In the early 1690s Roger North was preparing to remove from London to Rougham, Norfolk, where he planned to continue his search for truth, which for him meant knowledge of nature, including human nature. But this search was interrupted by three events. First, between c.1704 and the early part of 1706, he read Newton’s book on rational (quantitative) mechanics and, afterwards, his book on optics in Clarke’s Latin translation. Second, towards the latter part of 1706, he and Clarke, a Norfolk clergyman, corresponded about matters relating to Newton’s two books, after which Clarke removed to London and the correspondence ceased. Third, in 1712 North received a letter from Clarke, requesting him to read and respond to his new publication on the philosophy of the Godhead. As Kassler details, each of these events presented a number of challenges to North’s values, as well as the way of philosophising he had learned as a student and practitioner of the common law. Because he never made public his responses to the challenges, her book also includes editions of North's notes on reading Newton’s books, as well as what now remains of the 1706 and later correspondence with Clarke. In addition, she presents analyses of some of North’s ‘second thoughts’ about the issues raised in the notes and 1706 correspondence and, from an examination of Clarke’s main writings, provides a context for understanding the correspondence relating to the 1712 book.
In the early 1690s Roger North was preparing to remove from London to Rougham, Norfolk, where he planned to continue his search for truth, which for him meant knowledge of nature, including human nature. But this search was interrupted by three events. First, between c.1704 and the early part of 1706, he read Newton’s book on rational (quantitative) mechanics and, afterwards, his book on optics in Clarke’s Latin translation. Second, towards the latter part of 1706, he and Clarke, a Norfolk clergyman, corresponded about matters relating to Newton’s two books, after which Clarke removed to London and the correspondence ceased. Third, in 1712 North received a letter from Clarke, requesting him to read and respond to his new publication on the philosophy of the Godhead. As Kassler details, each of these events presented a number of challenges to North’s values, as well as the way of philosophising he had learned as a student and practitioner of the common law. Because he never made public his responses to the challenges, her book also includes editions of North's notes on reading Newton’s books, as well as what now remains of the 1706 and later correspondence with Clarke. In addition, she presents analyses of some of North’s ‘second thoughts’ about the issues raised in the notes and 1706 correspondence and, from an examination of Clarke’s main writings, provides a context for understanding the correspondence relating to the 1712 book.
Music as a Science of Mankind offers a philosophical and historical perspective on the intellectual representation of music in British eighteenth-century culture. From the field of natural philosophy, involving the science of sounds and acoustics, to the realm of imagination, involving resounding music and art, the branches of modern culture that were involved in the intellectual tradition of the science of music proved to be variously appealing to men of letters. Among these, a particularly rich field of investigation was the British philosophy of the mind and of human understanding, developed between the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, which looked at music and found in its realm a way of understanding human experience. Focussing on the world of sensation – trying to describe how the human mind could develop ideas and emotions by its means – philosophers and physicians often took their cases from art's products, be it music (sounds), painting (colours) or poetry (words as signs of sound conveying a meaning), thus looking at art from a particular point of view: that of the perceiving mind. The relationship between music and the philosophies of mind is presented here as a significant part of the construction of a Science of Man: a huge and impressive 'project' involving both the study of man's nature, to which – in David Hume's words – 'all sciences have a relation', and the creation of an ideal of what Man should be. Maria Semi sheds light on how these reflections moved towards a Science of Music: a complex and articulated vision of the discipline that was later to be known as 'musicology'; or Musikwissenschaft.
Music has been used as a cure for disease since as far back as King David's lyre, but the notion that it might be a serious cause of mental and physical illness was rare until the late eighteenth century. At that time, physicians started to argue that excessive music, or the wrong kind of music, could over-stimulate a vulnerable nervous system, leading to illness, immorality and even death. Since then there have been successive waves of moral panics about supposed epidemics of musical nervousness, caused by everything from Wagner to jazz and rock 'n' roll. It was this medical and critical debate that provided the psychiatric rhetoric of "degenerate music" that was the rationale for the persecution of musicians in Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. By the 1950s, the focus of medical anxiety about music shifted to the idea that "musical brainwashing" and "subliminal messages" could strain the nerves and lead to mind control, mental illness and suicide. More recently, the prevalence of sonic weapons and the use of music in torture in the so-called War on Terror have both made the subject of music that is bad for the health worryingly topical. This book outlines and explains the development of this idea of pathological music from the Enlightenment until the present day, providing an original contribution to the history of medicine, music and the body.
This book studies the working efficacy of Leonard Cohen's song Hallelujah in the context of today's network culture. Especially as recorded on YouTube, k.d. lang's interpretation(s) of Cohen's Hallelujah, embody acoustically and visually/viscerally, what Nietzsche named the 'spirit of music'. Today, the working of music is magnified and transformed by recording dynamics and mediated via Facebook exchanges, blog postings and video sites. Given the sexual/religious core of Cohen's Hallelujah, this study poses a phenomenological reading of the objectification of both men and women, raising the question of desire, including gender issues and both homosexual and heterosexual desire. A review of critical thinking about musical performance as 'currency' and consumed commodity takes up Adorno's reading of Benjamin's analysis of the work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction as applied to music/radio/sound and the persistent role of 'recording consciousness'. Ultimately, the question of what Nietzsche called the becoming-human-of-dissonance is explored in terms of both ancient tragedy and Beethoven's striking deployment of dissonance as Nietzsche analyses both as playing with suffering, discontent, and pain itself, a playing for the sake not of language or sense but musically, as joy.
John Wallis (1616-1703), was one of the foremost British mathematicians of the seventeenth century, and is also remembered for his important writings on grammar and logic. An interest in music theory led him to produce translations into Latin of three ancient Greek texts - those of Ptolemy, Porphyry and Bryennius - and involved him in discussions with Henry Oldenburg, the Secretary of the Royal Society, Thomas Salmon and others as his ideas developed. The texts presented here cover the relationship of ancient and modern tuning theory, the building of organs, the phenomena of resonance, and other musical topics.
Until the nineteenth century, music occupied a marginal place in British universities. Degrees were awarded by Oxford and Cambridge, but students (and often professors) were not resident, and there were few formal lectures. It was not until a benefaction initiated the creation of a professorship of music at the University of Edinburgh, in the early nineteenth century, that the idea of music as a university discipline commanded serious consideration. The debates that ensued considered not only music’s identity as art and science, but also the broader function of the university within education and society. Rosemary Golding traces the responses of some of the key players in musical and academic culture to the problems surrounding the establishment of music as an academic discipline. The focus is on four universities: Edinburgh, Oxford, Cambridge and London. The different institutional contexts, and the approaches taken to music in each university, showcase the various issues surrounding music’s academic identity, as well as wider problems of status and professionalism. In examining the way music challenged conceptions of education and professional identity in the nineteenth century, the book also sheds light on the way the academic study of music continues to challenge modern approaches to music and university education.
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