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OBERT FLUDD (1574-1637) IS WELL KNOWN among historians of science and philosophy for his intriguing work, Utriusque cosmi maioris scilicet et minoris metaphysica, physica atque technica historia (The Metaphysical, Physical and Technical History of both Major and Minor Worlds), in which music plays an important role in his system of neoplatonic correspondences: the harmony of the universe (macrocosm) as well as the harmony of man (microcosm). The Temple of Music (1617-18) is one section of this treatise, and deals with music theory, practice and organology. Many musicologists today have dismissed Fludds musical ideas as conservative and outmoded or mainly based on fantasy; only the chapters on instruments have received some attention. However, reading Fludds work on music theory and practice in the context of his own time and comparing it with other contemporary treatises, it is apparent that much of it contains highly original ideas and cannot be considered old fashioned or conservative. It is evident that Fludds music philosophy influenced and provoked contemporary natural philosophers such as Marin Mersenne and Johannes Kepler. Less well known is the fact that Fludds music theory reveals aspects of the development of new concepts that may have inspired contemporary writers on music such as John Coprario and Thomas Campion...
Extract from Peter Hauge, The Temple of Music by Robert Fludd in Music Theory in Britain, 15001700: Critical Editions (2011)
HE TEMPLE, PRESIDED OVER by Apollo (the god of rational music) and Thalia (the joyous muse), contains within its structure representations of the various aspects of musical knowledge--a clock representing the durations of musical time, a monochord tower signifying the proper divisions, a lower vestibule showing Pythagoras and the smithy, graffiti on the walls presenting musical notation, two entryways representing the portals of the ears, and a spiral near the top signifying air set in motion by sound. The temple serves as a mnemonic device to structure both the treatise and ones comprehension of music. As the treatise proceeds, Fludd examines the temple in detail with illustrations of enlarged portions of the structure serving to guide his discussion. Fludd divides his treatise into an introduction and seven books. The introduction describes the temple briefly. The first book introduces the subject of music with definitions and etymologies. This book introduces the quasi Porphyrian trees that serve to structure much of the information Fludd presents (this compendious method of presentation was employed earlier by Artusi in his summary of Zarlinos work). The second book briefly discusses the hexachords arid the third addresses the ratios of the intervals via the monochord. The fourth book deals with rhythmic concerns; the fifth provides an introduction to composition; the sixth addresses organology; and the seventh presents an automaton for music making of the authors invention (thus tying this book into the seventeenth century craze for automata).
Extract of a review by Chadwick Jenkins, City University of Arno York of Peter Hauges The Temple of Music by Robert Fludd in Music Theory in Britain, 15001700: Critical Editions (2011) from Notes, June, 2012, the quarterly journal of the Music Library Association.
HILE FLUDD CERTAINLY BELIEVED that the whole cosmos was generated through numbers and proportions (and was therefore inherently musical), this should not lead us to discount his treatment of real music.
Fludds Temple has been overlooked by musicologists mainly because (a) it is in Latin, unlike most other seventeenth-century English music theory, and (b) it is embedded within his monumental history of the macrocosm and microcosm, a publication that led him into vituperative controversy with two prominent Continental natural philosophers, Johannes Kepler (15711630) and Marin Mersenne (15881648). As the authors respectively of Harmonices mundi libri V (Linz, 1619) and Harmonie universelle (Paris, 1636), Kepler and Mersenne, no less than Fludd, understood the universe to be harmonically constructed. But for reasons that lie beyond the scope of this review, these critics judged his entire philosophical method as false and his adherence to the Pythagorean division of the monochord as essentially outmoded. This opinion soon became orthodoxy, and while they have become icons of the Scientific Revolution, Fludd has been typecast as a misguided supporter of magical and mystical thinking that was swept away by the Enlightenment. This appraisal was further reinforced by the eighteenth-century music historian John Hawkinss discovery that much of the Temple was copied verbatim from the fourteenth-century English Quatuor principalia musicae rather than being original to Fludd, and therefore deserved no interest (p. 7). However, Fludds tendency to cut and paste material without attribution was absolutely normal for his time... [He] also applied the same bricolage techniques to visual information, copying earlier images or adapting them for his own use... it is revealing to learn that the mnemonic image of the Temple was derived from a variety of sources and built around a common framework, and is therefore not quite as original as has previously been thought. The composition of the Temple as a whole, however, was something new, and shows Fludds skill in using graphic images as a tool for communicating and memorising complex information. This was a pedagogical method that was becoming more widespread thanks to print technology, the disadvantage being (as the Temple shows) that errors could be made in production that rendered such images distinctly problematic. Despite its flaws, the Temple adds up to something more than the sum of its various parts, and throws light on an aspect of early modern European musical culture, including what was classified as speculative music or harmonics, that thanks to our focus on practice has effectively been lost from view by music historians.
Extract of a review by Penelope Gouk (University of Manchester) of Peter Hauges The Temple of Music by Robert Fludd in Music Theory in Britain, 15001700: Critical Editions (2011) from Music and Letters, Volume 93, Issue 3, pp. 401-404.