The Place of Musica in Medieval Classifications of Knowledge

Abstract

Medieval classifications of knowledge (divisiones scientiarum) were created to impose order on the ever-expanding breadth of human knowledge and to demonstrate the interconnectedness of its several parts. In the earlier Middle Ages the trivium and the quadrivium had sufficed to circumscribe the bounds of secular learning, but the eventual availability of the entire Aristotelian corpus stimulated a reevaluation of the scope of human knowledge. Classifications emanating from the School of Chartres (the Didascalicon of Hugh of St. Victor and the anonymous Tractatus quidam) did not venture far beyond Boethius, Cassiodorus, and Isidore of Seville. Dominic Gundissalinus (fl. 1144––64), a Spaniard who based parts of his elaborate analysis of music on Al-Fāārāābīī, attempted to balance theory and practice, in contradistinction to the earlier mathematical emphasis. Aristotle had rejected musica mundana, and his natural science left little room for a musica humana based on numerical proportion. Consequently, both had to be reinterpreted. Robert Kilwardby's De ortu scientiarum (ca. 1250) sought to integrate the traditional Boethian treatment of musica with an Aristotelian perspective. Responding to the empirical emphasis of Aristotle's philosophy, Kilwardby focused on music as audible phenomenon as opposed to Platonic ““sounding number.”” Medieval philosophers were reluctant to assign (audible) music to natural science or to place it among the scientie mechanice. One solution argued that music, though a separate subiectum suitable for philosophical investigation, was subalternated to arithmetic. Although drawing its explanations from that discipline, it nevertheless had its own set of ““rules”” governing its proper activity. Thomas Aquinas proposed to resolve the conflict between the physicality of musical sound and abstract mathematics through the theory of scientie medie. These stood halfway between speculative and natural science, taking their material objects from physical phenomena but their formal object from mathematics. Still, Thomas defended the superiority of the speculative tradition by asserting that scientie medie ““have a closer affinity to mathematics”” (magis sunt affines mathematicis) than to natural science.

Has Philosophy Failed?

“…In antiquity, as well as the Middle Ages, "philosophia" was a wide concept that covered systematic knowledge and understanding in general, both about facts and about more speculative topics such as existence and morality. In the classification schemes for human knowledge that were produced in learned theses throughout the Middle Ages, "scientia" (science), "philosophia" (philosophy), and "ars" (art) were used interchangeably as general terms to cover all forms of knowledge (Dyer, 2007;Ovitt, 1983). The use of the term "philosophy" to cover almost all forms of theoretical and empirical knowledge persisted in the modern era, well into the eighteenth century (Covington, 2005;Freedman, 1994;Ovitt, 1983;Tonelli, 1975).…”

Untitled

“…Those who share it (and they are people of all professions, including musicians) will not give it up easily. No additional knowledge of history could dissuade them, e.g., that prior to being defined as an art, music used to be a science; that its boundaries were firmly established by the Pythagoreans, who made great effort to justify the nature of what this science was concerned with (according to the various historical emphases, the sounding number, or the numerical sound); that the place of music among the philosophical sciences did not waver throughout the Middle Ages when the word musica was an umbrella term for disciplines and subdisciplines brought together by the general method of music theory, while the world of sound, of musical practice did not even have a unified name and broke down into specific genre designations (Dyer, 2007) 1 ; that the most sagacious philosophers of the seventeenth century thought of music in a way that did not deviate from its Pythagorean basis (the number); that it was only with the autonomous musical aesthetics of the 19th century that the idea of music as an art in the strict sense of the word (Tonkunst) 2 was born. But both the belief that music "fits" within the framework of art, and the arguments entrusted with the task of expanding or transcending this framework require an equal degree of distancing if the one raising the question "What is music?"…”

What Is Philosophy, Really?

“…Others did exactly the reverse, and still others treated “science” and “philosophy” as synonyms. All of them used “philosophy” to denote a wide collection of areas of knowledge, often also including practical craftsmanship (Ovitt Jr, ; Covington, ; Dyer, ).…”