Perfect Harmony and Melting Strains

Perfect Harmony and Melting Strains
Author: Cornelia Wilde
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
Total Pages: 295
Release: 2021-05-10
Genre: Music
ISBN: 3110422131

Perfect Harmony and Melting Strains assembles interdisciplinary essays investigating concepts of harmony during a transitional period, in which the Pythagorean notion of a harmoniously ordered cosmos competed with and was transformed by new theories about sound - and new ways of conceptualizing the world. From the perspectives of philosophy, literary scholarship, and musicology, the contributions consider music's ambivalent position between mathematical abstraction and sensibility, between the metaphysics of harmony and the physics of sound. Essays examine the late medieval and early modern history of ideas concerning the nature of music and cosmic harmony, and trace their transformations in early modern musico-literary discourses. Within this framework, essays further offer original readings of important philosophical, literary, and musicological works. This interdisciplinary volume brings into focus the transformation of a predominant Renaissance worldview and of music's scientific, theological, literary, as well as cultural conceptions and functions in the early modern period, and will be of interest to scholars of the classics, philosophy, musicology, as well as literary and cultural studies.

Music, Nature and Divine Knowledge in England, 1650-1750

Music, Nature and Divine Knowledge in England, 1650-1750
Author: Tom Dixon
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
Total Pages: 366
Release: 2023-05-16
Genre:
ISBN: 178327767X

During a period of tumultuous change in English political, religious and cultural life, music signified the unspeakable presence of the divine in the world for many. What was the role of music in the early modern subject's sensory experience of divinity? While the English intellectuals Peter Sterry (1613-72), Richard Roach (1662-1730), William Stukeley (1687-1765) and David Hartley (1705-57), have not been remembered for their 'musicking', this book explores how the musical reflections of these individuals expressed alternative and often uncustomary conceptions of God, the world, and the human psyche. Music is always potentially present in their discourse, emerging as a crucial form of mediation between states: exoteric and esoteric, material and spiritual, outer and inner, public and private, rational and mystical. Dixon shows how Sterry, Roach, Stukeley and Hartley's shared belief in truly universal salvation was articulated through a language of music, implying a feminising influence that set these male individuals apart from contemporaries who often strictly emphasised the rational-i.e. the supposedly masculine-aspects of religion. Musical discourse, instead, provided a link to a spiritual plane that brought these intellectuals closer to 'ultimate reality'. Theirs was a discourse firmly rooted in the real existence of contemporary musical practices, both in terms of the forms and styles implied in the writings under discussion and the physical circumstances in which these musical genres were created and performed. Through exploring ways in which the idea of music was employed in written transmission of elite ideas, this book challenges conventional classifications of a seventeenth-century 'Scientific Revolution' and an eighteenth-century 'Enlightenment', defending an alternative narrative of continuity and change across a number of scholarly disciplines, from seventeenth-century English intellectual history and theology, to musicology and the social history of music.

Perfect Harmony and Melting Strains

Perfect Harmony and Melting Strains
Author: Cornelia Wilde
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
Total Pages: 162
Release: 2021-05-10
Genre: Music
ISBN: 3110422069

Perfect Harmony and Melting Strains assembles interdisciplinary essays investigating concepts of harmony during a transitional period, in which the Pythagorean notion of a harmoniously ordered cosmos competed with and was transformed by new theories about sound - and new ways of conceptualizing the world. From the perspectives of philosophy, literary scholarship, and musicology, the contributions consider music's ambivalent position between mathematical abstraction and sensibility, between the metaphysics of harmony and the physics of sound. Essays examine the late medieval and early modern history of ideas concerning the nature of music and cosmic harmony, and trace their transformations in early modern musico-literary discourses. Within this framework, essays further offer original readings of important philosophical, literary, and musicological works. This interdisciplinary volume brings into focus the transformation of a predominant Renaissance worldview and of music's scientific, theological, literary, as well as cultural conceptions and functions in the early modern period, and will be of interest to scholars of the classics, philosophy, musicology, as well as literary and cultural studies.

The English Spirit

The English Spirit
Author: Doris Eveline Faulkner Jones
Publisher: Rudolf Steiner Press
Total Pages: 244
Release: 1982
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9780854403899

This thoughtful book, originally published in 1935, explores the qualities of the English people in relation to other European peoples. With many examples from Shakespeare, Wordsworth, Tennyson, and other great English authors.

Melting the Venusberg

Melting the Venusberg
Author: Heidi Epstein
Publisher: A&C Black
Total Pages: 222
Release: 2004-10-15
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 9780826416483

This book begins with a pointed critique of the foundations of the understanding of Western music: that music from Pythagoras to the Renaissance has been viewed as the source and model of order in the universe and in society. Unfortunately that order was rigidly hierarchical, so that over the centuries music reinforced established social prejudices, particularly those against women. Nowhere was this more evident than in religious music that was regarded by male ecclesiastics and scholars as the instrument of choice for taming hysterical female eruptions. Through her mordant commentary on a rich selection of texts by major thinkers from two millennia of Christian theology, Heidi Epstein shows in the first part of Melting the Venusberg that music as the erotic embodiment of human engenderment has been ignored or suppressed, while music as the expression of transcendent harmony, order, and restraint has been extolled. The second re-constructive part of Melting the Venusberg draws on ignored sources and lost tropes from the Christian tradition as well as on insights from the music and thought of historical and contemporary woman composers and performers from Hildegard of Bingen and Lucrezia Vizzana to Rosetta Tharpe and Diamanda Galas. Through this recuperative synthesis, music's theological significance changes keys, as it moves beyond its symbolic function as divinely ordained, harmonious microcosm into more dissonant metaphorical registers. Those who have ears to hear will be delighted.

Perfect Harmony of Science and God’S Word

Perfect Harmony of Science and God’S Word
Author: John Frazier Bonner
Publisher: WestBow Press
Total Pages: 251
Release: 2016-04-08
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 1512735639

Have you ever contemplated the actual scientific explanation of the mysteries the creation or the many unexplained events that sound impossible that you read about in the Bible? This author will take you to the far ends of the universe, from the star and planets to the grand canyon and beyond. It is mind boggling just how deep he gets into the scientific explanation of the mysteries prophesies of yesterday. today, and what is to come. This has helped me to better understand Gods word by using this mans hours of study and research and soul searching contemplation as he explored Gods truths; which are so often difficult to grasp. He fought with words and was a Christian warier to the end.

Sisters of Providence

Sisters of Providence
Author: Allen Paul Speer
Publisher: The Overmountain Press
Total Pages: 308
Release: 2000
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 9781570721588

The lives and writings of these two sisters, Jennie and Ann Speer, provide us a window on a world that for a long time was rarely seen and only recently has been exposed. The life of neither sister is an altogether happy one. The writings of both—Jennie in particular—are full of a kind of yearning, of sadness, of possibilities not realized. One feels both a vast sympathy and strong admiration for these sisters who dwelled in obscurity and wanted to be heard. Now, with the publication of their writings, unread for nearly a century and a half past, they are no longer silenced.