Dialogue On Ancient And Modern Music

Vincenzo Galilei, the father of the astronomer Galileo, was a guiding light of the Florentine Camerata. His Dialogue on Ancient and Modern Music, published in 1581 or 1582 and now translated into English for the first time, was among the most influential music treatises of his era. Galilei is best known for his rejection of modern polyphonic music in favor of Greek monophonic song. The treatise sheds new light on his importance, both as a musician who advocated a new philosophy of music history and theory based on an objective search for the truth, and as an experimental scientist who was one of the founders of modern acoustics.

This fascinating, scholarly study by one of the world's foremost authorities on Galileo offers a vivid portrait of one of history's greatest minds. Detailed accounts, including many excerpts from Galileo's own writings, offer insights into his work on motion, mechanics, hydraulics, strength of materials, and projectiles. 36 black-and-white illustrations.

The definitive collection of great writings on music from ancient Greece through the twentieth century.

First published in Rome in 1555, Nicola Vicentino's treatise was one of the most influential music theory texts of the sixteenth century. This translation by Maria Rika Maniates is the first English-language edition of Vicentino's important work. Unlike most early theorists, Vicentino did not simply summarize the practice of his time. His aim was to change how composers wrote and how musicians thought about music. His best-known contribution is the adaptation of the ancient Greek chromatic and enharmonic genera to modern polyphonic practice. But he also expressed the avant-garde's position on the relation between music and the subject matter and feelings of a secular or sacred text. He challenged the view that part writing always had to conform to the rules of counterpoint, asserting that license was permissible in order to express the feelings of a verbal text. In this he anticipated the manifestos of Vincenzo Galilei and Claudio Monteverdi. Maniates' introduction discusses Vicentino's life and work, the sources of his ideas in earlier theoretical literature, and the contemporary humanists from whom he may have learned.

Publisher: London: Dent Publication date: 1889 Subjects: Hutchinson, John, 1615-1664 Lathom house, Ormskirk, Eng. -- Siege, 1644 Great Britain -- History Puritan Revolution, 1642-1660 Notes: This is an OCR reprint. There may be numerous typos or missing text. There are no illustrations or indexes. When you buy the General Books edition of this book you get free trial access to Million-Books.com where you can select from more than a million books for free. You can also preview the book there.

A wide-ranging exploration of how music has influenced science through the ages, from fifteenth-century cosmology to twentieth-century string theory. In the natural science of ancient Greece, music formed the meeting place between numbers and perception; for the next two millennia, Pesic tells us in Music and the Making of Modern Science, “liberal education” connected music with arithmetic, geometry, and astronomy within a fourfold study, the quadrivium. Peter Pesic argues provocatively that music has had a formative effect on the development of modern science—that music has been not just a charming accompaniment to thought but a conceptual force in its own right. Pesic explores a series of episodes in which music influenced science, moments in which prior developments in music arguably affected subsequent aspects of natural science. He describes encounters between harmony and fifteenth-century cosmological controversies, between musical initiatives and irrational numbers, between vibrating bodies and the emergent electromagnetism. He offers lively accounts of how Newton applied the musical scale to define the colors in the spectrum; how Euler and others applied musical ideas to develop the wave theory of light; and how a harmonium prepared Max Planck to find a quantum theory that reengaged the mathematics of vibration. Taken together, these cases document the peculiar power of music—its autonomous force as a stream of experience, capable of stimulating insights different from those mediated by the verbal and the visual. An innovative e-book edition available for iOS devices will allow sound examples to be played by a touch and shows the score in a moving line.

This book explores the pivotal role played by ancient mousike-in all its facets-in the development of musical practices and ideas throughout history. Since antiquity, music has consistently played a significant role in social and cultural life, and although the terms in which it is expressed and the cultural meanings it conveys vary dramatically across different times and geographies, the influence of the ancient Greek concept on modern Western notions is nevertheless striking. In a series of lucid and engaging thematic chapters, Eleonora Rocconi surveys the roles and functions of music from classical antiquity, through the Renaissance and early modern eras, and up to the present day. The discussion is structured around the key concepts, theoretical models, and aesthetic issues at play - from the educational and therapeutic value of music to its place in the ideal of cosmic harmony and its relationship to the senses and emotions - as well as the function of music in debates around individual and cultural identity. What emerges is a timely reassessment of the paradigmatic value of the Greek model in the musical reception of antiquity in different historical periods. It highlights the ongoing contribution of mousike to modern cultural debates within the realms of classics, musicology, philosophy, aesthetics, anthropology, performance, and cultural studies, as well as in artistic environments, and offers a clear and comprehensive account of its inexhaustible source of inspiration for musicians, theorists, scholars, and antiquarians across the centuries.

Traces the spread of the concept of conversation during the Enlightenment, including the project of politeness, the fine arts, philosophy and public opinion. The book narrates this triumph of conversational style and thought partly as a succession to the oratorical rhetoric that characterized the Renaissance and partly as the victory of the only mode of speech that recognized women as women, and not as imitation men. It also rewrites Jürgen Habermas' history of the public sphere as the history of rational conversation.