Investigando il suono dei cieli: tra metodo scientifico e pensiero magico-simbolico

Abstract

In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries European scholars of natural philosophy often attempted to formalize music in apparently very different contexts. It is fascinating to follow the influence of magic and the symbolic on high culture, often resulting in controversies, and the fruitful critical reflections about the method of scientific inquiry. It is in this context that musicology becomes important, starting from the interdisciplinary musical treatises which were fashionable until the end of the seventeenth century. With regard to this specific issue, one can focus on points that link the history of scientific thought and the history of world-views to the field of music and to the possibilities of mythopoeic speculation of music, both used as a formalization of magicsymbolic universes, and as a dismantling of methodological (and ethical) rational models. This essay discusses, amongst others, Kepler, Mersenne, Fludd as writers that make extensive use of the meta-language of music to give shape to their, at times controversial, ideas.