Chapter XXIX: Introduction

As an educational subject music is the oldest of those grouped under the heading of the seven liberal arts. In Plato’s time music and gymnastic were the staples of education, and the former term meant chiefly the study of poetry, with music in the proper sense of the word as a mere adjunct. As the different subjects, such as grammar, rhetoric, geometry, arithmetic, appeared in the curriculum, the field of music narrowed and it held a less commanding place. Conflicting points of view in regard to it appear to have arisen. The older educational tradition connected music with grammar and the other literary studies. On the other hand, the influence of the Pythagorean theory of number and of its application to music tended to dissociate grammar and music, and to place the latter in relation to the mathematical sciences. It has been noticed that among the older Roman writers from whom evidence on this matter can be drawn—Cicero, Varro, Seneca, Quintilian, and others—the association of music and grammar appears the natural one, while in the Roman writers of the second, third, and fourth centuries both traditions prevail, with an increasing preference for placing music among the mathematical sciences, where it finally found itself when the canon of the seven liberal arts was formed, and where it remained to the end of the middle ages.[254]

[254] Schmidt, _Questiones de musicis scriptoribus Romanis,
imprimis de Cassiodoro et Isidoro_ (Darmstadt, 1899). This
dissertation is in part an examination of the question whether
the Roman writers associated music with grammar or the
mathematical sciences in their enumerations of educational
subjects. It contains a useful list of passages bearing on the
seven liberal arts.

In Isidore little is to be found to justify the mathematical environment of music. It is true that at times he defines it as a mathematical science[255] and he insists on the musical view of the universe as a necessary complement to other views. “Without music,” he says, “there can be no perfect knowledge, for there is nothing without it. For even the universe itself is said to have been formed under the guidance of harmony.”[256] But, with the exception of a paragraph on the musical mean, his treatment is entirely taken up with the non-mathematical aspect of the subject, and the definition “music is the practical knowledge of melody”[257] is the one that more closely fits the occasion.

[255] Five definitions of music are given by Isidore, two making
no allusion to its mathematical character. They are as follows:

“Musica est peritia modulationis sono cantuque consistens.”
_Etym._, 3, 15, 1.

“Musica est disciplina quae de numeris loquitur qui inveniuntur
in sonis.” _Etym._, 3, Preface.

“Musica est disciplina quae de numeris loquitur qui ad aliquid
sunt his qui inveniuntur in sonis.” _Etym._, 2, 24, 15.

“Musica quae in carminibus cantibusque consistit.” _Etym._, 1, 2,
2.

“Musica est ars spectabilis voce vel gestu, habens in se
numerorum ac soni certam dimensionem cum scientia perfectae
modulationis. Haec constat ex tribus modis, id est, sono, verbis,
numeris.” _Diff._, ii, cap. 39.

[256] _Etym._, 3, 17, 1.

[257] _Etym._, 3, 15, 1.

The treatment[258] of music is of about the same length as that of arithmetic, and is devoted mainly to definitions of musical terms and brief descriptions of wind and stringed instruments. It appears that Isidore knew nothing of music in a technical sense.[259]

[258] C. Schmidt, _op. cit._, after a detailed comparison of
passages, concludes that Isidore did not obtain his material for
_De Musica_ from Cassiodorus or Augustine, but that all three go
back independently to an original work produced by an unknown
Christian writer. However, the numerous identical passages in
Cassiodorus and Isidore would indicate that the latter had used
the former at least as a guide in plagiarism. See Schmidt, pp.
26–52, and compare Dressel, _De Isidori Originum Fontibus_
(Turin, 1874), pp. 5 and 6.

[259] Woodridge in the _Oxford History of Music_ (Oxford,
1901), vol. i, p. 33, note, says of Isidore’s _De Musica_, that
it “clearly reveals the complete ignorance of his time. His
dicta upon music are chiefly crude and misleading paraphrases
from Cassiodorus and others, from which it is evident that the
signification of the terms employed had completely escaped him.
Modes are not mentioned by him [but _cf._ 3, 20, 7] and keys and
genera are confounded together.”

EXTRACTS

Book III, Chapter 15. On music and its name.

1. Music is the practical knowledge of melody, consisting of sound and song; and it is called music by derivation from the Muses. And the Muses were so-called ἀπὸ τοῦ μῶσθαι, that is, from inquiring, because it was by them, as the ancients had it, that the potency of songs and the melody of the voice were inquired into.

2. Since sound is a thing of sense it passes along into past time, and it is impressed on the memory. From this it was pretended by the poets that the Muses were the daughters of Jupiter and Memory. For unless sounds are held in the memory by man they perish, because they cannot be written.

Chapter 16. On its discoverers.

1. Moses says that the discoverer of the art of music was Jubal, who was of the family of Cain and lived before the flood. But the Greeks say that Pythagoras discovered the beginnings of this art from the sound of hammers and the striking of tense cords. Others assert that Linus of Thebes, and Zethus, and Amphion, were the first to win fame in the musical art.

2. After whose time this science in particular was gradually established and enlarged in many ways, and it was as disgraceful to be ignorant of music as of letters. And it had a place not only at sacred rites, but at all ceremonies and in all things glad or sorrowful.