In 1617 the alchemist, counselor and court physician to the then recently deceased Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II (1552-1612) published his Atalanta Fugiens (Atalanta fleeing). The book fits into the general category of an 'alchemical emblem book', very popular in the day: it contains 50 beautiful engravings to which are assigned poetic sextets in both Latin and German. The main difference with all known similar works is that it includes a three-part canon with each engraving. According to the author, the purpose is for all of this input "to be looked at, read, meditated, understood, weighed, sung and listened to, not without a certain pleasure" (Maier 1990, 91). In this sense, this book might be interpreted as a very early example of multimedia, and as a work which requires a performative attitude and activity (in the form of singing) and not merely to be read, for its original purpose to be fully accomplished. In this brief article I will describe the work, and present arguments to support my belief that it would be reasonable to conclude that it is an early form of multimedia.
Este artículo presenta un barrido bibliográfico a través de la metodología de lectura crítica y posterior catalogación de los diversos modelos que se han desarrollado en Occidente, desde el siglo I hasta finales del siglo XX, con la meta de tratar de interpretar las posiciones o velocidades de los planetas como alturas musicales. Se concluye que estos modelos pueden catalogarse en tres grandes familias: derivados de la interpretación de las velocidades orbitales de los planetas como frecuencias más altas o más bajas, derivados de las proporciones de las distancias de los planetas entre sí (para interpretar dichas distancias como intervalos musicales) y derivados de una combinación entre ambos cuando ni las distancias ni las velocidades son fijas, como en el caso del modelo de órbitas elípticas y las tres leyes de movimiento planetario de Kepler. El aporte original de este artículo consiste en que presenta dichos modelos en un texto compacto y su clara clasificación, lo que facilita enormemente su utilización práctica para la creación musical, o bien en composición preescrita, o bien para extemporización en tiempo real, y así posibilita la utilización artística de modelos cuyo alcance histórico ha estado circunscrito al ámbito teórico de la música especulativa o de la percepción sonora de modelos cosmológicos.
Remi Chiu states the focus of his book at the very outset with such clarity that it warrants a full quotation here: "This book is about music and music-making as one of those resourceful strategies for surviving the plague. It treats music as an urgent and active curative with material consequences for the health and well-being of those assailed by the horrible disease. It shows that the production of music was animated by the changing experiences and knowledge of pestilence.. .. It makes no great claims about aesthetic breaks in music on account of trauma; rather, it focuses on how traditional beliefs about music became embroiled in the new discourses about plague and how established musical styles, techniques and practices were marshaled up to combat the disease" (5). As summarized on the back cover, Chiu's work "uncovers the place of music-whether regarded as an indispensable medicine or a moral poison that exacerbated outbreaks-in the management of the disease." Chiu structures his work in five chapters, plus a short epilogue with his overall conclusions. In chapter 1, "Medicine for the Body and the Soul," he surveys several plague treatises that annotate the medical value of music, pointing out that "many authors promoted music-making as a salubrious recreation, placing it on the pharmacy shelf alongside anti-pestilential foodstuffs and other medicines" (8). This chapter also examines the opposite idea: how some other authors cautioned against the use of music, especially in "religiously skewed [medical] treatises" (8). Chapter 2, "Sympathetic Resonance, Sympathetic Contagion," investigates what the author terms "the esoteric side of premodern medicine and its relationship to music" (9)-i.e., the doctrines of sympathetic resonance in the theory of contagion, Galenic bodily humors, and the rhetorical use of music in order to affect the mind-body complex under these perspectives. This chapter also focuses on the breaking of harmony between friends, kin, and compatriots as a form of breaking the harmony of social relationships, akin to the disharmony of the four humors that cause disease in Galenic medicine. The latter part of this second chapter centers on "anxieties surrounding this social breakdown [in times of pestilence] and the role that music may play in restoring the body politic" (9). The third chapter, "Devotions on the Street and in the Home," explores the conflict between spiritual and medical-civic authorities, especially regarding public penitential processions, which understandably generated concerns regarding contagion and agglomeration of people. Chapter 4, "The Cult of St. Sebastian," is a study in the cult of this saint, the main devotional protector against plague from the fourteenth century onward, and the important repertoire that sprang up around these devotions. The fifth and final chapter is a case study on Paolo Caracciolo's Il primo libro de Madigali a cinque voci, published in 1582, which includes several songs composed in the crisis of the major outbreak in Milan between 1576 and 15...
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.
customersupport@researchsolutions.com
10624 S. Eastern Ave., Ste. A-614
Henderson, NV 89052, USA
Copyright © 2024 scite LLC. All rights reserved.
Made with 💙 for researchers
Part of the Research Solutions Family.