Music as a means of social control:Some Examples of Practice and Theory in Early Modern Europe

In the early modern period (sixteenth to eighteenth centuries) the power of music to alter inner states was conducted in the language of the ‘passions’ rather than the emotions. In this paper I explore the extent to which early modern Europeans considered music as a vehicle for achieving social transformation through control of the passions. Typically for the period, Plato and Aristotle’s writings on music were a starting-point for discussion. I consider the attempts under the French king Charles IX (1550-1574) to ban certain types of music and also to promote a distinctively French form of ‘measured music’. A belief in the civilising effects of music is similarly found in the writings of Dr John Gregory (1724-1773), a Scottish physician and amateur musician who regarded music as a powerful vehicle for self-improvement and social integration

Music and the emergence of experimental science in early modern Europe

The seventeenth century witnessed major advances in physics and experimental science. This paper argues that while the role of new visual technologies (e.g. the microscope) has been well studied, less attention has been paid to acoustic technologies in early modern natural philosophy. In particular, I attend to the relationship between making music, a specific form of organised sound mediated through instruments, and the production of new scientific knowledge. On the one hand, this relationship developed in the context of acoustics, a new discipline first mapped out by Francis Bacon. On the other hand, music’s relationship to natural philosophy was also more fundamental, since harmony was understood as an organising principle of the universe, the laws of musical strings providing a model for other forms of vibrative motion. I also show the importance of musical training for Galileo’s experiments and the significance of harmony for Isaac Newton and Robert Hooke