71 As she wrote in The Philosophical and Physical Opinions,
There is great reason why Musick should cure madnesse; for this sort of madnesse is no
other but the spirits that are in the brain and heart put out of their natural motion, and the
spirits having a natural sympathy with Musick, may be composed into their right order; but it must
be such Musick, as the number of the notes must goe in such order as the natural motion of
the brain, though every brain hath not one and the same motion, but are set like notes to
several tunes: wherefore if it were possible, to set notes to the natural motion of the heart, or
that brain that is distempered, it might be perfectly cured, but as some notes do compose the
brain by a sympathy to the natural motion, so others do make a discord or antipathy, and
discompose it, putting the natural motions out of tune.72
Cavendish’s conception of a well-functioning mind as operating according to certain healthy, natural
motions suggested that music could be responsible for reinstating the natural motions of the mind
when necessary, and that this could be achieved by understanding that there were contrasting
musical characteristics—such as sympathy and antipathy, composition and decomposition, and
accord and discord—that could be harnessed to those effects. Such intrinsically Pythagorean views
had explicit roots in the writings of Plato, whose dialogue Timaeus claimed that “harmony, which has
motions akin to the revolutions of our souls” was meant to “correct any discord which may have
arisen in the courses of the soul…bringing her into harmony and agreement with herself.” Plato
69 Pepys says that her writing “shews her to be a mad, conceited, ridiculous woman, and [her husband] an asse to suffer
her to write what she writes to him, and of him.” “Wednesday 18 March 1667/68,” The Diary of Samuel Pepys: Daily Entries
from the 17th century London Diary, https://www.pepysdiary.com/diary/1668/03/18/. 70 See David Cunning, “Cavendish on the Intelligibility of the Prospect of Thinking Matter,” History of Philosophy Quarterly
23 (2006): 117-136. 71 Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, The Philosophical And Physical Opinions, Written by her Excellency, the Lady
Marchionesse of Newcastle (London: Printed for J. Martin and J. Allestrye, 1655), 192. 72 Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, Philosophical Letters: Or, Modest Reflections Upon some Opinions in Natural
Philosophy, Maintained By several Famous and Learned Authors of this Age, Expressed by way of Letters (London, 1664), 139.
Emphases mine.
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completed this lofty insight with the observation that “rhythm too was given by them for the same
reason, on account of the irregular and graceless ways which prevail among mankind generally, and
to help us against them.”73 Plato’s Laws made similar arguments regarding music’s effects on the
minds and emotions of children:
The affection both of the Bacchantes and of the children is an emotion of fear, which
springs out of an evil habit of the soul. And when some one [sic] applies external agitation to
affections of this sort, the motion coming from without gets the better of the terrible and
violent internal one, and produces a peace and calm in the soul, and quiets the restless
palpitation of the heart, which is a thing much to be desired, sending the children to sleep.74
For both Plato and Cavendish, music was a therapeutic tool whose curative powers found their
roots in the basic rhythmic arrangement or structure of musical movement, causing infants and
young creatures to be soothed by peaceful, gentle, calm, or still musical motions, precisely because
these were rhythmic antidotes to the jarring, heaving, shaking, or frenzied motions of fear. The
activation of genuine rhythmic oppositions results in one set of contrasting movements and
emotions to counter and finally overcome another.
Eighteenth-century accounts of music and aesthetics incorporated many of these themes
established in the seventeenth century, showing far more continuity than divergence from these
earlier models. Francis Hutcheson, for instance, agreed with his predecessors that music’s powers
proceeded from the basic mimetic and sympathetic connection between music and the passions:
There is also another Charm in Musick to various Persons, which is distinct from the
Harmony, and is occasion’d by its raising agreeable Passions. The human Voice is obviously
vary’d by all the stronger Passions; now when our Ear discerns any resemblance between the
Air of a Tune, whether sung or play’d upon an Instrument, either in its Time, or Modulation,
or any other Circumstance, to the sound of the human Voice in any Passion, we shall be
touch’d by it in a very sensible manner, and have Melancholy, Joy, Gravity, Thoughtfulness
excited in us by a sort of Sympathy or Contagion.75
73 Plato, Timaeus, trans. Jowett, 47d. 74 Plato, Laws, trans. Benjamin Jowett, The Internet Classics Archive (website), Massachusetts Institute of Technology,
http://classics.mit.edu/Plato/laws.html, 790e. 75 Francis Hutcheson, An Inquiry into the Original of our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue, In Two Treatises, 4th ed. (London: D.
Midwinter, A. Bettesworth, and C. Hitch, J. and J. Pemberton, R. Ware, C. Rivington, F. Clay, A. Ward, J. and P.
Knapto, T. Longman, R. Hett, and J. Wood, 1738; Project Gutenberg Canada, March 23, 2010),
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Like North and others, Hutcheson distinguished between the effects of harmony and of more active
aspects of music. In addition, his theory was expressly mimetic in his positing of a resemblance
between music and the sound of the voice in heightened states of passion. Finally, searching for
language appropriate to express these relations, he ventured “a sort of Sympathy or Contagion,”
those words attempting to articulate the communicability or transferability of motion from music to
the passions.
Music and the Cultivation of Morality and Good Character
Because of the perception of music’s marvelous power to move people to ideas and action, it
embodied a central part of educational theory, moral philosophy, and became a commonplace in
many broad discussions of sociopolitical import. The conception of music as moving air possessing
psychic properties posed many implications for moral thought. If music had the ability to direct the
mind and will by its own motive forces, extreme care was required in order to use the powers of
music for good and avoid music that might cause harm. Such moral conceptions of music were
especially visible in theological controversies about music that pervaded Puritan and anti-Puritanical
writings throughout the seventeenth century.
Before Cromwell and the Interregnum, philosophers and theorists continued to offer
traditional conceptions of the importance of music in moral life. Robert Fludd, known mostly for
his mystical and numerological eccentricities, draws explicitly on a litany of names to bolster his own
views on the relationship between music and character development. In the third chapter of the first
book of his Templum Musicum (Temple of Music), entitled “On the working of music on soul and
body,” he declares that knowledge of music “must be required to the arrangement of men’s life and
https://gutenberg.ca/ebooks/hutchesonf-inquiry/hutchesonf-inquiry-00-h-dir/hutchesonf-inquiry-00-h.html, section
VI, para. XII.
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character.”76 Fludd’s strong language does not merely recommend music as one way to acquire
moral character, but rather suggests that is absolutely necessary. As he takes care to explain, music
must be taught to children “ut mitiores et concinniores reddantur et ad agendum et dicendum
promtiores” (that they may be made gentler and more graceful, more ready to speak and to act).77
He cites the authority of Plato, Aristotle, Guido of Arezzo, and Marsilio Ficino for his views,
invoking the connections of his ideas to Greek philosophy, medieval musical theory, and neoPlatonic ideas from the Italian Renaissance.
Claims that music was a necessary guide to cultivating morals and virtues resounded across
music treatises of the seventeenth century. In his 1614 A Briefe Discourse, composer and teacher
Thomas Ravenscroft appeals to a generalized classical wisdom: “The wise Grecians therefore
educated their children in it [music], that by means of it, they might temper their minds, and fully
settle therein, the Vertues of Modestie and Honesty.”78 Similar claims were expressed five years
earlier by lutenist John Dowland, whose 1609 translation of Andreas Ornithoparcus’s79 Micrologus
claims that learning of harmony is “fit for moral education.”80
Connections between morality and music were especially visible in theological controversies
about music stemming from the implications of the Protestant Reformation in Elizabethan England.
In the 1590s, theologian Richard Hooker revealed his own thoughts on the nature of music’s
potential benefits and dangers in The Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity:
In Harmony, the very Image and Character, even of Vertue and Vice is perceived, the minde
delighted with their Resemblances, and brought, by having them often iterated, into a love of
76 Robert Fludd,“The Temple of Music” by Robert Fludd, ed. Peter Hauge, Music Theory in Britain, 1500–1700: Critical
Editions (Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2011), 43. 77 Fludd, Temple of Music, 44. Translation mine. 78 Thomas Ravenscroft, A Briefe Discourse Of the true (but neglected) use of Charact’ring the Degrees, by their Perfection, Imperfection,
and Diminution in Measurable Musicke, against the Common Practise and Custome of these Times (London: Printed by Edw. Allde
for Tho. Adams, 1614), A. 79 Andreas Ornithoparcus was the nom de plume of German writer Vogelsang. 80 Andreas Ornithoparcus, Andreas Ornithoparcus His Micrologus, or Introduction: Containing the Art of Singing (London: Printed
by Thomas Snodham for Thomas Adams, 1609), 37.
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the things themselves. For which cause there is nothing more contagious and pestilent than
some kindes of Harmony; than some, nothing more strong and potent unto good.81
Building on the idea that music’s forces are fundamentally mimetic, his contention that harmony
presents “the very Image and Character, even of Virtue and Vice” goes further to suggest that music
mostly represents moral content. Acknowledging the role of musical pleasure in this mimetic
transfer—“the mind is delighted with their resemblances”—Hooker stresses that these resemblances
must be “often iterated,” since repetition is the means by which the things that are imitated become
internalized as “a love of the things themselves”—in other words, as one’s own character traits.
Hooker also warns that some kinds of harmony may be “strong and potent unto good” but that
others are dangerous due to their “contagious and pestilent” qualities.
Ralph Battell buildt on Hooker’s insights nearly a century later when he was called to preach
a sermon for the celebration of St. Cecilia’s Day in 1693. There he made claims about how to use
music’s power specifically for the stimulation of religious feeling and impulse:
And therefore a well composed Harmony, shall have even a natural Efficacy to work
changes for the better in humane Affections, to enliven and stir up those that are dull, and to
compose and pacifie those which are irregular: So that not only the Psalms of the Church,
but even the Voluntaries, being suitably framed, may have a good effect upon the Mind, and
even influence and dispose it to sober and Religious purposes.82
For Battell, the ultimate purpose of music listening is mental transformation towards an improved
state, here that the mind is influenced and disposed toward “sober and Religious purposes.” Battell’s
argument is not driven by text-based reasoning, as he emphasizes that “Voluntaries, being suitably
framed”—in other words, well-composed organ music—can transmit ethical force without recourse
to specifically religious language. In addition, he names the affections as the source of the relative
liveliness or dullness of the mental states that are the recipients of musical action. Noting that music
81 Richard Hooker, The Works Of Mr. Richard Hooker, (That Learned and Judicious Divine) In Eight Books Of Ecclesiastical Polity,
Compleated out of his own Manuscrips; Never before Published. With an account of his Life and Death (London: Printed by Thomas
Newcomb for Andrew Crook, 1666), 184. 82 Battell, Lawfulness and Expediency, 16.
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operates upon the “humane affections, to enliven and stir up those that are dull, and to compose
and pacifie those which are irregular,” he evokes the idea that inner transformations are achieved by
music acting as an oppositional mechanism to one’s inner states. Battell’s view is that music
possesses a “natural efficacy” for delivering such salutary benefits, suggesting that it is therefore
important for composers to compose with such potential moral effects in mind.
For generations, theologians such as Battell made regular reference to the benefits of musical
practice amidst the turbulent Puritan discussions that questioned every aspect of music’s place in
church and society.83 These arguments were often not specifically religious in nature, however,
instead referring directly to music’s stimulating function as a benefit to instruction, concentration,
and learning more generally. In the context of a sermon celebrating the installation of a new organ at
St. Andrew Undershaft in 1696, Oxford Anglican divine Gabriel Towerson (c. 1635–1697) argued
that a central obligation of the devout individual was to cultivate the passion of joy, which he
thought characterized the virtuous person. He described people as generally sluggish and in need of
an energetic burst that could create more joyfulness:
Whereas again the Affections of the generality of Men are, and will be dull, but however
there is none of us all, whose Affections do not often want quickning in the Worship of
God; In which case Reason it self will perswade the use of such probable means as may be
helpful to us in the stirring of them, but especially in that part of Gods Service, which
requires a sprightly and a chearful Mind: What can be more reasonable than to make use of
such Instruments of Musick, as tend in their own Nature to excite and improve them; yea, do
not seldom transform Men into a perfectly different Temper from what they were before
they listned to them?84
For Towerson, “to excite and improve” one’s mental state was the goal, while dullness was a kind of
degradation. Music served to achieve this end of energizing and stimulating auditors.
83 The classic volume on the subject is Percy A. Scholes, The Puritans and Music in England and New England (London:
Oxford University Press, 1934). 84 Gabriel Towerson, A Sermon Concerning Vocal and Instrumental Musick In the Church As it was Delivered in the Parish Church of
St. Andrew Undershaft, Upon the 31th of May, 1696, being Whit-Sunday, and the Day wherein the Organ there Erected was First made
Use of (London: Printed for B. Aylmer, 1696), 24.
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Music’s all-around ability to enhance the mind’s resilience to challenging tasks—and
therefore the mind’s pliability to education—was widely believed in the seventeenth century, and its
longstanding support went back to the Greeks. In particular, the argument shares features with
Aristotle’s in Politics, Book 8, where he suggests that music “makes the hearts of men glad” and that
“on this ground alone we may assume that the young ought to be trained in it.”85 For Aristotle, it is
precisely the entertaining, enjoyable, and amusing aspect of music that makes it essential in
education, “for learning is no amusement, but is accompanied with pain.”86 This line of reasoning
was front and center in Charles Butler’s Principles of Musick, published in 1636. Dedicating the
volume to Charles I, Butler opened his address with direct reference to “the Philosopher”
(Aristotle’s traditional medieval designation): “There is nothing that more conduceth to the
prosperiti and happines of a Kingdom, than the good education of yuthe and children: In which the
Philosopher requireth three Arts especially to be taught them (Grammar, Musik, Gymnastik).”87
Hewing closely to Aristotle’s ideas, Butler presented the education of youth as the primary concern
of society and affirmed Aristotle’s framing of music as one of the three legs of the pedagogical stool,
without which no education was complete. Such Aristotelian arguments also formed a central theme
in the writings of John Case in his Apologia Musices: “For just as there is a sweet savor in learning
which makes for pleasure, so there is an effort in learning which engenders tedium and pain. But
there is no effort in music, no shadow of pain, since it refreshes rather than shatters the powers of
the wit, renders the vital spirits subtler rather than consuming them, sharpens the intellect with its
wonderful influence rather than tiring it with study.”88 While each of these arguments is presented in
a different context, music’s ability to arouse, excite, or otherwise activate the attention for the
85 Aristotle, Politics, trans. Benjamin Jowett, 2:2124, 1339b24-25. 86 Aristotle, Politics, trans. Benjamin Jowett, 2:2124, 1339a29-30. 87 Charles Butler, The Principles Of Musik, In Singing And Setting: With the two-fold Use thereof, Ecclesiasticall and Civil (London:
Printed by John Haviland, 1636), 1. 88 Case, Apologia Musices.
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purpose of making education pleasurable pervaded musical discourse in seventeenth-century English
writings.
The general usefulness of music for making learning pleasurable was one of the key
connections between music and morality. In addition, authors regularly drew other ethical
conclusions from music-learning itself. Like Aristotle, many thinkers argued for the necessity of
training youths in the musical arts for its immediate benefits and for an ongoing lifetime of
appreciation. Thomas Morley’s 1597 A Plaine and Easie Introduction to Practicall Musicke, Set Downe in
Forme of a Dialogue, for instance, promised to teach the musical rudiments of pricksong, descant, and
composition in an accessible way, doing so in the form of a Platonic dialogue. In the preface, Morley
offered patriotism as his motive for publishing the volume, so that his fellow countrymen could have
the best instruction possible, and he promised that “any of but meane capacatie” could understand
the basic architecture of the science of music. The dialogue that occupies the main body of the
treatise was then framed as an education of the musically unlearned student Polymathes, a recent
convert to the virtues of being musically literate. When Polymathes confessed to his music master of
being ashamed of his lack of musical education when part singing broke out at a dinner party, the
surprised teacher recalled conversations in which the would-be student condemned music as a
wasteful pleasure that inclined to vice—“for which many of your companions termed you a Stoick,”
the teacher noted. But Polymathes undertook his education nonetheless, signaling his understanding
of the rational basis of music by averring that “I am so farre changed, as of a Stoick I would willingly
make a Pythagorean.”89 Many pages of technical instruction later, Morley reveals his complete
picture of knowledge, learning, wisdom, and virtue and the general interconnectedness of all aspects
of one’s study in the final benediction from the master to the student: “The Lord of Lords direct
yon in al wisdome and learning, that when hearafter, you shall bee admitted to the handling of the
89 Morley, Plaine And Easie Introduction, 2.
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weighty affaires of the commonwealth, you may discreetly and worthily discharge the offices
whereunto you shal be called.”90
Besides these general promises of educational and social improvement, Morley noted that
not only did music make one virtuous, but that virtue itself was required for excellent musical
performance. Morley complained of singers whose enlarged sense of self-importance obliterated
musical expression and claimed that, on the contrary, humility was required to allow the
composition itself to transcend individual musicians:
For most of our Church men, (so they can crie louder in the quier than their fellowes)
care for no more; whereas by the contrarie, they ought to study how to vowel and sing
clean, expressing their words with devotion and passion, wherby to draw the hearer as it
were in chaines of gold by the eares to the consideration of holy things.91
This point—that too much focus on competition and individual gain corrupted performance—was
central to Morley’s thought, and the “Plaine and Easie” manner of presenting his treatise implies
that Morley believed grandiloquence to block genuine communication and learning. More generally,
in the final word of his treatise, the Peroratio, where the music master gives his benediction, Morley
asserted his overall view that music should be considered among the intellectual sciences rather than
anything rote or merely manual. Lamenting that music “is almost fallen into the nature of a
mechanicall arte, rather than reckoned in amongst other sciences,” he claimed, citing the authority of
Plato and especially Boethius, that “musick cannot be intreated or taught without the knowledge of
all other sciences.”92 As depicted in the elaborate frontispiece, Morley saw the teaching of music as
one of the cornerstones of the traditional medieval quadrivium, which encompassed arithmetic,
geometry, astronomy, and music.
90 Morley, Plaine And Easie Introduction, 182. 91 Morley, Plaine And Easie Introduction, 179. 92 Morley, Plaine And Easie Introduction, 184.
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Morley published his Plaine and Easie Introduction a few years before the end of the reign of
Elizabeth I. But already, fifty years before, when Elizabeth was merely in her childhood, her tutor
Roger Ascham had made similar arguments in Toxophilus (1548), a manual of archery, about music’s
relationship to the attainment of virtues. Defending the practice of archery by scholars, Ascham
endeavored to argue that archery, like the singing or performance of music, helped one to attain
other virtues. In the process, he discussed the nature of a complete education, suggesting many
social and educational benefits to instructing youths in music. Claiming in his typically hyperbolic
and dramatic tone that mother’s milk “is no fitter nor more naturall” than music, Ascham argued for
the deliberate teaching of music from the earliest age, suggesting that even before children were
rational, they could be soothed by their mother’s singing. From this he drew a more general
conclusion: “Agayne how fit youth is made, by learning to sing, for grammar and other sciences,
bothe we dayly do see, and Plutarch learnedly doth prove, and Plato wiselie did alowe, whiche
received no scholer in to his schole, that had not learned his songe before.”93 Thus, music and virtue
were connected not only by the belief that listening to music could lead to virtuous achievements
such as better learning, or that virtue was in turn required to perform music well, but also by the
belief that singing—or the performance of music, specifically—could help enhance one’s ability to
learn and more generally cultivate desirable virtues.
Accordingly, learning music was not seen in the seventeenth century as something to be
limited to childhood, but rather as a lifelong well upon which one could draw for enjoyment,
pleasure, and great satisfaction. Unlike Aristotle, who suggested that adults appreciate music but
leave its performance to the youth, early modern English society did not follow him on this point, as
private music making became a cornerstone for a conception of what it meant to be a well-socialized
citizen. In fact, many authors complained of the over-professionalization of music and the extreme
93 Roger Ascham, Toxophilus, ed. Edward Arber (Westminster, UK: A. Constable and Co., 1895), 42.
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lengths to which professional performers went to achieve astounding feats of technical virtuosity.
Amateur musician and theorist Roger North, for instance, complained that musical virtuosi in
London caused ordinary people to lose interest in amateur music making. He was so irritated by this
trend that he claimed to be “almost of Plato’s opinion, that the state ought to govern the use of it
[music], but not for their reasons, but for the use it may be in diverting noble familys into a generous
way of country living.”94 From there, North suggested that the cause of the decay of ordinary
musicianship was that amateurs would witness virtuosi, lapse into despair, and quit, then turning to
some other, probably more vicious form of pleasure. North’s advocacy for amateur music making
echoes Aristotle, who claimed that extreme shows of technical virtuosity were unbecoming, not only
because they were showy and attention-seeking, but because cultivating a high degree of technical
facility could only be achieved at the expense of becoming well-rounded. Simply put, only a
professional could dedicate the time required to achieve extreme levels of technical facility.95
Ultimately, the ethical frameworks and perspectives of Aristotelian virtue were
commonplace in the minds of early modern English writers. In particular, they subscribed to the
belief that music was an especially good conceptual parallel for virtue, because, just like all other
virtues, music was something one acquired ability in by doing it. Notably, there was Aristotle’s
conception that one became virtuous by habit:
But the Virtues we get by first performing single acts of working, which, again, is the case of
other things, as the arts for instance; for what we have to make when we have learned how,
these we learn how to make by making: men come to be builders, for instance, by building;
harp-players, by playing on the harp: exactly so, by doing just actions we come to be just; by
doing the actions of self-mastery we come to be perfected in self-mastery; and by doing
brave actions brave.96
94 North, Roger North on Music, 12. 95 Aristotle’s remarks on this point can be found in Politics, trans. B. Jowett, in The Complete Works of Aristotle: The Revised
Oxford Translation, ed. Jonathan Barnes, 2:1986-2129 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995), 1341a10-13. “The
right measure will be attained if students of music stop short of the arts which are practised in professional contests, and
do not seek to acquire those fantastic marvels of execution which are now the fashion in such contests, and from these
have passed into education.”
96 Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, trans. D. P. Chase (London: J. M. Dent, 1915; Project Gutenberg, July 10, 2003. Updated
March 27, 2021), https://www.gutenberg.org/files/8438/8438-h/8438-h.htm, 1103a32-33.
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Such a view was repeated by Christopher Simpson in his Compendium of Practical Musick (1667), a
volume that, structured in the same manner as Morley’s treatise, presented the rudiments of music
and counterpoint and concluded with composition. Simpson closed his Compendium with an
exhortation that resonated uncannily with Aristotle’s ideas, down to their phrasing: “But it rests on
your part to put them in practice: without which nothing can be effected. For, by Singing a man is
made a Singer; and by Composing he becomes a Composer. ’Tis Practice that brings Experience;
and Experience begets that Knowledge with improves all Arts and Sciences.”97 With music being the
ultimate domain in which practice brought both personal transformation and incremental acquisition
of ability, it was easily seen as cultivating the discipline required for other studies. Ethical ends and
value-related goals were therefore conceived as inherent to music and music education, and music
itself was seen as a necessary and crucial component of ethical life.
Conclusion
Musical motion and psychological states were commonly believed in the seventeenth century
to bear a genuine physical resemblance to one another, thus attributing tremendous motivating
power and great ethical force to music. This chapter has shown the specific mechanics by which this
resemblance was thought to occur. Claiming that music and the passions were constituted of the
same substance, seventeenth-century thinkers saw them as moving, active, and dynamic in similar
ways, effecting changes in both the music and the passions that resulted from operations between
opposite poles. As moves one, so goes the other in a directly analogous manner, completing the
bond of sympathetic resonance in which the motions of the music and the passions were identical.
97 Christopher Simpson, A Compendium of Practical Musick in Five Parts (London: Printed by William Godbid for Henry
Brome, 1667), 144.
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Anchored in rhythm and its correspondence to bodily movements, music as a whole was therefore
seen as uniquely capable of producing desired moods and character traits in a person.
Throughout these theories, we saw a number of different ways in which thinkers sought to
express the fundamental oppositional mechanics of musical materials: through analogies to the
elements, to the phenomena of heating and cooling, expanding and contracting, heavy and light,
rising and falling, and so on. Skillful manipulation of these relational properties was central in
discussions of the composition and performance of affective music. As the next chapter will show,
the composer’s task during the long seventeenth century became the vivid representation of
psychological extremes. Since the passions themselves were exaggerated motions given to polar
oppositions, an effectual musical representation of such properties required that composers
construct music itself from characteristics exaggerated in the same kind of way. The next chapter
will look specifically at the music of Henry Purcell and his contemporaries, revealing tools and
techniques they employed in order to compose compelling representations of inner human nature.
By offering understanding of the oppositional musical mechanisms employed by Purcell and his
contemporaries, I hope to enable more vivid readings and performances of this intensely
psychological music.
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– Chapter 3 –
Musical Motion and the Passions (Part I):
Building a Mimetic Approach to Analysis Using the Cecilian Odes
Edmund Spenser’s Fairie Queene, first published in 1590, has a longer full title: The Faerie
Qveene: Disposed into Twelve Books, Fashioning XII Morall Vertues. Filled with allegorical tales of
characters engaged in moral conflict, all of whom possess the virtue to make wise decisions,
Spenser’s tale influenced Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, written six years later, the latter
addressing related themes of the merits and faults, dangers and rewards, pleasures and pains of love,
using wildly fantastical and mythological creatures. Henry Purcell set an anonymous libretto very
loosely based on Shakespeare’s play as a masque or semi-opera in 1692. He developed his music
around the central emotional states presented in the text, seeking to convey the principal pleasures
and pains involved in the situations of each of the characters. Purcell’s ethical perspective was not
moralistic. Music wasn’t didactic, it was an art form. But it was an art form that related to ethical
living, and Purcell participated in the commonplace view that one needed to take that into account
when composing music. In fact, he was one of the most eloquent composers to do so. Celebrated
for his importation of the latest Italian and French styles in theater, Purcell composed dynamic
music designed to illustrate the nature of the emotional turbulence involved in love and other moral
conflicts. His success in these matters was recognized by his contemporary Roger North. While
lauding the recitatives of Nicholas Lanier as providing “a compleat patterne of an Italian style, in an
English recitative,” North observed how it “expresseth passion, hope, fear, and despair, as strong as
words and sounds can bear,” and added that, “saving some pieces of Mr. H. Purcell, wee have
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nothing of this kind in English at all recommendable.”1
North’s view, which assumed the
conveyance of emotional content to be the principal goal of music, offered Purcell as the prince of
this skill.
As we saw in chapter 2, the moral persuasiveness of music around the virtuous management
of the passions was connected to the idea that music ought to be seen as rhetorical. For Aristotle,
the principal purpose of rhetoric was to move or persuade, drawing the hearer along with a speaker’s
ideas and intentions. When applied to music, this meant that successful composers and performers
would literally move audiences to such virtuous management of their feelings, to think and feel
whatever mood or passion they wished to represent. A similar compositional intention is described
by Wye Allanbrook in Rhythmic Gesture in Mozart: “Le nozze di Figaro” and “Don Giovanni.” Reflecting
on baroque dance rhythms in Mozart’s operas, she suggests that the rhythms serve as musico-poetic
symbols of social structures that express emotional, psychological, and moral content related to
individual operatic characters. For Allanbrook, Mozart’s music functions as a kind of moral mimesis
by which audiences simultaneously receive both aesthetic and ethical content.
2 As the previous
chapter has demonstrated, however, there is a sense in which calling such an intention “moral
mimesis” would be redundant, since all musical representations were seen as representations of
human states of mind that had implications for one’s ethical character. And it was generally believed
that these implications were of concern to everyone. As Herbert Schueller, a mid-twentieth century
scholar of the history of aesthetics argues, music of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was
thought to represent sonically a basic human set of dispositions that were shared by all, forming a
rhetoric that could be felt and understood by all who might hear. “Musical expression was the
expression of the passions of men, not of a man,” he wrote. “Hence the ‘objectivity’ that 18th1 North, Roger North on Music, 265. 2 See especially Wye Jamison Allanbrook, Rhythmic Gesture in Mozart: Le nozze di Figaro and Don Giovanni (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1983), 1-12.
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century musical expression, vocal or instrumental, seems to have. The doctrine of music as imitation
and expression reflected the generalizing and universalizing aim of neo-Classical thought and art.”3
This chapter analyzes select works of Henry Purcell and a few of his contemporaries,
showing their mechanisms for conveying words, thoughts, feelings, and passions in such a way that
was believed to actually move you—the mimetic substances within you—to resonate with what is
being conveyed. As Henry Playford wrote of Purcell in his preface to Orpheus Brittanicus, “the
Author’s extraordinary Talent in all sorts of Musick is sufficiently known, but he was especially
admir’d for the Vocal, having a peculiar Genius to express the Energy of English Words, whereby he
mov’d the Passions of all his Auditors.”4 As Playford puts it, successful compositions—that is, those
that were successful at moving listeners—required composers and performers to understand the
“Energy” of words and to “express” them accurately. With this perspective in mind, I demonstrate
how composers during the English Restoration period drew upon a common rhetorical vocabulary
for the musical expression of the passions. Using analytical tools that themselves date from Purcell’s
time, we can see that the perspectives of his contemporaries reflect the fundamental mechanics of
the compositional techniques he drew upon to create musical representations of all the inner states
of human life. In particular, the analytical orientations of Isaac Vossius and Christoph Bernhard
reveal the means by which music’s fundamental activity was thought to mirror the activity of
thought and feeling.
Thinking Rhythm and Pitch through Vossius and Bernhard
While any connection between Purcell and contemporary figures Isaac Vossius (1618-1689)
and Christoph Bernhard (1628-1692) would be conjecture, these two music theorists occupy
3 Schueller, “‘Imitation’ and ‘Expression,’” 564. 4 Henry Purcell, Orpheus Brittanicus (London: Printed by J. Heptinstall for Henry Playford, 1698), ii.
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diametrically opposite positions on the question of the origin of the power of music over the
passions. Each theorist attempted to reduce music’s effects to a single musical element—rhythmic
structures based in poetic feet for Vossius, and pitch, melodic contour, and the artful management
of contrapuntal consonance and dissonance for Bernhard. With the aid of each of these theorists,
we can gain insight into the works of Henry Purcell and his contemporaries by viewing music from
their perspectives. Each theorist attempted a basic description of the procedures and techniques by
which composers work their effects on human passions through the creation of a musical mimesis
of human quandaries, struggles, dilemmas, and affairs. Through the interpretive lenses of Vossius
and Bernhard, we can accurately identify Purcell’s musico-rhetorical figures, more fully comprehend
their basic nature, and apply these insights toward the achievement of more vivid and lively
interpretations of music of the period.
For Vossius, it was principally the rhythmic character of poetic feet that conveyed and
transmitted affective energy. Vossius, notorious for his grumbling and naysaying against music of his
own day, recommended that musicians consult the wisdom of drummers (literally “tympanotriba” or
tabor players) in order to use rhythm more powerfully for arousing the passions and creating more
exciting music. Of drummers Vossius said, “There is little that they know; but no matter how small
their knowledge, they nevertheless suffice to proclaim the power of rhythmic feet,” acknowledging
the special capabilities of drummers even as he was unable to resist a drummer insult.5
Vossius
assured readers that by first understanding the rhythmic aspects of music, the rest of music
comprehension would come easily.
Vossius’s main claim was that music’s power flowed from the rhythmic clarity of the poetic
feet, which in spoken poetry were less apparent, but in song possessed a audibility to the listener
from which flowed music’s transformative capacities. In particular, he argued that the repetition of
5 Vossius, De poematum cantu, 114.
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simple feet made the most forceful music and was most able to "elicit pleasing and meek
behaviors.”6 Throughout Purcell’s oeuvre, we can see the persistent use of poetic feet in repeating
patterns to convey precisely the emotive characteristics that Vossius suggests: for arousal and
activity, the pyrrhic foot ( ); to induce relaxation, the slow spondee ( ); for rushing forward,
the iambic foot ( ); for pulling back, the spondee ( ); and, for very aggressive emotions, the
anapest ( ).7
Vossius’s commitment to the repetition of simple poetic feet was staunch. He believed, for
instance, that mixing up the feet resulted in music that did genuine harm, complaining of
“composite feet, whose performance unnerved the mind and spirit to the extent that it drove many
to furor and insanity.”8 “Dithyrambic poems and Phrygian modes give credence to this,” he argued,
“and it is agreed that in former times men were made wild by them even to the point of madness.”9
He cited Plato at length on the psychic and moral injuriousness of such “clashing rhythms,”10
explaining that
this is why Plato expels composite feet, together with the Ionic, Lydian, and Mixolydian
modes, from his city-state and orders them to depart far away. Since he admits no music in
his Republic except that which is grave, modest, and manly, and he judges that the pace of
many rhythms of the other type hinder morals, not without reason does he nearly always
exclude rhythms made up of these antithetical movements, as spurious and in a certain way
androgynous, disturbing minds from their right state, and inducing insults, intoxication, and
illicit desires.11
In applying Vossius’s lens to the music of Purcell and his contemporaries, I will examine specific
instances where rhythmic activity is especially repetitive or disjointed. In doing so, we can see Purcell
6 Vossius, De poematum cantu, 30. 7 Such viewpoints are preceded by Monteverdi’s in his 1638 preface to Madrigali guerrieri, et amorosi, in which he cites Plato
and Boethius to support his claims that “in the pyrrhic measure the tempo is fast and, according to all the best
philosophers, used warlike, agitated leaps, and in the spondaic, the tempo slow and the opposite.” Quoted in translation
in William Oliver Strunk, ed., Source Readings in Music History, rev. ed. (New York: W. W. Norton, 1998), 666. 8 Vossius, De poematum cantu, 30. 9 Vossius, De poematum cantu, 30. 10 Vossius, De poematum cantu, 32. 11 Vossius, De poematum cantu, 30.
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himself employing rhythmic patterns that correspond to Vossius’s descriptors, whereby Purcell
denotes and describes both tranquil and chaotic states of mind and body.
Vossius also saw over-ornamentation as a major impediment to the simple clarity of
rhythmic material. He regularly complained about singers staying on “oh” or “ah” on extended
melismas and decried all singing that was not directly connected to the delivery of clear text. His
aversion to flurries of musical showmanship stemmed similarly from his belief that the regular
repetition of small fragments of musical material alone was sufficient to give music its power to
entrance, captivate, and move.12 Vossius ultimately denied pitch any musical power or signification.
Claiming that rhythm was the only motive force in music, he was especially denigrating of theorists
who focused expressly on counterpoint, “neglecting what is fundamental in song.”
In direct contrast with Vossius, however, stood his contemporary Christoph Bernhard, who
argued from the opposite side of the continent an exactly opposite view, namely that compositional
artistry was to be found primarily in the management of pitch, specifically through counterpoint
(“punctus contra punctus” or “note against note”), or the relationship between multiple musical lines. As
Bernhard declares in the opening page of his Tractatus compositionis augmentatus,
Beauty (forma) consists in the artistic alternation and intermingling of consonances and
dissonances, hence in the observation of the General and Special Rules of Counterpoint.
From differing applications of these rules and from their natural influence, it results that one
composition is good, but another better, that the audience may be more or less pleased, and
that a composer is made famous.13
12 Of course, this view was not unique to Vossius but reflects a rhetorical tradition that identifies music and rhetoric as
sister arts. Henry Peacham the Younger’s 1622 The Compleat Gentleman, modeled after Castiglione’s Book of the Courtier,
names several musico-rhetorical devices that empower music: “Hath not Musick her figures, the same with Rhetorick?
What is a Revert, but her Antistrophe? her Reports, but sweet Anaphora’s? her conterchange of points, Antimetabole’s? her
passionate Airs, but Prosopopoeia’s? with infinite other of the same nature.” Henry Peacham, The Compleat Gentleman
Fashioning him absolute in the most necessary & Commendable Qualities concerning Minde or Bodie that may be required in a Noble
Gentleman (London: John Legat for Francis Constable, 1622), 104. 13 Christophe Bernhard, Tractatus compositionis augmentatus, in The Music Forum: Volume III, ed. William J. Mitchell and Felix
Salzer (New York: Columbia University Press, 1973), 33.
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Bernhard’s approach forms a useful complement to Vossius’s for interpreting the efficacy with
which music of Purcell’s time communicated the passions. Bernhard begins by presenting fairly
standard procedures for basic counterpoint, but quickly proceeds to divide the art of counterpoint
into several logical and stylistic categories. At the most basic level, he argues, stands a chain of
consonances between two voices. At the next level, consonances can be interpolated with
dissonances. At the third level, the interpolations of dissonances between two parts can occur at
different speeds. Finally, at the fourth level, more voices may be added.
At this level, Bernhard points out that a distinction can be made between two types of
counterpoint, namely “gravis and luxurians,” that apply across different compositional genres. The
former he characterizes as “stylus antiquus,” denoting the honeyed phrases of high Renaissance
polyphony; and the latter he calls “contrapunctus luxurians,” referring to the “rather quick notes and
strange leaps” exemplified by more modern approaches to dissonance treatment. Bernhard classifies
these more modern, dramatic uses of dissonance as fifteen distinct types of “figurae melopoeticae”14
through which composers explored wider expressive freedoms enjoyed by modern composers in
“both church and table music,”15 as opposed to the stylus antiquus of more traditional church music.
Bernhard does not intend his list figures to be exhaustive, but merely illustrative of the most
commonly used figures in his own estimation.16
Although Bernhard is content to speak to only the technical contrapuntal aspects of the
figurae melopoeticae, the figures can often be connected directly to affective modes of movement and
action. This is important because, since the affections comprise movements of both mind and body,
14 Bernhard, Tractatus compositionis augmentatus, 35. 15 Bernhard, Tractatus compositionis augmentatus, 91. 16 For a comprehensive collection of musico-rhetorical figures from the renaissance and baroque periods, Dietrich
Bartel’s Musica Poetica serves as an encyclopedic source that labels and classifies figures and contains useful biographies of
central authors in the mostly German musica poetica tradition. Dietrich Bartel, Musica Poetica (Lincoln: University of
Nebraska Press, 1997).
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musical mimesis of such motions necessitates some kind of musical movement in time. At base, the
concepts of consonance and dissonance, which are central to Bernhard’s theory of counterpoint,
require a concept of musical time in order to make sense. Dissonances gain their relative degrees of
harshness based on how long they are held, whether they are prepared or entered into immediately,
as well as the intensity of dissonance a single voice adds to a complete musical texture. And more
generally, although Bernhard’s theory is pitch centric, movement through time is required in order
for his figures to exist. For example, Bernhard says that passus duriusculus “within a single voice
occurs when a voice rises or falls a minor semitone,” revealing that melodic structures and their
basic directional orientation create the figures. The same can be said for his figure saltus duriusculus,
which consists of leaps of a tritone, sixth, or seventh. Such figures, in the hands of Purcell and his
contemporaries, are commonly used to convey particular psychological states precisely through the
directionality of single melodic lines. Therefore, although Bernhard himself does not explicitly link
these rhetorical figures to affective states, my analyses of Purcell and his contemporaries’ uses of
these figures reveals ways in which they consistently employ them to supply mimetic representations
of affective conditions and attendant bodily and mental states.
In this chapter, I will supply interpretations of the music of Purcell and his contemporaries
by combining the approaches of Vossius and Bernhard, paying attention to how the types of
rhythmic and intervallic figures they emphasize correspond to particular affective expressions.17
Uncovering the affective meaning of such musical figures can enrich contemporary performers’
interpretations of baroque works by suggesting interpretations of tempo, dynamics, articulation, and
17 Unlike Vossius, whose engagement with Dryden is well documented, Christoph Bernhard has mostly remained at a
distance from English musical scholarship. Burney only mentions his name in passing as a teacher of John Caspar Kerl,
and it is well into the twentieth century before any of Bernhard’s works receive direct treatment. Burney, General History
of Music, 2:459. Carl Dahlhaus focused on Bernhard’s hexachord-based modal theory in “Christoph Bernhard und die
Theorie der modalen Imitation,” Archiv für Musikwissenschaft 21, no. 1 (1964): 45–59. Like Dahlhaus’s article, multiple
dissertations in English begin to appear only as late as the 1960s. For a discussion of the degree to which Dryden was
influenced by Vossius, see H. Neville Davies, “Dryden and Vossius: A Reconsideration,” Journal of the Warburg and
Courtauld Institutes 29 (1966): 282–295.
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phrasing, allowing performers to make the affective content of the compositions explicit and more
vivid. The ensuing section will detail specific correspondences between various passions and such
rhythmic and intervallic figures that I have observed from this repertoire, and that I will go on to
illustrate with musical examples from the Cecilian odes composed by Purcell and his
contemporaries, as well as a selection of other vocal and instrumental works by Purcell.

Specific Correspondences between the Passions and Musical Gestures
This section will delineate a common musical vocabulary used by composers to articulate,
with a palette drawn from the arts of verbal persuasion, a systematic frame of musico-linguistic
structures that reveal a shared understanding of both psychological states and the means by which
musicians discuss them in sound. Drawing on the terminology of the musica poetica tradition, I offer
here the building blocks of a mimetically oriented musico-rhetorical analysis. As with grammatical
analysis, such an approach examines and labels existing substructures in music or text, regardless of
the degree to which a composer or writer is conscious of them. A composer or musician may not
possess terminology to describe musical art, but such structures have an existence of their own that
invites the project of naming in order to better conceive the basic nature of musical art.
The vocabulary I delineate here is based in part on a tradition of text-setting compositional
techniques that extend centuries into the past before Purcell and company. Gioseffo Zarlino’s
commentary from two hundred years prior, for example, connects wider intervals with joy and
positive, expanding emotions, while he claims that smaller intervals convey sadness, lamentation,
and collapsing passions.18 Coming after Zarlino, other Italian theorists such as Jacopo Peri, Giulio
18 According to Zarlino, “When we wish the counterpoint to be languid or sad, or perhaps sweet and soft, we must
proceed with sweet, smooth progressions. Among such steps are the semitone, semiditone, and similar intervals, and the
best consonances are the minor imperfect consonances: semiditone, minor hexachord, and their compounds. By their
nature, as I have said in Chapter 10, these consonances are apt for such effects. On the other hand, to make the
counterpoint cheerful, write the whole tone, ditone, and similar intervals.” Gioseffo Zarlino, The Art of Counterpoint: Part
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Caccini, and Claudio Monteverdi defended the seconda prattica that similarly emphasized the
emotional expressive conditions of the text—developments that were largely shared and repeated in
England by Thomas Morley, Charles Butler, Thomas Mace, Christopher Simpson, John Playford,
and others.
The way such emotional vocabulary works in the music of Purcell and his contemporaries
can be found in the aspect of their music that has been sometimes referred to as “the graces.” Roger
North, for instance, praises Purcell by saying that he “hath given us patternes of all the graces
musick can have.”19 Of course, the word “graces” remains a common synonym for ornamentation in
musicological parlance, but North’s general point is that the appropriateness of them stems from
their relation to a genuine representation of the subject matter being illustrated. As North says, “If
wee had masters who are capable, which (now Purcell is gone) is much to be suspected, they should
not teach their scollars Gracing but as inferences from the nature of composition, on which all
depends.”20 Thus, as similarly discussed with the terms “mimesis” and “word painting” in chapter 2,
ornament or gracing should be more appropriately understood not as referring to the merely
decorative, but rather as entailing the modification of musical material to relate it most effectively to
the affective content of the meaning of a musical idea. Importantly, North’s invoking of the idea of
musical “patterns” suggests that such ways of expressing emotional content might be analyzed,
systematized, understood, and taught, for the purpose of performance and compositional
improvisation. While these basic building blocks contain relatively simple structures—for example, a
rising, static, or falling melodic direction, relative pitch height, combinations of long and short notes,
Three of “Le Istitutioni Harmoniche,” 1558, trans. Guy A. Marco and Claude V. Palisca (New Haven, CT: Yale University
Press, 1968), 177.
19 North, Roger North on Music, 150. 20 North, Roger North on Music, 150.
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at faster or slower tempi, etc.—the creative combination and reworking of such elementary
compounds produces a practically infinite variety of results.
Functioning similarly to rhetorical devices, these mimetic constructions express and
communicate through the judicious use of a relatively small body of musico-poetic figures. This
basic musico-poetic vocabulary can be identified, collected, and named by viewing these units of
expression through the dual lenses of a Vossian and a Bernhardian perspective. Bernhard’s
methodology of viewing skillful composition as consisting in “the artistic alternation and
intermingling of consonances and dissonances” enables analysis that uncovers expressive intention
by isolating dissonances.21 Complementing this, a Vossian view focusing on the identification of
poetic feet as elementary rhythmic units of expression creates a combined perspective that reveals
Purcell’s work to be an unending braid of melodic and rhythmic patterns fashioned to effectively
convey the individuated specificities of the wide variety of human affective properties.
Using Bernhard’s focus on the expressive capacities of dissonance, we can see recurring
patterns that form the basic building blocks of musical expression of the passions. In general, rising
pitch tends to indicate an intensification or literal heightening of affective motion. On the contrary,
descending lines, as a rule, tend to represent a loosening, slackening, or weakening of affective
energy.22 Between the two possibilities of rising or falling, pitch patterns can repeat themselves with
a tendency to maintain a constant pitch height. A key exemplar of this middle state is the rhetorical
figure circulatio in which pitches rise and descend around a stable central tone, which denotes a
moderate state between extremes and a kind of steady, holding position. Such middle states are
often used to denote passions that are equally stable and unwavering.
21 Bernhard, Tractatus compositionis augmentatus, 31. 22 Such figures were named anabasis (rising pitch) and catabasis (descending pitch) by Athanasius Kircher in his Musurgia
Universalis of 1650, but such figures are so fundamental to any pitched or sung music that the “device” clearly pre-exists
whatever naming convention might be chosen. See Bartel, Musica Poetica, 106-111.
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Besides such pitch-related patterns, Isaac Vossius’s obsession with strings of long and short
syllables corresponding to poetic feet can be combined with the above to produce musical
compounds of both rhythm and pitch by which composers created clear affective representations.
For example, joy and happiness are conveyed by skipping rhythms with mostly rising melodic
tendencies and stepwise motion. Love and related affections are often described musically by
relatively higher pitch or tessitura as well as longer notes and more of them, and these in
combination with relatively close, mostly stepwise intervallic movements that tend to rise. In
comparison, feelings of melancholy, mourning, and the like tend to be conveyed by even longer
notes, always descending in pitch either by half steps (passus duriusculus) or leaps downward (saltus
duriusculus). In patterns expressing anger and its related emotions, rhythms are mostly chains of
pyrrhic feet, usually with outbursts of note groupings separated by rests, with a tendency towards
sharply rising pitch directions, often traversing a wide ambitus. Calm and gentle feelings, in contrast,
are represented by long notes in a moderate tempo with relatively stable pitch height.
Although such patterns are not exact in the way they manifest in seventeenth-century
English music, they contain pitch and rhythmic elements that might be compositionally manipulated
to evoke passions leaning in particular directions. The ability to notice these can be illuminating for
scholars and performers seeking to create an interpretation of music that foregrounds mimetic goals.
In particular, the passions conveyed by music can be identified by examining small phrases that are
themselves composed according to a fairly strict and identifiable program. The representation of
specific passions arises specifically as a result of the combinations of relative pitch height, length and
brevity of individual notes, and their rootedness in repeating rhythmic patterns. With regard to
melodic pitch direction, one may ascend, descend, or remain relatively static or circulating. Strong,
positive, or upward passions are generally represented by ascending pitch, while representations of
death, pain, loss, grief, suffering, fragility, or weakness tend to use descending pitch. When
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Table 3.1. Representing the passions with musical figures in the Cecilian odes
Passion Pitch and Rhythmic Building Blocks
Love High tessitura, slower and more gentle rhythmic movement, and mostly
stepwise motion, indicating the smoothness but basic positivity of the
passion of love
Melancholy Pitch patterns always descending, employing mostly long notes of even
length.
Fury/anger Wide pitch ambitus containing busy, running notes but with occasional
single-note bursts, erratic changes or shifts, disjunct motion, overall
unpredictability.
Calm Low- to middle-range tessitura, slower rhythmic patterns, and mostly
stepwise melodic movements that circle around a central pitch or remain
static.
Joy/pleasure Ascending melodic direction, tending toward a middle- or high-range
tessitura, pulsing and repeating rhythms, often dotted-eighth-and-sixteenthnote formulae.
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composers insist repeatedly upon the same pitch, such lines often represent a kind of stable, middle
state used for proclaiming, uttering, announcing, or otherwise speaking forth some kind of definitive
set of claims. On the other hand, when composers represent the passions with rhythmic material,
those passages that utter energetic, more active passions tend to be filled with many notes, often
rapidly articulated or composed of some sort of fast-moving material. Both individual and longer
chains of dotted, skipping rhythms are often used to inject energy and to activate. By contrast, long
notes are used by Purcell to represent sluggish and negative passions.
Beyond these simple parameters, it is the artful combination of pitch- and rhythm-based
mimetic activity that emphasizes and increases the concentration of such representations of passion.
Using these more complex building blocks, various shades of passions can be represented, and a
large variety of combinations becomes possible. Table 3.1 illustrates the sorts of combinations
composers avail themselves of when composing melodic material. Such figures can be readily found
throughout the music of Purcell and his contemporaries regardless of genre. I will begin my
analyses, however, by examining a selection of Cecilian odes—music that reflected self-consciously
on the expressive capabilities of music—that emerged from the last decades of the 1600s in London.
In addition, I will examine works from a variety of vocal and instrumental genres within Purcell’s
body of work.
Affective Analyses of the Cecilian Odes
The Cecilian odes present excellent opportunities to glean late seventeenth-century
compositional techniques for representing the passions. Beginning with Purcell’s Welcome to All the
Pleasures in 1683, poets created and composers set new texts annually for two decades that
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commemorated St. Cecilia, the patroness of music.23 Since these festivals were self-consciously
celebrating music and its marvelous effects, poets extolled the power of music in the new works they
created while composers matched such expression in aural form. Not all the Cecilian odes are
extant; however, the ones that survive range from works regarded as masterpieces (most notably, the
verses of John Dryden and the music of Purcell) to comparatively lesser-known verse and musical
compositions. This analytical section, which will focus on a selection of phrases and other short
excerpts from the Cecilian odes, will shed light on relevant musico-rhetorical figures that were used
as foundational musical compositional materials by Purcell and his contemporaries.
My focus on the Cecilian odes stems from the supposition that music about the power of
music provides special insight into how composers conceived of the capacities of music to
transform the passions—to both model and influence affective states. In particular, since composers
are setting texts about the power of music, the compositional agenda is largely guided by the texts
being set, which offer poetic and imaginative ways of identifying music’s power over listeners. Given
this, we can find in the Cecilian odes a consistent vocabulary of musico-rhetorical figures used by
several composers during the Restoration period, revealing beliefs, attitudes, and concepts about
musical composition shared by this community of composers working in England. Some of the
musico-rhetorical commonplaces in this repertoire are based in shared assumptions about human
nature, the relationship between mental and physical states, and the manner in which passions
manifest themselves in movement. Notably, composers employed musico-rhetorical techniques that
they believed to be capable of eliciting specific emotions in audiences. The ensuing analyses will be
23 Cecilian celebrations in Europe preceded English odes on the same subject by a hundred years, most notably in the
festival established in Evreux, Normandy, in 1571. Prizes were awarded for performance and composition beginning in
1575, of which Orlando di Lasso won several. Noted by Burmeister for his particularly distinctive use of musicorhetorical figures, Lasso is important to the tradition of setting Cecilian texts with symbolic character and affective
representations that later English celebrations would model. See John Rice, Saint Cecilia in the Renaissance: The Emergence of
a Musical Icon (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2022), 76-158.
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organized by the emotions intended to be both represented and elicited. Within each subsection, my
commentary on each piece will focus on brief, illustrative phrases, paying detailed attention to their
melodic, rhythmic, and harmonic elements for the purpose of elucidating how they combine to
represent the passions. When poetry and text include reference to inherently musical terms, such as
instruments, these will also be examined and shown to be particularly rich fields for mining musical
rhetorical techniques commonly employed for the transformation of audiences.
Calm/Peaceful/Relaxing
Instances of calm, relaxing, or peaceful passions involve a stilling, slowing, or tendency
towards stasis, so any noticeable movement will be as minimal as possible. Among the many
passages related to these gentler passions, one particularly noteworthy example can be found in the
second Cecilian ode, Begin the Song, penned by John Oldham and set to music by John Blow in 1684.
In the bass solo “Music’s the cordial of a troubled Breast,” Blow reveals two ways he understands
“calm” to be represented melodically and rhythmically (see fig. 3.1). These representations of
calmness appear in a passage where Blow juxtaposes them with the “ruffling passions of the mind,”
creating an oppositional motion of the passions that highlights the qualities of calmness in contrast
to those of the “ruffling passions.” In the first representation of calmness, Blow employs a long,
held tonic G, to figure solidity, stability, and motionlessness. This is interrupted by the “ruffling
passions” in the next bar, a bursting flurry of fast rhythms quickly descending an entire octave to
capture the hurtling, tumbling aspect of emotional turbulence, which is again followed by a second
instance of calm, represented by separated quarter notes that descend gently down the scale.
Whereas calmness had originally been depicted by pitch stasis, this second depiction shows that,
after being interrupted by jagged emotional fervor, reaching a calm state is something that requires a
calming down after being in an excited state. Thus, depending on the context of oppositional motion,
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Figure 3.1. John Blow, Begin the Song, 1684, “Music’s the cordial of a troubled Breast”
Source: John Blow, A Second Musical Entertainment Perform’d on St. Cecilia’s Day (London: Printed by
John Playford, 1685), 57-58.
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calmness can also be indicated with the use of a downwardly directed melodic contour. Here, it is
further combined with a gently slowing rhythmic structure, which provides an image of relaxing,
slowing, and enervating motions. Finally, the quarter rests that separate each instance of the word
“calm” are themselves further indicators of relaxing passions.
Since music is a moving art, the representation of still and comparatively inactive states can
often be found in contexts containing active, though repeating rhythmic figures. Such states of
relative calm bear other marks that allow busy lines to remain indicators of gentle passions. In 1687,
Giovanni Battista Draghi composed the Cecilian ode From Harmony, from Heav’nly Harmony, setting
John Dryden’s famous text by the same title. In the countertenor solo “The soft complaining flute,”
Draghi’s task is to set the following text: “The soft complaining flute / In dying notes discovers /
The woes of hopeless lovers, / Whose dirge is whisper’d by the warbling lute.” Here, he emphasizes
the melancholy side of love in the first three lines—with oozing suspensions and sighing figures for
two recorders—before shifting to a focus on the peaceful dimensions of love’s gradual dissipation
(see fig. 3.2). On the word “warbling,” Draghi introduces repeating dotted rhythmic patterns in
small, stepwise intervals. This gentle rising and falling, involving largely stepwise motion and a small
ambitus of pitch that circles around central notes, conveys a murmuring or bubbling activity that
suggests the sweetness, charm, relaxation, and peacefulness of something liquid—perhaps gentle
waters or unctuous oozing honey. Recall the words of Vossius, whose principles seem to be at work
in Draghi’s hands: “The trochee, beginning with a long syllable and ending with a short. This foot
mimics completely frail and effeminate movement, vigorous at the start, but soon losing energy—
wherefore it is suitable for expressing gentle and amorous effects.”24 Such settings become musical
figures that typify the lute as an especially effective instrument for imitating “gentle and amorous
effects,” highlighting how the specific word “warbling” was chosen by the poet Dryden to suggest
24 Vossius, De poematum cantu, 27.
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Figure 3.2. G. B. Draghi, From Harmony, from Heav’nly Harmony, 1687, “The soft complaining flute,”
mm. 28-47
Source: Giovanni Battista Draghi, Cantatas, Odes and Anthems: Manuscript from the Libraries of William
Horsley; the Musical Society of London; Sacred Harmonic Society, unpublished manuscript score [ca. 1700],
copied by John Blow, MS 1097, Royal College of Music Library, London, p. 101.
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the kind of emotive powers possessed by the lute. We can see that Blow appears to have either made
a change to the text or made or reproduced a copyist’s error, switching the word order of Dryden’s
“whose dirge is whisper’d by the warbling lute” and transforming it into “whose dirge is warbled by
the whispering lute” (emphasis mine). This change brings into relief the clear differences between
musical expression of the two terms, with “whispering” being captured by a sighing slur, but
“warbling” by a gentle, downward bouncing.
The Cecilian odes are especially replete with examples of musical instruments standing as
poetic metaphors for all manner of inner states. Poets such as Dryden make much use of
instrument-based imagery, assigning various passion-related functions and abilities to the
instruments, especially their capacity to cause such passions to come about. In the text that Draghi
sets, the flute’s primary activity is woeful “complaining,” while the lute is assigned to a calming and
soothing “warbling.” Reference to the lute in connection with the theme of romantic love probably
finds its strongest association with love through the image of the troubadour, accompanying himself
while singing songs of love. Of course, England had its own self-accompanying master of lute songs
in John Dowland. Shakespeare himself associates the lute with sexual love in the opening words of
Richard III, where Richard announces the “winter of our discontent” and criticizes a corrupt
monarch, who instead of fighting his enemies, “capers nimbly in a lady’s chamber / To the
lascivious pleasing of a lute.”25 It seems likely that Dryden attached “warbling” to the lute through
John Milton’s influence, who wrote in Sonnet XVII: “To hear the Lute well toucht, or artfull voice /
Warble immortal Notes and Tuskan Ayre?”26
References to the lute and other instruments in Cecilian odes do not function only as
metaphorical poetic images or imitations of the kinds of sounds instruments make, but contain
25 Shakespeare, Richard III, act 1, sc. 1, lines 12-13. 26 Milton, Poems, &c., 60. Italics in the original.
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attempts by composers to represent with any instrument (though especially the voice), the essential
passion activating functions possessed by each instrument family. As in the above example, Draghi
introduces repeated dotted eighth and sixteenth patterns to figure “warbling” characteristics, further
cementing the gentle, hypnotic, and erotic connotations of the lute’s supposed nature and purpose.
These breezy, swinging rhythms create a softer, gentler response to the woeful complaining of the
earlier stanzas, bringing the overall tone from melancholic and bitter to a calming and easing
contrast of song-like rhythmic patterns.
Joy/Pleasure
The passions of joy and pleasure, which are positive, bear some resemblance in musical
figuration to the passions of calmness and peacefulness, but also have their distinctive traits. In the
very first Cecilian ode composed, Henry Purcell’s Welcome to All the Pleasures, the presumption of the
librettist Christopher Fishburn was that music was mostly to be conceived as a pleasure, and
therefore related to the affirmative passions of happiness and joy. Discernable from each other in
their level of energetic intensity, happiness and joy are figured by Purcell in similar, but importantly
different ways. The first instance of his representation of happiness occurs in the opening chorus on
the text “Hail to this happy place, this Musical Assembly” (see fig. 3.3). While the chorus begins in E
minor, this section gradually centers on G major when expressing “Hail to this happy place.” In the
setting of this latter text, the consonant harmony in parallel thirds conveys the inner parallel of the
congruent motions of peaceful accord. In the excerpt above, the bass voice sounds as the principal
voice, articulating a basic, ascending passage with a gently optimistic rising melody that targets
melodic arrival points of G, C, A, then B, a rising structure that itself is ornamented by divisions that
lift lightly upward. Additionally, Purcell adorns the higher voice with sharpened thirds, further
connoting the inflating and expanding quality of happiness itself.
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Figure 3.3. Henry Purcell, Welcome to All the Pleasures, 1683, opening chorus
Source: Henry Purcell, Another St. Cecilia: Welcome to all the pleasures [Welcome to all the pleasures, Z. 339],
in Vocal and instrumental musick: as composed by Mr. Henry Purcell, 105-142 (unpublished manuscript
score, 1765; Robert Pindar, copyist), MS 993, Royal College of Music Library, London, p. 108.
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It is notable that, in the context of the ode, which mostly follows a one-note-to-a-syllable
homophonic style, Purcell’s use of melisma usually breaks out in the presence of passion-related
terms. For “happy” he uses a long series of running eighths, employing faster note values and florid
passages to convey the particularities of happiness. Such faster runs, called “coloratura” by
Bernhard, are commonly used by Purcell to convey emotional content. Dotted rhythms in repeating
patterns are also often featured in representations of joy and happiness, as rhythmic repetition is
generally quite commonly employed for shaping the various movements of the passions. When used
to represent joy or happiness, however, repeating dotted rhythms are used with more energetic force
than when used to represent calmness or peacefulness. In “Welcome to All the Pleasures,” Purcell
represents joy as a more active and forceful version of happiness, employing a repeating series of
dotted eighths with sixteenths to indicate a lighter and more skipping, jubilant passion related to
happiness (see fig. 3.4). The word “Joys” also receives a more elevated tessitura and higher ending
pitch when compared to the more circulating, less active passion of happiness.
It is interesting that Purcell’s approach to the representation of the passions (like Blow’s) is
mostly word-by-word, where each distinct idea receives its own pattern.27 Thus, in this context of
jolly running passages in triple time, Purcell articulates “celestial” with leaps of a major third, perfect
fifth, or octave to represent both heavenly harmoniousness or perfection as well as the lofty distance
or great height of the celestial realm.28 “Joys,” in contrast, is represented primarily by its strikingly
ascending melodic thrust, beginning with a leap of a fourth and followed by further rising dotted
eighth notes and sixteenths in alternation. Joy, happiness, and pleasure are therefore chiefly
27 Scholarship focused on the music of Johann Sebastian Bach has explored the connection of basic motivic shape to
passions and musical expressivity in detail. Especially useful is Joe Armstrong’s translation of André Pirro’s 1907
commentary on the construction and design of Bach’s elementary melodic material. Joe Armstrong, “The Formation of
Bach’s Motifs: Chapter Two of André Pirro’s ‘L’Esthétique de Jean-Sébastien Bach,’” Bach: Journal of the Riemenschneider
Bach Institute 41, no. 1 (2010): 32–96. 28 As detailed in chapter 1, the association of perfect intervals or consonances with the heavens or “music of the
spheres” functions as a rhetorical commonplace that has been in use since the early Pythagoreans, through Boethius,
into the Middle Ages, and is related to the deep core of early modern scientific attempts to quantify physical reality.
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Figure 3.4. Henry Purcell, Welcome to All the Pleasures, 1683, “While joys celestial”
Source: Henry Purcell, Another St. Cecilia: Welcome to all the pleasures [Welcome to all the pleasures, Z. 339],
in Vocal and instrumental musick: as composed by Mr. Henry Purcell, 105-142 (unpublished manuscript
score, 1765; Robert Pindar, copyist), MS 993, Royal College of Music Library, London, p. 118.
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represented by ascending melodies, and further distinguished from figurations of calmness and
peacefulness by more vivacious levels of activity.
In general, ascending melodies and more vivacious activity were generally correlated with
positive, rising energy. While this often manifested as joy, happiness, or pleasure, it could also
manifest in other nuanced ways. Towards the end of the run of London Cecilian celebrations,
Daniel Purcell set the poetry of Samuel Wesley, Sr., who gave a final admonition at the end of his
ode to “Raise the voice, and raise the soul.”29 In this instance, Daniel Purcell’s simple but effective
mimesis gently moves upward by step, reminding musicians that the raising of the voice and soul is
both a literal and figurative elevation, and that by singing uplifting melodies, they simultaneously
boost their interior capacities (see fig. 3.5). The relationship between the two Purcells is more than
familial and consists in a shared vocabulary of melodic themes which themselves bear a family
resemblance to one another. Of course, like all musical and grammatical elements, such structures
themselves have a history that antedates their use in Restoration court odes. The Purcells also share
the tendency to set single syllables to single notes, excepting verbal or active vocabulary, which tend
to be the recipients of musical figurations.
Anger/Fury
Like joy, happiness, and their related passions, the passions of anger, rage, frustration,
condemnation and their affective cousins are likewise rushing, swiftly manifesting passions, but
instead of being affirmative in orientation, they are negative. Related words and types of sentiments,
such as alarm, fear, panic, frenzy, fury, indignation, danger, warnings, alerts, commands, and any
29 Annual musical celebrations of St. Cecilia’s day in London span from 1683 to 1703, interrupted only by the political
instability and regime change spanning the years of 1688 and 1689. After 1703, annual celebrations cease and run only
sporadically through the eighteenth century. For details regarding these occasions, see William Henry Husk, An Account
of the Musical Celebrations on St. Cecilia’s Day in the Sixteenth, Seventeenth, and Eighteenth Centuries (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2015), 10-103.
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Figure 3.5. Daniel Purcell, Ode for St. Cecilia’s Day, 1698, “Raise the voice, and raise the soul”
Source: Daniel Purcell, Ode for St. Cecilia’s Day, 1698, ed. Richard Charteris, Baroque Music Series 48
(Albany, NY: PNB Productions, 2007), p. 40.
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mention of generally aggressive thematic materials, are often set in similar ways. Given their fastmoving nature as passions experienced in the body, such affections find their principal expression in
musical figures that themselves consist of fast passages and similarly active rhythmic frameworks. At
the same time, the negativity of this set of affections is conveyed primarily through the character of
the melodic contours chosen, the directionality and arrival points of leaps, and the degree of
dissonance present. Through the skillful management of figures, composers convey emotional
content with remarkable accuracy.
In the next excerpt, Henry Purcell sets the phrase “The fife and all the harmony of war in
vain the passions to alarm” with frantic runs that both ascend and descend, leading ultimately to an
unpredictable terminus point (see fig. 3.6). On the words “passions” and “alarm,” we see fast
running passages, with the setting of the word “alarm” especially exhibiting a quick span of a wide
ambitus, erratic changes of direction, and little pitch repetition. Overall, the phrase lingers in the
higher vocal register. When setting the repetitions of the word “alarm,” Purcell chooses jerking leaps
of fifths and octaves and quick repeated eighth notes to convey the kind of panic found in bodily
expressions during states of confusion or uncertainty. The arpeggiated leaps are also notably
trumpet-like, the trumpet being an instrument then as now associated in the public mind with
military uses for alerting troops for action. Further reinforcing the overall unpredictable nature of
this passage, continuo entrances are separated by long rests and consist of swift-moving short
phrases, occasionally peppered with speedy runs down the octave.
Just as the musical figurations associated with joy and pleasure are also more generally used
to convey high-energy, positive emotions, the musical figurations associated with anger and fury are
also generally used to convey rising energy states with negative connotations. Draghi faced the task
of setting Dryden’s text, which is replete with apocalyptic themes and dreadful, fearsome
connotations. Thus, on the phrase “Arise, ye more than dead!” in the aria “When nature
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Figure 3.6. Henry Purcell, Hail! Bright Cecilia, 1692, “The fife and all the harmony of war”
Source: Henry Purcell, St. Cecilia, composed for 1692: Hail bright Cecilia hail [Hail, bright Cecilia, Z. 328],
in Vocal and instrumental musick: as composed by Mr. Henry Purcell, 1-104 (unpublished manuscript score,
1765; Robert Pindar, copyist), MS 993, Royal College of Music Library, London, p. 75.
134

underneath,” Draghi conveys the fear, awe, and dread of the sudden sight of the dead under the
earth coming to life by setting the word “arise” with an ascending scale, suggesting the dualities of
fear and excitement (see fig. 3.7). Important as well, alongside this obvious use of upward motion, is
that the rising pitch is accompanied by an increase in speed. The wide pitch ambitus and slight
unpredictability of the rhythm help to indicate that it may not merely be positive emotions at play
here, but negative ones as well. Since Draghi repeats the term “arise” musically in two different ways,
we can infer that both a long rising run and short intervallic jumps of a fifth or octave are thought to
convey the same feeling in this context. Importantly, these considerations help to show that the
ascending melodic line on “arise” is not just word painting. It is not merely there to illustrate that the
word is literally about upward motion; rather, it is there because an ascending line with some
disjunct motion and a wide ambitus can also evoke the rushing, negative passions of fear and other
negative excitements.
As noted in the earlier example from Henry Purcell’s Ode for St. Cecilia’s Day, trumpet-like
sounds are often used to elicit aggressive or alarming passions, and they are typically of two types:
pyrrhic rhythms and military-sounding arpeggiations. Stretching back at least to Monteverdi’s
conscious use of pyrrhic rhythms in his Madrigali guerrieri et amorosi of 1638, composers of Purcell’s
milieu themselves readily absorb the figure, using repeating eighth notes to hammer the mind to
attention, sharply and briskly indicating passions that are themselves sharp and brisk. As Vossius
says, pyrrhic rhythms are “suitable only for portraying rapid movements…‘as if all is on fire’ from its
mobility.”30 Such rhythms were associated with the essence of the trumpet’s function, the typical
flurry of short bursts of wind in quick, knocking rhythms used to call soldiers to attention and to
raise courage in preparation for battle. Draghi, facing Dryden’s apocalyptic finale in the chorus “As
from the pow’r of sacred lays,” uses such trumpeting figures to structure his musical representation
30 Vossius, De poematum cantu, 27.
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Figure 3.7. G. B. Draghi, From Harmony, from Heav’nly Harmony, 1687, “When nature underneath”
Source: Giovanni Battista Draghi, Cantatas, Odes and Anthems: Manuscript from the Libraries of William
Horsley; the Musical Society of London; Sacred Harmonic Society, unpublished manuscript score [ca. 1700],
copied by John Blow, MS 1097, Royal College of Music Library, London, p. 91.
136

Figure 3.8. G. B. Draghi, From Harmony, from Heav’nly Harmony, 1687, “As from the pow’r of sacred
lays”
Source: Giovanni Battista Draghi, Cantatas, Odes and Anthems: Manuscript from the Libraries of William
Horsley; the Musical Society of London; Sacred Harmonic Society, unpublished manuscript score [ca. 1700],
copied by John Blow, MS 1097, Royal College of Music Library, London, p. 111.
137

of the final destruction of the world, expressed in Dryden’s text as follows: “So when the last and
dreadful hour / This crumbling pageant shall devour, / The trumpet shall be heard on high; / The
dead shall live, the living die, / And Music shall untune the sky.” On the text “The trumpet shall be
heard on high,” Draghi uses short, detached rhythms for the entrance of the new theme, which is
characteristic for the trumpet in its pyrrhic rhythms and ascending major scale (see fig. 3.8).
We can find similar figures employing trumpet-like aggression in contexts with no textual
reference to the instrument, though still calling upon the same affective thematic material. When
encountering the term “jarring” in the chorus “Soul of the world,” for instance, Henry Purcell uses
short, pyrrhic rhythms in a flurry of repeating eighth notes on the same pitch to capture the jostling
and jolting sense of the word and to transmit similar jarring sensations to the listener on a more
fundamentally moving level (see fig. 3.9). Adding an additional layer of artistry to the concept of
“jarring,” Henry Purcell also repeats the notes A, F, C, and E-flat—an almost first-inversion
dominant-seventh chord in the context of B-flat major—as a means of employing the dissonance
and pressure to resolve as an affective device.
Besides with pyrrhic rhythms, the trumpet is also often alluded to using arpeggiated chords
that mirror the overtone series of a natural trumpet. Major triads are outlined clearly and the leaping
nature of these lines is the same as those found in military calls. This is often used in combination
with pyrrhic rhythms, as can be seen in the countertenor solo “The trumpet calls to arms” from
Daniel Purcell’s Ode for St. Cecilia’s Day. Here, Daniel Purcell sets the text “The trumpet calls to
arms!” with a pyrrhic arpeggio, attempting to excite and convey the energy of battle (see fig. 3.10).
As with pyrrhic rhythms more generally, military arpeggiations are also used in contexts that do not
textually invoke the trumpet, conveying the affective content of related themes such as shouts, hails,
cheers, and commands.
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Figure 3.9. Henry Purcell, Hail! bright Cecilia, 1692, “Soul of the world”
139

Source: Henry Purcell, St. Cecilia, composed for 1692: Hail bright Cecilia hail [Hail, bright Cecilia, Z. 328],
in Vocal and instrumental musick: as composed by Mr. Henry Purcell, 1-104 (unpublished manuscript score,
1765; Robert Pindar, copyist), MS 993, Royal College of Music Library, London, p. 44-45.
140

Figure 3.10. Daniel Purcell, Ode for St. Cecilia’s Day, 1698, “The trumpet calls to arms”
Source: Daniel Purcell, Ode for St. Cecilia’s Day, 1698, ed. by Richard Charteris, Baroque Music Series
48 (Albany, NY: PNB Productions, 2007), p. 31.
Figure 3.11. Charles Le Brun, “La Tristesse,” 1732
Source: Charles Le Brun, Expressions des passions de l’Ame, engraved by Étienne Picard and Jean
Audran (Augsburg: Martin Engelbrecht, 1732). Image courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
141

Sadness/Melancholy
Depictions of sadness trade on human expressive gestures indicating the same: tears
dripping down cheeks, moaning and wailing vocalizations, slumping heads and shoulders, and other
such bodily traits. Charles Le Brun’s famous drawings supply good examples (see fig. 3.11). Just as
these features are themselves components of sadness, so similarly do mimetically aligned treatments
of pitch and rhythm bear an analogous relation.
Musical figures indicating such passions are found throughout Henry Purcell’s work, but we
can find a particularly vivid setting of such passions in Purcell’s 1692 ode, Hail! bright Cecilia. In the
countertenor solo “’Tis nature’s voice,” he sets “grieve” with a series of descending half-step figures
in the melody falling on the downbeat of each bar, combining suspensions with stark harmonic
dissonances and jagged motion in the bass line (see fig. 3.12). Just as when representing the
expanding character of joy, here Purcell sets the collapsing nature of grief, by constant use of
shortening or flattening intervals.
Just as the trumpet became associated with war and high-energy states of emotion, sadness
and melancholy were especially conveyed with the flute. Like the lute, the flute was thought to be
particularly apt for expressing emotions involved in romantic love; however, the flute seems to have
been used for expressing its more sorrowful or painful aspects.31 Dryden describes the flute as “soft”
and “complaining,” and Draghi mirrors these notions by choosing rhythmic and intervallic choices
apt for expressing just these ideas in the countertenor solo “The soft complaining flute” in his 1687
ode, From Harmony, from Heav’nly Harmony (see fig. 3.13). “Softness” is figured by long notes held at a
fairly low pitch, while “complaining” is represented by a rising half step and a quick descent,
suggesting an onomatopoeic relationship to moaning, wailing, or crying in ordinary human vocal
31 For a discussion of the history of the metaphorical meanings of the flute and other instruments, see Emanuel
Winterniz, Musical Instruments and Their Symbolism in Western Art (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1979).
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Figure 3.12. Henry Purcell, Hail! bright Cecilia, 1692, “’Tis nature’s voice”
Source: Henry Purcell, St. Cecilia, composed for 1692: Hail bright Cecilia hail [Hail, bright Cecilia, Z. 328],
in Vocal and instrumental musick: as composed by Mr. Henry Purcell, 1-104 (unpublished manuscript score,
1765; Robert Pindar, copyist), MS 993, Royal College of Music Library, London, p. 43.
143

Figure 3.13. G. B. Draghi, From Harmony, from Heav’nly Harmony, 1687, “The soft complaining flute,”
mm. 7-27
Source: Giovanni Battista Draghi, Cantatas, Odes and Anthems: Manuscript from the Libraries of William
Horsley; the Musical Society of London; Sacred Harmonic Society, unpublished manuscript score [ca. 1700],
copied by John Blow, MS 1097, Royal College of Music Library, London, p. 100-101.
144

Figure 3.14. Henry Purcell, Hail! bright Cecilia, 1692, “In vain the am’rous flute”
Source: Henry Purcell, St. Cecilia, composed for 1692: Hail bright Cecilia hail [Hail, bright Cecilia, Z. 328],
in Vocal and instrumental musick: as composed by Mr. Henry Purcell, 1-104 (unpublished manuscript score,
1765; Robert Pindar, copyist), MS 993, Royal College of Music Library, London, p. 69.
145

utterance.32 Furthermore, the phrase continues with the expression “in dying notes,” which Draghi
represents by slurred downward-directing half steps in order to capture the slumping and energyreleasing nature of death.
Purcell himself has the opportunity to compose to a text that associates the flute with its
related family of affections in 1692 in the duet “In vain the am’rous flute” in Hail! bright Cecilia,
where he sets Nicholas Brady’s text “In vain the am’rous flute and soft guitar / Jointly labour to
inspire / Wanton heat and loose desire” (see fig. 3.14). Henry Purcell’s setting of a text mentioning
the flute uses a traditional pairing of two flutes in order to capture the relationship of harmonious
lovers who while two, are dedicated to a common cause. In this instance, Purcell’s melodic devices
suggest the flirtatious “amorous” side of romantic love, with gently bubbling phrases that rise up
and pull back, connoting the back and forth nature of flirting, which keeps the subject guessing at
the degree of amorous intention that may or may not be involved.
Conclusion
The foregoing selection of examples from the Cecilian odes has shown how Restoration
English composers shared a musical rhetoric of the passions that leaned on the manipulation of
fundamental rhythmic patterns and small units of melodic material to mimic the emotional and
psychological states of the passions. Such musical modeling of inner states was central to Henry
Purcell’s compositional approach, and chapter 4 will further demonstrate how this modeling took
place in Purcell’s works.
32 The long tradition of association between flat notes and femininity is explored by Bonnie J. Blackburn in her essay
“The Lascivious Career of B-Flat,” in Bonnie J. Blackburn and Laurie Stras, eds., Eroticism in Early Modern Music
(Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2015).
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– Chapter 4 –
Musical Motion and the Passions (Part II):
Applying the Mimetic Approach to Analyses of Three Works by Henry Purcell
Having demonstrated in chapter 3 how the passions are expressed musically in the works of
Purcell and his contemporaries, using the Cecilian odes as a study case, I turn now to a small
selection of vocal and instrumental works by Henry Purcell in order to demonstrate how the
rhythmic and contrapuntal insights of Vossius and Bernhard can also be applied to interpreting
more complex combinations of passions in their musical representation. Key here is the insight—
which I first extrapolated above in the analyses of the Cecilian odes—that it is the sense of
increasing versus decreasing energy states that gives listeners, performers, and scholars access to the
mimetic approach of musical composition by Purcell and his contemporaries. In performance or
scholarly analysis, I argue that it is the identification of these energy states that contributes to the
sense of how composers and performers of the long seventeenth century expected to move their
audiences—regardless of what passion the present-day performer or scholar may attribute to the
passage of music in the process of interpreting these energy states. Thus, I see concepts of the
passions in the music of this time as concepts of extremes, where the rhetorical—or persuasive—
force of the music can best be appreciated through an emphasis on these extreme opposites of inner
states.
In previous chapters, I have shown how passions were conceived as oppositional states of
motion, composed themselves of increasing and decreasing energy states, and their being calming or
upsetting, with Vossius and Bernhard lending rhythmic and contrapuntal insight into how such
states of being can be musically represented. But more generally, a performance and scholarly focus
on how these extremes and movements between extremes are communicated in the written music
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or performance of it would pay attention to dyads of many kinds, whether they are of internal states
or expressive means in the music. Such a focus would come across in performance, for example, as
making fast passages faster than is the norm in performance practice of this music today, and slow
passages slower, in order to create an effective mimesis of the movements that take place in the
experience of emotion, and it might come across in scholarship as a recognition of such dramatic
contrasts as rhetorically central to a work’s basic purpose. Such a manneristic overemphasis and
heightening of extremes serves to illuminate the motions within a passion—music being a moving
art form—so that one can perceive, for instance, that happiness is a fast thing, and sadness
something slow. Such perceptions contribute to the felt sense of the passions and how they are
brought to life in music. I turn now to an examination of three pieces of music in greater depth—
two vocal and one instrumental—to show how such an analytical perspective could work in more
comprehensive interpretation of musical works from this time.
“From Rosie Bowers”
Replete with Purcell’s techniques for representing the many movements connected to the
variety of passions, the song “From Rosie Bowers” exemplifies many of the rhetorical figures
present in the Cecilian odes (see fig. 4.1). The popularity of this aria, which found a healthy life of its
own after Purcell himself was gone, stems from its being overtly about the representation of a
variety of passions.1
The song is based upon Thomas D’Urfey’s libretto for Don Quixote in which he
separates the song into five “Movements” with each labeled in the margin next to the line of poetry
most exemplifying the mood listed (see fig. 4.2). For a performer to more vividly convey each of the
1 For an account of its life as a concert-hall showpiece and a discussion of possible subtextual meanings, see Olive
Baldwin and Thelma Wilson, “Henry Purcell’s Mad Songs in the Theatre and Concert Rooms in the Eighteenth
Century,” in British Music, Musicians and Institutions, c. 1630-1800: Essays in Honour of Harry Diack Johnstone, ed. Peter Lynan
and Julian Rushton, 91–105 (Martlesham, UK: Boydell & Brewer, 2021).
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Figure 4.1. Henry Purcell, “From Rosie Bowers,” in Don Quixote: The Music in the Three Plays of
Thomas Durfey, 1696
(continued on next page)
149

Source: Henry Purcell, John Eccles, and Thomas D’Urfey, Don Quixote: The Music in the Three Plays of
Thomas Durfey, ed. Curtis Alexander Price (Tunbridge Wells, UK: R. Macnutt, 1984), p. III.14-III.15.
150

Figure 4.2. D’Urfey, “From Rosie Bowers,” in The Comical History of Don Quixote, 1696
Source: Thomas D’Urfey, The comical history of Don Quixote. The Third Part. With the Marriage of Mary the
Buxome. Written by Mr. D’Urfey (London: Printed for Samuel Briscoe, 1696), 49, Early English Books
Online.
151

varieties of passion listed by D’Urfey, knowledge of Purcell’s rhetorical techniques for creating
compelling mimetic figures becomes a practical method for heightening expression.
In the first movement “Love,” Purcell captures the internal tension involved in love by
creating several contradictory moods across different phrases. Here, Purcell suggests that love
inherently twists and tugs at the heart. The first few measures, for example, engage in softening and
descending themes illustrating “the sleeping God of love,” but immediately launch into arousing and
energetic motifs while describing images of winged creatures flitting about when setting the phrase
“hither ye little waiting Cupids fly.” The third phrase slowly rises by half-step with dissonances on
“teach me in soft melodious strains to move,” then goes to a series of backfalls that illustrate “tender
passion.” In the final phrase, the performer can highlight how the words “ah” and “dear” are set as
exact melodic opposites, suggesting something exciting and energizing about the former, while
implying something comparatively softer and more tender about the latter.
In the second movement (which receives the descriptor “gaily” by D’Urfey), Purcell changes
the time signature to a brisk “2” to represent the “brisk and airy” nature of the affect. Several layers
of repeating rhythms in both the bass and melodic lines generate a hurried excitement and allusions
to brisk dancing. In order for the mimesis to be effective, performers must ensure that the tempo is
amply brisk and that articulation is sufficiently light. Notably, Purcell uses the rhythmic structure of
“Or if more influencing” to create a - | - - - - __ - pattern that repeats regularly throughout. The
second phrase of the movement ratchets up the energy by increasing the rhythmic brevity of the
melodic line, creating a galloping quarter-eighth-eighth repeating pattern for two bars. Performers
can lean into the brisk rhythmic character of each phrase to help heighten the sense of speed and
levity in this movement.
In the third movement, marked “slow” and “melancholy” by D’Urfey, performers can
exaggerate the slowness and heaviness of the movement to contrast with the fastness of the
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previous movement. Moments that could especially be emphasized are marked by Purcell’s use of
suspensions and drooping lines falling by whole step or half step. In these instances, we can see
Purcell’s method of linking musical figures to individual words from the libretto, with expressive
materials grouped by affective type. Exaggerating these figures as they appear on the words “vain”
“despair” “cold” and “dead” highlights the fact that they each receive the same descending eighth
note figurations, suggesting the affective kinship of all such states. The textual repetition that Purcell
employs in this movement further reinforces the heavy affect of the movement, often amplifying
terms by repeating them in places where D’Urfey’s text does not. In an especially noteworthy
moment, though D’Urfey’s writes “my Pulse Beats a Dead March,” Purcell’s composition sets the
text as “my Pulse Beats a Dead, dead March | my Pulse Beats a Dead, Dead March,” showing
exactly what words and ideas Purcell believes requires musical emphasis to add piquancy and
bitterness to the melancholic movement.
In the fourth movement, in a similar manner to how the first movement depicts the
conflicting feelings of being torn apart by love, the main character Altisidora is now depicted being
torn in different directions as she deliberates the question “shall I Thaw my Self or Drown?”
D’Urfey notes the fourth movement with the curious note “passion” without any further sense of
what affect might be intended. But Purcell sets the text of the central question several times, and
unlike D’Urfey’s construction, Purcell ends the movement by repeating that same question. Given
this fact, it is clear that Purcell’s gloss on the movement centers around the deliberation experienced
by the main character Altisidora. To emphasize this inner conflict and sense of indecision, Purcell
created a bass line that offers an equal number of rising and falling phrases and regularly alternates
between melodic and natural minor to indicate the possibility of things going either way for
Altisidora.
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Finally, it is precisely this confusion and being torn between possibilities that leads to the
fifth and final movement. Purcell indicates the answer to Altisidora’s question—“no, no, I’ll straight
run mad”—by indicating a C-major key for this movement, contrasting with the C-minor key of the
previous movement. In the second stanza, which D’Urfey labels as “frenzy,” we can see how Purcell
uses a gradual increase of motion in the bass line to describe an ever-increasing amount of energy,
indicating a growing wildness and confusion caused by Altisidora’s lovesickness. To interpret
D’Urfey’s hyperbolic descriptions of torn robes and locks of hair, which seem to be images of
increasing degrees of madness, performers can look to his reference to “a thousand deaths,” which
perhaps connects thematically to the infamous “mille mort’il di” of Arcadelt’s Il bianco e dolce cigno.
Overall, this movement ends the piece in a whirlwind of activity, of madness from love, which
performers can emphasize to conclude the drama.
When embedded in the context of the plot of Don Quixote, the song is overtly erotic and
represents Altisidora’s attempt to show her superiority over her rival Dulcinea after comparing body
parts: “Come now, you shall see me sing and dance, and how far I excel dull Dulcinea.”2 After
Altisidora sings, she is spurned by Don Quixote, rattles off a string of alliterative insults, and exits in
a huff. Thus, “From Rosie Bowers” is a comedically satirical rendering of the means of seduction
and the corresponding types of lovesickness that accompany such overtures. Apparently, the song
found popular success and D’Urfey himself rode that wave, altering the original to magnify
references to different sorts of madness. By 1719, after the song had taken on a life of its own,
section titles were modified to read “Sullenly Mad,” “Mirthfully Mad,” “Melancholy Madness,”
2 Thomas D’Urfey, The comical history of Don Quixote. The Third Part. With the Marriage of Mary the Buxome. Written by Mr.
D’Urfey (London: Printed for Samuel Briscoe, 1696), 48.
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“Fanatically Mad,” and “Stark Mad.” Its popularity is further evidenced by the fact that “From Rosie
Bowers” is placed by D’Urfey on page 1 of the volume he published of his complete songs.3
“Oh Solitude”
While a song such as “From Rosie Bowers” may be an obvious instance of music and text
operating together to express the passions involved in love, and especially easy to understand since it
is embedded in a comic play that supplies characters and context, not all of Purcell’s songs are as
easily interpreted. Interpretation of songs such as Purcell’s “Oh Solitude” from Orpheus Britannicus
can be difficult to achieve without full commitment to a rich concept of musical mimesis. Both the
poetry and Purcell’s compositional figures in “Oh Solitude” suggest active movement and a
disposition that may be quiet and solitary, but is generally affirmative, while whatever hints of fear,
regret, sadness, or any negative affective assessments that exist are only momentary. The text points
to a positive assessment of solitude, the second stanza registering “content” and the third describing
something “agreeable.” Furthermore, if one allows the affective terminology of the piece to drive the
interpretation, the author Antoine Girard de Saint-Amant (via translator Katherine Philips) describes
solitude as something desirable, as the concluding line “how I solitude adore!” suggests, and that it is
something fundamentally pleasurable, as the opening line proclaims it to be “my sweetest choice”
while later praising solitude as “that element of noblest wit.” For these positive feelings and
assessments to be communicated in such a way that actually moves a listener, the performance of the
piece needs to move at a pace that relates to how the body would naturally move toward something
that one desires or is drawn to—that is, with eagerness, excitement, and some liveliness. By contrast,
3 Thomas D’Urfey, Songs Compleat, Pleasant and Divertive; Set to Musick By Dr. John Blow, Mr. Henry Purcell, and other Excellent
Masters of the Town (London: Printed by W. Pearson for J. Tonson, 1719), 1-2.
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modern performances universally treat the piece as a dirge.4
In these performances, tempos remain
at much slower pace than what might be spoken by an orator performing a heightened reading of
the poem. Instead, plodding bass notes crawl along slowly as singers solemnly spin out long phrases
that seem to be offered as what possesses artistic value in Purcell’s music. For a performance of “Oh
Solitude” to feel like a mirror of the passions—a representation of genuine affections—the tempo
would need to be almost doubled, so that the mimetic sense of movement in Purcell’s musical
gestures can become meaningful and more genuinely representative of their emotional objects.
Furthermore, by adopting Bernhard’s approach of describing figures as products of
compositional dissonance negotiation, we can better isolate and label figures used by Purcell to
weave his persuasive tale. Positioning Purcell’s actual melody against a reduction of natural available
consonances, we can bring into relief certain features of his compositional approach and the tools by
which he plied his trade. “Oh Solitude” and other monodic selections are especially useful in a
Bernhardian context since they supply the simplest possible two-voice contrapuntal examples. In
addition to being monodic, “Oh Solitude” supports many possible melodic paths, since it is a
repeating four-bar ground bass over which the vocal line weaves a remarkable variety of possible
melodies across, over, and around the stable repeating bass line. As a repeating line, the ground bass
provides an unchanging foil against which the composer can express whatever passions might be
implied by individual moments in the text. In this analysis, I provide a Bernhardian reduced account
of the most logical consonances given Purcell’s melodic target notes, while avoiding the traditional
voice-leading pitfalls of parallel fifths and octaves. Through such reductions, composers and
performers gain a clearer understanding of Purcell’s compositional tools for achieving mimetic
success. Purcell’s approach has been described by Alon Schab as “Orientating and Disorientating”
4 Beginning with countertenor Alfred Deller’s 1976 recording, modern performers tend to use a similarly slow tempo.
Deller Consort, O Solitude: Chants et Anthems, Harmonia Mundi HMM332472, 2019, new vinyl release, originally released
1976.
156

the listener, where a well-balanced range of both fulfilled and frustrated expectations creates a
musically satisfying experience.5
In this approach, excitement and energy in a ground bass format are
achieved by a twisting, varying, kaleidoscopic rotation—with the musical material pointing in the
same direction during a brief grouping of several bars before changing direction—that creates both
clear expectations as well as surprising turns. Thus, the ground bass form is predicated on the clever
balance of the predictable and unpredictable, generating dramatic gestures of tension and release
through its ongoing harmonic pressure.6
Whether to heighten expressive dramatic moments for
performance or for scholarly comprehension of Purcell’s compositional tools, identifying and
examining the most dissonant and piquant moments in his compositions reveals insightful
information. The harmonic reduction in figure 4.3 is an aid to identifying these moments, which will
be discussed in the ensuing paragraphs.
The dense use of dissonance in “Oh Solitude” is evident from the opening phrase in the
vocal line, and the features highlighted here go on to be used recurringly in the piece. Setting up the
dissonance of the first vocal phrase is first a presentation of the ground bass by itself. Here, it is
useful to pay attention to the harmonic implications of the ground-bass melody on its own. In the
first bar, D on beat three is under pressure to rise to E-flat, and the zenith of the ground, A-flat,
swells upward under pressure to deflate each time back into the stable G, which is itself under
pressure to resolve to back to the tonic, starting the cycle over again. It is imperative that we not
simply treat the ground bass as itself an isolated unit from which all melodic notes must be oriented
as consonances, since the ground bass itself travels through intervals that can be conceived, heard,
and felt as fundamentally dissonant.
5 Alon Schab, “On the Ground and Off: A Comparative Study of Two Purcell Chaconnes,” Musical Times 151, no. 1912
(2010): 54.
6 John Hawkins described the powerful effects of a creative management of a ground bass after hearing violin virtuoso
Niccola Matteis, who “seemed to be spiritato’d and plaid such ravishing things on a ground as astonished us all.” Quoted
in Peter Walls, “The Influence of the Italian Violin School in 17th-Century England,” Early Music 18, no. 4 (1990): 580.
157

Figure 4.3. Author’s reduction of mm. 1-24 of Henry Purcell’s “Oh Solitude”
(continued on next page)
158

Note: The top line is Purcell’s original melody, while the second treble line maps the natural
consonances available over each half note in the ground bass.
159

Over this ground bass, the first entrance of the vocal melody on the note C raises several
issues. Since it would have been a consonant major third over A-flat, and is itself the tonic to the
key, it seems that the G in the bass is the driving note of the dissonance, making the ground bass
itself in this case the agent or active source of tension, suggesting a more primordial possible bass
structure (for a depiction of this underlying bass structure, see fig. 4.4). Note that the final G in the
bass, dropping an octave on beat two, is itself a figure connoting solitude and withdrawal through a
literal dropping out. Rhythmically, each of the initial exclamations on “Oh” in the first two vocal
phrases is distinguished by strong syncopations in which the melodic line is held and the traveling
bass line becomes the source of activity and motion—transitus, as Bernhard would have labeled it—
since it is the note that is the traveling source of pressure and release. As the simplified ground
above shows, the moving note in the ground on beat two is often Purcell’s source for creating
especially piquant dissonant activity. A brief glance at each bar in the reduction above reveals the
overwhelming number of intervals of a second that arrive on beat two, precisely when the bass is a
moving note.
Harmonically, in each of the first three vocal phrases, the setting of the word “solitude” on
the second note strongly conveys the idea that solitude is being longed for, and this momentarily
painful longing is created by the dissonant “Oh” resolving into the consonant “solitude.” Taking
these two basic elements as his theme, Purcell repeats the same text similarly several times, tripling
up on the intensity through anaphoric repetition (see fig. 4.5). It is further noteworthy that the
second instance of “solitude” is double the length of the first, indicating a figurative longing through
a literal lengthening. Understanding the import of this contrast between the dissonant “Oh” and
consonant “solitude” in each iteration would be key to any interpretation of this work, as it sets up
the overriding sentiment of the piece.
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Figure 4.4. Partially reduced ground bass for “Oh Solitude”
Figure 4.5. Henry Purcell, “Oh Solitude,” mm. 1-13
Source: Henry Purcell, Orpheus Brittanicus (London: Printed by J. Heptinstall for Henry Playford,
1698), p. 95.
161

As we can see so far in the analysis, besides Purcell’s treatment of dissonance, delayed
entrances are often rhetorically significant. This is first introduced at the beginning of the
composition, where the first beat of the ground bass is a literal silence, a rest on beat 1 that will be
filled out as a C in every subsequent iteration of the repeating ground. This delayed entrance is a
performed silence that itself is a figuration of the quiet nature of solitude. This hesitation of a voice
to enter is used repeatedly by Purcell in several places to serve as an exclamatio figure, denoting
pleasure, excitement, and longing.7
Measures 3, 7, 9, and 23 are applications of this figure on the
word “Oh,” emphasizing desire or something ravishing. Measures 4, 10, and 16 employ this waiting
figure as a pickup at the end of each bar to “my sweetest choice,” further emphasizing positive
affective energy. Such delaying figures (as is the case with anticipatory figures) are noteworthy for
their being intrinsically rhythmic, a feature that is not immediately obvious when taking Bernhard’s
pitch-centric approach.
As the initial phrases unfold, the third measure of the ground consistently generates
meaningful dissonances that begin with the note G on the second beat. After Purcell begins a new
phrase over E-flat (m. 14), he employs a melodic B-flat, and after having told several times of
sweetness through B-naturals, he uses B-flat to inject a mysteriousness appropriate to “places
devoted to the night.” Though B-flat is consonant against G, and part of the initial key signature,
things quickly become injected with tension when Purcell asserts the same melodic B-flat against Aflat on the downbeat of measure 15. Clashing continues on beat two when the melody asserts A-flat
against the falling G, pressuring the listener with a minor ninth. The image is completed by the
melodic backfall of a diminished fifth, conveying darkness and the subsequent setting of “remote”
as a sinking to the lowest written melodic note of the piece.
7 Dietrich Bartel comments that the musical exclamation has the dual property of being “one of the most obvious
musical-rhetorical devices” and also one of the rarest and latest to receive a name by theorists in the Musica Poetica
tradition. Bartel, Musica Poetica, 265-268.
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It is important to bear in mind that Purcell’s regular interchanging of melodic B-natural and
B-flat over G in the bass makes the dominant chord major in most but not all instances. The
struggle between the major and minor versions of the dominant harmony continues the
consonance-dissonance contrast set up in the opening gesture of the piece. Purcell’s choices of
whether to use the major or the minor dominant chord always corresponds to the mood of the text
being set, and so “solitude” and “sweetest” (as in mm. 4, 5, 8, 10, and 12) always receive B-naturals
over the V chord (making it major), while “Night” (m. 14) receives no third at all, and “restless” (m.
18) has a deliberately florid passage emphasizing a central B-flat, suggesting G minor. For instance,
Purcell sets the text suggesting that solitude is often “my sweetest choice” (as in mm. 5 and 11)
using the major V chord, which is indicated by B-naturals and noted as figures in the earliest edition.
This contrasts with the previous minor V chord on “restless thoughts delight” (mm. 20-21), where,
to sharpen the sense of bittersweet irony in the delightfulness of this restlessness, the pang of the
word “restless” is brought out by setting it to jostling eighth-note divisions emphasizing clear B-flats
and A-flats. Importantly, the edition includes no ♯ figure to indicate a major chord, suggesting that
the person responsible for the figured bass symbols (most likely Purcell himself) was fully conscious
of this specific situation.8
It is imperative that modern continuo players take careful note and not
simply assume that every instance of a dominant chord should necessarily be major,since Purcell
often alternates between major and minor as a choice between two different affective states (see an
instance of the minor dominant chord in fig. 4.6 and the major dominant chord in fig. 4.7).9

8 For accompaniment-specific issues regarding the relationship of figured bass and the figures of rhetoric, see
harpsichordist Thérèse de Goede’s “From Dissonance to Note-Cluster: The Application of Musical-Rhetorical Figures
and Dissonances to Thoroughbass Accompaniment of Early 17th-Century Italian Vocal Solo Music.” Early Music 33, no.
2 (2005): 233–50. 9 For an exploration of some of these concerns, see Tim Carter, “The Search for Musical Meaning,” in The Cambridge
History of Seventeenth-Century Music, ed. Tim Carter and John Butt, 158-196 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2005). He considers instances of Purcell’s modulation to and from parallel major and minor key centers. Though he
supplies no example of such a situation, he says “it is difficult to determine whether the minor has specific affective
significance” (176). Given the specific treatment of the figured bass under dominant chords underneath clear melodic
163

Figure 4.6. Henry Purcell, “Oh Solitude,” mm. 20-22
Source: Henry Purcell, Orpheus Brittanicus (London: Printed by J. Heptinstall for Henry Playford,
1698), p. 95.
Figure 4.7. Henry Purcell, “Oh Solitude,” mm. 26-29
Source: Henry Purcell, Orpheus Brittanicus (London: Printed by J. Heptinstall for Henry Playford,
1698), p. 95.
164

Returning to Purcell’s figuration of “restless” (m. 20), we can see that the naturally
consonant target note of B-flat in the melodic line is hidden by his actual ornament, which begins on
the downbeat of the bar on the note C, beginning what Bernhard names as cercar della nota (“to
search for the note”), which Purcell uses as a vivid connotation of restlessness through its intrinsic
wandering instability. In the subsequent bar (m. 20), Purcell uses a melodic A-flat over C in the bass
over “thoughts” to further invest in capturing their restlessness. The reduction prints the note G as
most consonant, but A-flat over C invites the possibility of a 6 in the figured bass, connoting a basic
consonance. Conceived either way, Purcell’s remarkable choice of the melodic A-flat supplies an
unexpected and intrinsically restless turn of events. Finally, his setting of “invite” involves a subtle
figure, anticipatio notae, in which an early entrance of G falls before the downbeat of the next bar,
opening the door early to an eagerly invited guest.
Additional levels of dissonance can be found beyond the always effective 4-3 and 7-6
suspensions that supply so much of the forward-driving energy of Purcell’s writing. He uses a few
exceptionally piquant dissonances cleverly inserted to emphasize painful textual elements. When
Purcell sets poetry that describes the sad plight of others, “when their hard fate makes them endure
such woes as only death can cure,” his setting of the phrase is full of musico-poetic figures
connoting durability and difficulty, beginning with Purcell’s description of fate’s hardness as a series
of descending suspensions that travel from F, to E-flat, leaning again from E-flat into D-flat, before
finally resolving down to C, providing a musical mimesis of hardness as something pressing
insistently downward by getting literally flatter. Engaging another opportunity to trade in such
concepts, he sets “makes them endure” to a rigid hemiola, capturing the stiff and stubborn nature of
endurance. At the end, Purcell cannot resist a final opportunity to finish the phrase by setting
uses of different types of thirds in “Oh Solitude,” we ought to err on the side of expecting decisions of this kind to carry
rhetorical content.
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Figure 4.8. Henry Purcell, “Oh Solitude,” mm. 56-63
Source: Henry Purcell, Orpheus Brittanicus (London: Printed by J. Heptinstall for Henry Playford,
1698), p. 96.
Figure 4.9. Henry Purcell, “Oh Solitude,” mm. 82-86
Source: Henry Purcell, Orpheus Brittanicus (London: Printed by J. Heptinstall for Henry Playford,
1698), p. 97.
166

“woes” as a dramatic backfall into a crunching suspension of the melodic B-natural against A-flat in
the bass (see fig. 4.8).
Finally, perhaps Purcell’s most striking use of harsh dissonance can be found in the stanza in
which the protagonist brags about the ease of learning “Apollo’s Lore” (misprinted in the excerpted
manuscript as “Love”) without the pain of study. And perhaps to heighten the listener’s sense of the
pains that have been avoided, the “pains” of study are set as shocking melodic leaps back and forth
on eighth notes, only to land on a tritone—melodic F# against C in the bass—perhaps indicating
the usual frustrations of scholarly activity (see fig. 4.9).
Sonata VI
While the poetry of “Oh Solitude” may be challenging to interpret, purely instrumental
forms invite questions surrounding how instrumental music could possibly resemble or represent
human passions and how something such as a sonata might create an effective and powerful
mimesis given a total absence of text. Unlike his more traditional multi-movement models, Sonata VI
(Z.807) is a simple adagio for two violins over a ground bass with continuo in G minor. Alon Schab
suggests that it is closer to “the local English tradition of divisions upon a ground” than to Italian
sonatas, arguing that the lack of variation in the ground bass makes it dissimilar to sonatas “of the
celebrated legacy of Muffat or Corelli.”10 Robert Klakowich has argued that Lully’s “Scocca pur” is
the most probable model for Sonata VI based on its irregular five-bar ground bass.11 Most salient to
this discussion are Ellen Rosand’s claims in her landmark article from 1979 called “The Descending
Tetrachord: An Emblem of Lament” in which she correlates the descending tetrachord’s historical
10 Alon Schab, The Sonatas of Henry Purcell: Rhetoric and Reversal (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2018), 207. 11 Robert Klakowich, “‘Scocca Pur’: Genesis of an English Ground,” Journal of the Royal Musical Association 116, no. 1
(1991): 63–77. Klakowich also suggests that Purcell’s work on this sonata led to the development of his famed aria
“When I am laid in Earth” from Dido and Aeneas, since it is the identical five-bar ground in the same key, and often shot
through with similar thematic material.
167

linking to lovers’ laments, such as in Monteverdi’s Lamento della ninfa. Rosand places “Dido’s
Lament” from Purcell’s semi-opera Dido and Aeneas in this tradition due to both its similar melodic
and harmonic structures and textual themes. Sonata VI shares the same key (G minor), a nearly
identical ground bass, as well as overlapping melodic material, though Tim Carter articulates an
important challenge, saying that the work “involves a mammoth ground-bass movement based on
the descending minor tetrachord that hardly seems an emblem of ‘lament’ in this context.”12 In this
section, I will argue that while Sonata VI may not explicitly be a lamentation, it trades heavily in
thematic material that is indicative of related passions, and that the lines themselves move in ways
analogous to impassioned human states.
Sonata VI belongs to a second set of sonatas by Purcell that was published posthumously in
1697 by his widow Frances Purcell. It was probably composed around the same time as the first set,
however, circa 1680, when Purcell would have been in his early twenties. This first set of sonatas
was published early on in Purcell’s career, in 1683, and according to the preface (which is attributed
to Purcell himself13), the composer had “faithfully endeavor’d a just imitation of the most fam’d
Italian Masters,” and his goal was to “bring the seriousness and gravity of that sort of Music into
vogue” offering an alternative to the “levity and balladry of our neighbors.”14 Purcell perceived
“power in the Italian Notes” and introduced terms that he thought might be new to English
musicians, including adagio, grave, largo, allegro, piano, and forte, among other terms, in order to facilitate
12 Quoted in Schab, Sonatas of Henry Purcell, 204. 13 Authorship of this preface is widely attributed to Purcell, mostly based on the self-deprecating comments littered
throughout. Conjectures about exactly whose work served as Purcell’s model are complicated affairs, since sonatas of a
similar type were composed by William Lawes, Matthew Locke, and John Jenkins, the latter of whom was especially
regarded for his imitative writing. Purcell is likely to have known Giovanni Battista Draghi personally, though many
other works were extant in England in manuscript form. Michael Tilmouth has suggested that “there is no doubt at all
that Purcell was well acquainted with the music of Cazzati, Colista, and Vitali.” Michael Tilmouth, “The Technique and
Forms of Purcell’s Sonatas,” Music & Letters 40, no. 2 (April 1959): 109–21. More recently, Peter Holman has suggested
that Giovanni Battista Vitali was a primary model, arguing that court musicians had access to some of Vitali’s own
sonatas. See Peter Holman, “Compositional Choices in Henry Purcell’s ‘Three Parts upon a Ground,’” Early Music 29,
no. 2 (2001): 251–61. 14 Henry Purcell, “To the reader,” preface to Sonnata’s of III Parts: Two Viollins and Basse (London: Printed for the author,
1683).
168

understanding of terminology that relates to the motions and qualities that comprise the affective
properties of instrumental music.
Purcell’s sonatas show mature development of his melodic vocabulary, employing motifs
and phrases that he would continue to rework throughout his career. As a single seamless throughcomposed piece, it proceeds in a roughly canonical, stretto fugue call-and-response format in which
both voices interact and reply to one another in very close imitative fashion, with each motivic
passage lasting about four to eight measures. The irregular five-bar ground bass divides phrases into
unevenly numbered groups and invites clever entrances and exits of voices at different possible
cadential points. The two violin parts weave restlessly around and against the bass and continuo,
with new musical material constantly seeming to come in early or end late. Overall, the large-scale
arch form of the work shows a gradual increase of activity, dividing phrases into ever smaller units
of rhythmic construction, building intensity until a frantic climax (mm. 181-185) followed by a gentle
slowing and releasing of tension until the end. Throughout Sonata VI, Purcell energizes the emotive
complexity and dynamism of the work through his use of dissonance and repeated rhythmic
patterns. Purcell’s heavy use of suspensions and near-constant heaving between states of tension and
relaxation is immediately apparent in the basso continuo part, whose unwavering ground bass
contrasts with the meticulous figured bass symbols that rarely repeat. The importance of creating a
detailed figured bass can be gleaned from the fact that a delay in publication had been caused by the
composer’s change of mind, in which he “thought fit to cause the whole Through Bass to be
Engraven” so that intricate details of the harmony could be captured accurately by the keyboard
player (see fig. 4.10).15
The figured bass immediately reveals that most measures begin with suspensions on the
downbeat, enhancing the overall effect of such dissonances locating them on the strongest beat of
15 Purcell, “To the reader.”
169

Figure 4.10. Henry Purcell, Sonata VI, 1697, basso continuo
Source: Henry Purcell, Ten Sonatas in Four Parts: Compos’d by the Late Mr. Henry Purcell (London:
Printed by J. Heptinstall for Frances Purcell, 1697).
170

the bar. Such viscerally felt movements between dissonance and consonance become a primary way
of registering pathos and affective content within the listener. These push-and-pull effects are a
central feature throughout the work, where opposing affective qualities manifest as phrases that
reach upward and expand harmonically only to then collapse and deflate. Rhythmically, phrases
increase their energy by increasing the amount and level of divisions, and then slowly set the listener
down by gently unwinding the degree of subdivision. Over the course of the sonata, this reveals the
way in which the work is effective not because it indicates a specific passion, but rather because it
charts a compelling course of movement of the passions, a journey of the building and declining of
energy that stirs the same experience within a listener or performer.
Simultaneous Rhythmic, Melodic, and Harmonic Expansion and Contraction
In order to bring Purcell’s rhetorical compositional techniques into relief, it is helpful to
employ a Bernhardian approach of reducing Purcell’s counterpoint to its basic consonances (see fig.
4.11). Reverse-engineering the most consonant solutions available—keeping as many of Purcell’s
melodic target points intact as possible—reveals not only the great number of dissonances that exist
in the sonata, but also how they function as expressive mechanisms. In addition, we can see that
they often involve creative solutions to voice-leading difficulties and quandaries that arise for the
composer. For reference, a full score of Sonata VI is provided in the appendix.16
Imitative writing
A prominent feature of Sonata VI is the presence of multiple points of imitation, few of
which have a sense of completion before they restlessly forge ahead into new thematic material. The
16 The full score in the appendix is transcribed from the parts in Henry Purcell, Ten Sonatas in Four Parts: Compos’d by the
Late Mr. Henry Purcell (London: Printed by J. Heptinstall for Frances Purcell, 1697).
171

Figure 4.11. Author’s reduction of mm. 1-35 of Henry Purcell’s Sonata VI
(continued on next page)
172

(continued on next page)
173

Note: The top three staves are Purcell’s originals, while the fourth and fifth staves map the natural
consonances available over each half note in the ground bass. The sixth staff repeats Purcell’s
original unaltered ground bass.
174

first entry (m. 1) is imitated two bars later by the second violin, but soon after, the imitation occurs
only one bar behind (mm. 6-7). Purcell continues his deceptive maneuvering and makes the second
violin the leading voice in the pickup to measure 11. Such activity is only momentary since the
voices synchronize in homophonic rhythm (m. 16) to forcefully collaborate on the rising and
expanding passage from measures 16 to 20. At this point, the voices begin one-bar imitation again
(m. 20), starting their descending and contracting path downward through measure 25. When the
next point of imitation enters in the first violin (m. 26), it is buried in homophonic alignment with
the lower voice as the descent reaches its nadir. Returning to two-bar constructions, the line consists
of leaps up of a fourth, followed by differently sized leaps downward of fifths, sixths, and sevenths,
which adds to the uncertainty of the overall destination. A final moment of instability is created by
measure 31, in which he squeezes the imitation back to the distance of one bar, ensuring an overall
unpredictability in the most predictable of formats, the ground bass. Purcell’s employment of
imitative writing suggests a fundamentally human characteristic in its conversational quality,
denoting intimacy and a relational modality of thoughtful listening and responding.
Suspensions
While traditional sighing eighth-note suspensions permeate the work, Purcell often creates
long chains of suspensions to enhance the sensation of stretching and pulling over long phrases.
Beginning in measure 16, Purcell begins a wave of melodic expansion in which the first and second
violin rise gently together, with the first voice traveling upward from B-natural (making the key
center of G feel momentarily major), next rising a whole step upward through C-sharp, and
continuing the approach to the tonic by employing E-natural and F-natural before a strong
appoggiatura from G to F-sharp over E-flat in the bass, finishing the ascending and inflating phrase.
Rhythmically, repeated chains of strong-beat accents of beat two increase forward momentum. In
175

the next motivic unit, beginning as a pickup to measure 21, Purcell begins a long, deflationary
sequence that lasts through measure 26 and is exaggerated by the presence of a melodic A-flat.
Reduction of measures 21-24 enables us to see that Purcell employs the traditional compositional
procedure of fauxbourdon to accomplish his descent.17 A series of parallel 6-3 chords becomes clear
in the reduced format, while the original stumbles downward through a series of heaving 7-6 and 4-3
suspensions. Repeated forceful suspensions landing on beat 1 create powerful sighing figures that
serve to lessen and diminish pressure, creating a leaning-back appropriate to relaxing motives. Music
theorists will later label the procedure of using natural sixths and sevenths while ascending, and
flattened ones while descending, “melodic minor,” but Purcell steps beyond this, employing
sharpened fourths while ascending and flattened seconds in descent, further accentuating downward
pressure and intensifying the sinking, drooping sensation of the phrase.
Leaps
For Purcell, another important tool for injecting powerful affective content is his
employment of various kinds of leaps, each of which possess different amounts of dissonance and
tension. In this sonata, most leaps are ornamental, though several are part of the basic melodic
structure of the work. Bernhard’s label for dissonant leaps, saltus duriusculus, speaks both to the leap
itself (“saltus”) but more importantly to the hardness, harshness, or ruggedness (“durus”) injected
into the music by them. In measure 2, we can see the audacity of Purcell’s leap upward into a ninth
that is resolved by the moving bass line. The second violin (m. 11) includes a leap downward from a
consonance into a ninth, followed by the first violin leaping from a dissonance to a consonance (m.
12). The second violin immediately continues the theme, leaping downward into the harsh F-sharp
17 This early procedure for embellishing a cantus firmus dates from fifteenth-century England and was named as a
foundational musico-rhetorical figure by Joachim Burmeister. For a history of the discussion and labeling of such
techniques, see Bartel, Musica Poetica, 271-277.
176

over E-flat (m. 13). Finishing the point of imitation in measure 14, we can see that even the
reduction to pure consonances involves a leap of a tritone downward, implying a rhetorical figure
even in the context of sweet sixths and thirds. Finishing this phrase by reversing the direction, the
first violin leaps upward by stacking two fourths (m. 14) at a non-imitative point. Often, Purcell’s
most expressive leaps are themselves accompanied by suspensions, doubling up on tensionintroducing mechanisms. Measures 28 through 35 reiterate strong backfalls on almost each bar, and
while some are more dissonant than others, the dramatic effect of each is multiplied by its
occurrence on the downbeat of the bar.
Several instances of clever voice leading also reveal themselves when comparing the reduced
version to the original. Movement of the second violin from measure 3 to 4 would imply a parallel
fifth with the bass had not Purcell escaped by means of a suspension, suggesting that some
dissonances are chosen not only for their impassioned nature, but as ways of avoiding compositional
pitfalls. As in “Oh Solitude,” downward leaps of a seventh enable the avoidance of parallel fifths and
octaves while at the same time enabling an affective charge, as in measure 30. Again, Purcell shows
himself to be a master technician who regularly accomplishes multiple goals with a single gesture,
leading Michael Tilmouth to compare Purcell’s skills to another sort of escape artist: “The tightest
bonds do not defeat the greatest magicians.”18
Avoiding resolution
Since a ground bass is a fixed and unwavering structure, a composer must deceive listeners
in order to avoid causing them to feel that most dreadful of passions, boredom. Of particular
interest are moments when the bass lands on G, the defining note of the key and that which typically
feels like the most natural point of harmonic arrival. Instead, Purcell often uses instances of G in the
18 Tilmouth, “Technique and Forms,” 111.
177

bass as a departure point, traveling into wild and unknown territory rather than the expected arrival
at the tonic. Measure 16 implies a secondary dominant by using A and C-sharp above G, now
functioning as a flatted seventh in the bass, leading naturally to D minor in first inversion in measure
17. Likewise, Purcell upsets the natural arrival point in measure 26, supplying diminished flavors
with E-natural and B-flat over the G in the bass line. In measure 31, Purcell supplies a B-natural,
briefly suggesting the parallel major, then follows it in measure 32 with the same B-natural and D
against F in the bass, creating instability and forward-moving energy implied by a diminished triad.19
Ornamental and structural dissonances
Reducing the score to available consonances reveals that, though some dissonances
inevitably result from the structure (as discussed in the proceeding paragraphs), most are ornamental
and were added for their expressive content. Perhaps most relevant to the concerns of this project is
the much-discussed passus duriusculus. While most contemporary discussions of this figure occur
within the larger framework of the descending tetrachord, Bernhard’s definition is much more open:
“Passus duriusculus within a single voice occurs when a voice rises or falls a minor semitone.”20 To
illustrate this, he supplies the example shown in figure 4.12. Several instances of this sort of rising
and falling chromatic motion can be found in Sonata VI. The first instance of a passus duriusculus is a
small, chromatically ascending one-bar phrase (m. 10), while the second spans a much wider length
of four to five measures (mm. 43-47), both belonging to the first violin. However, at the climax of
the sonata, upon exiting the 9/8 section both violin parts are awash in simultaneous chromatic
19 For further discussion of Purcell’s “harmonic surprises,” see Schab, Sonatas of Henry Purcell, 223-229. Schab suggests
that Matthew Locke’s Melothesia: or Certain General Rules for Playing upon a Continued-Bass (1673) was Purcell’s source for
detailed information regarding the adornment of a chaconne with a series of 6-5 and 7-6 suspensions. 20 Bernhard, Tractatus compositionis augmentatus, 103-104.
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Figure 4.12. Bernhard’s example illustrating passus duriusculus
Source: Christoph Bernhard, Tractatus compositionis augmentatus, in The Music Forum, ed. William J.
Mitchell and Felix Salzer (New York: Columbia University Press, 1973), 3:104.
Figure 4.13. Henry Purcell, Sonata VI, m. 165, 9/6 time signature in first violin part
Source: Henry Purcell, Ten Sonatas in Four Parts: Compos’d by the Late Mr. Henry Purcell (London:
Printed by J. Heptinstall for Frances Purcell, 1697), violino primo, p. 13.
179

ascents from measure 186 to 190 followed by four more bars of descent by half step through
measure 195, adding maximal tension at just the appropriate moment.
Increasing rhythmic intensity
From measure 81 to 164, motivic units are constructed in a series of increasingly active
rhythmic patterns. Increasing the level of diminution raises the overall emotive energy of the work
until measure 165, where Purcell increases the degree of rhythmic division to an additional level of
activity by moving from duple to triple time. Here, he employs the curious 9/6 time signature
(usually rendered 9/8 by modern editors) in only the violin parts (fig. 4.13), while no change is
indicated in the continuo.21 Just as in “From Rosie Bowers,” jigg-like, highly florid activity in 9/8
injects energy into the piece. Purcell constructs several motivic units in this triple time section that
spans twenty measures (mm. 165 to 185), at which point Purcell returns to the original time
signature of 3/1 (usually written as 3/4 in modern editions), where rhythmic values begin gradually
to lengthen in his approach to the finish. Thus, Purcell applies an additional layer of tensing and
relaxing mechanisms to complete the mimesis.
Purcell’s use of divisions not only suggests affective content, but at the same time has
implications for the choice of tempo. The final passage from measure 165 to 221 especially
demonstrates the importance of choosing an appropriate tempo for the work if one wishes its
emotive power to be apparent. Since a sonata of this sort would have been largely about both testing
and displaying the technical abilities of a musician, the dramatic runs that comprise measures 184
21 Interpretation of Purcell’s use of time signatures involves a thorny set of issues that have led to little scholarly
consensus, mostly since Purcell lived in an era when mensuration signs were slowly giving way to modern time
signatures. For details regarding these questions, Stephen Rose provides an excellent compendium of sources in his essay
“Performance Practice,” in Rebecca Herissone, ed., The Ashgate Research Companion to Henry Purcell (Abingdon, UK:
Routledge, 2016), 120-125. In addition, A. Margaret Laurie’s discussion of the role of clocks and time keeping
technology is especially fascinating. See her essay “Continuity and Tempo in Purcell’s Vocal Works,” in Curtis Price, ed.,
Purcell Studies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 192-206.
180

and 185 imply a frenzied, hyperactive state, forming a kind of dizzying Purcellian madness, but only
if they are performed with a high degree of technical proficiency. Such musical figures make the
most sense if they are blistering flourishes across the fingerboard, and therefore could not have been
nearly as slow as in many modern performances. To make for an effective contrast, from measure
214 to the end, the violins maintain an almost complete rhythmic unison, with their restless
conversation finally coming to a unified rhythmic resolution.
Final Remarks on Sonata VI
Though applying a German theorist to the analysis of English music might be open to
question, Christoph Bernhard and Henry Purcell are not only contemporaries who employ a similar
musical vocabulary, most importantly, their approach to compositional process as a fundamentally
rhetorical activity is shared. Though I am not aware of the reception of Bernhard’s pedagogical
methodology in England, nevertheless, his approach serves as a useful witness from the period and
suggests fertile analytical approaches for understanding Purcell’s music in greater depth. In brief,
Bernhardian reduction to the closest consonance becomes a useful tool for isolating and labeling
mechanisms in the music that act as intensifiers. These energy-increasing mechanisms that grab
one’s attention operate in a similar manner to the passions in that listeners’ connection to the
physicality of sound is immediate, often involuntary, and if strong enough, able to command our
undivided attention. Thus, a richer concept of mimetic activity holds that musical mimesis is not
about representing or imitating specific passions (much less consisting in mere pictorialisms), but
rather about how music shares a basic resemblance to all of the passions, sharing in the same kinds of
movements, operating simultaneously on body and mind with impacts of similar force and vivacity.
181

Conclusion
As this dissertation has demonstrated, the representation and elicitation of emotions are not
separate things where English musical expression of the long seventeenth century is concerned. In
an Aristotelian account of the arts, mimesis is intrinsically connected to rhetoric—its persuasive
power, its ability to move. This power was seen to exist in music because of sympathetic resonance,
which pointed to the shared properties between the passions and music that made representation
and what was being represented two sides of the same coin. Ultimately, effective performances
capture something about the way that emotions move. Far from being merely representational, they
elicit because they are representational, because the movement of emotion is mirrored in the
representation itself. These representations are found in instrumental as well as vocal music.
Moreover, this form of musical rhetoric was not merely limited to madrigalisms or some other
superficial ornamentation seen as exclusively a property of text painting, and as something a
composer may or may not choose to engage. Rather, mimetic transfer between sound and listener
was perceived and employed as an intrinsic property of all music and constituted its basic substance
as an art form.
182

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199

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Note: This full score is transcribed from the parts in Henry Purcell, Ten Sonatas in Four Parts: Compos’d by the Late Mr. Henry Purcell
(London: Printed by J. Heptinstall for Frances Purcell, 1697).
Appendix: Sonata VI by Henry Purcell
Adagio.
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Abstract (if available)

Abstract This dissertation examines the influence of Greek philosophy on early modern theories of the mind and the passions in order to highlight the centrality of such themes in English language discourse about the “power of music.” Arguing that intellectuals of many varieties saw music as a fundamentally mimetic activity that literally moved the passions, this dissertation shows how detailed examination of these philosophical views on music can be used to deepen a scholar or performer’s understanding of the affective musico-rhetorical strategies and compositional structures employed by Henry Purcell and his contemporaries. To establish the relationship between Greek philosophy and early modern English thought, chapter 1 demonstrates that Pythagorean conceptions of the soul as harmony and Aristotelian approaches to artistry as fundamentally mimetic activity were pervasive themes in English-language writings from the Renaissance well into the eighteenth century. Chapter 2 analyses how these themes are undergirded by conceptions of the passions as mechanical forces, making music important for moral and educational development. Chapters 3 and 4 then use the rhythmic and contrapuntal methodologies of contemporaneous music theorists Isaac Vossius and Christoph Bernhard to apply this mimetic view of music to the interpretation of works composed during the English Restoration. Chapter 3 examines the Cecilian odes, music self-consciously reflective on the nature of music’s power, while chapter 4 analyzes three works by Henry Purcell, ranging from the most obviously passion-centered (“From Rosie Bowers”) to untexted instrumental music, revealing the pervasiveness of compositional structures designed to move auditors.

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Asset Metadata

Creator Rowley, William Preston (author)

Core Title “Patheticall stories” and “uncontroulable perswasions”: Greek philosophy, the power of music over the passions, and the music of Henry Purcell

School Thornton School of Music

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program Music (Historical Musicology)

Degree Conferral Date 2024-08

Publication Date 08/08/2024

Defense Date 08/07/2024

Publisher Los Angeles, California (original), University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag Greek philosophy,OAI-PMH Harvest,passions,Purcell

Format theses (aat)

Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor Gilbert, Adam Knight (committee chair), Brown, Bruce Alan (committee member), Morrison, Leah (committee member)

Creator Email willrowley@sbcglobal.net

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-oUC113998TE4

Unique identifier UC113998TE4

Identifier etd-RowleyWill-13364.pdf (filename)

Legacy Identifier etd-RowleyWill-13364

Document Type Dissertation

Format theses (aat)

Rights Rowley, William Preston

Internet Media Type application/pdf

Type texts

Source 20240813-usctheses-batch-1195 (batch), University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

Access Conditions The author retains rights to his/her dissertation, thesis or other graduate work according to U.S. copyright law. Electronic access is being provided by the USC Libraries in agreement with the author, as the original true and official version of the work, but does not grant the reader permission to use the work if the desired use is covered by copyright. It is the author, as rights holder, who must provide use permission if such use is covered by copyright.

Repository Name University of Southern California Digital Library

Repository Location USC Digital Library, University of Southern California, University Park Campus MC 2810, 3434 South Grand Avenue, 2nd Floor, Los Angeles, California 90089-2810, USA

Repository Email cisadmin@lib.usc.edu