On Music, Sense, Affect and Voice

Carol Harrison

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781501326271
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy of Religion

This book explores early reflections on music and its effects on the mind and soul. Augustine is an obvious choice for such an analysis, as his De Musica is the only treatise on music by a Christian writer in the first five centuries AD; concerned not only with poetic metre and rhythm, but also with an ontology of music. Focusing on the six books of De Musica, the Confessions and the Homilies on the Psalms, Carol Harrison argues that Augustine establishes a psychology, ethics and aesthetics of musical perception, which considered together form an effective theology of music. For Augustine, music-both heard and performed- becomes the means by which we can sense and participate in divine grace. Composed by one of the world's foremost Augustine scholars, this book is a concise and powerful exploration of Augustine's writing and reflections on music and, by extension, the intimate relationship between music, religion, and philosophy.

1

The Conversion of the Senses

God, creator of all things

And ruler of the heavens, fitting

The day with beauteous light

And the night with the grace of sleep

Deus creator omnium

Polique rector, uestiens

Diem decoro lumine,

Noctem soporis gratia

(Ambrose Deus Creator Omnium (Ramsay (1997) 170–171))

How sweet the moonlight sleeps upon this bank!

Here will we sit and let the sounds of music

Creep in our ears: soft stillness and the night

Become the touches of sweet harmony.

Sit, Jessica. Look how the floor of heaven

Is thick inlaid with patines of bright gold:

There’s not the smallest orb which thou behold’st

But in his motion like an angel sings,

Still quiring to the young-eyed cherubins;

Such harmony is in immortal souls;

But whilst this muddy vesture of decay

Doth grossly close it in, we cannot hear it.

(Shakespeare Merchant of Venice Act 5, scene 1)

When early Christian theologians turned to address the subject of music it was, at once, immediately obvious and yet rather disconcerting. This was first and foremost due to the fact that music was thought about and practised in two very different contexts, by two rather different groups of people: for the educated minority it was a rational, academic discipline, concerned with the mathematical laws of rhythm and harmony – one of the seven liberal arts (artes liberales),¹ which it was the privilege of free citizens to study and which formed their shared culture; for the uneducated majority it was something that resonated and reverberated in their ears through the sounds of instrumental and vocal performance. Music was therefore both a theory and a practice; the disconcerting thing was the question of how, or even if, theory and practice were related.²

The answer is not the straightforward one which we moderns are readily able to rehearse: that music theory provides the universally acknowledged rules for all (or at least most) types of musical composition and practice. The ancients did not see the relation between music as a liberal discipline and music in performance in anything like the same way: one was a matter of eternal, immutable, incorporeal truths to be understood by the intellect; the other was a matter of temporal, mutable, all too sensuous sound – worse, it was often practised by dubious characters in dodgy contexts and played on the most distracting of human passions.³ Was there any useful or acceptable link to be made, then, between these two manifestations of music, or were they simply entirely alien entities which happened to share the same name?

Henri Irenée Marrou,⁴ one of the few scholars to have devoted much attention to Augustine on the subject music, is representative of a scholarly approach to the subject of music in antiquity which entirely divorces theory and practice. He argues, for example, that the word musica was only ever used by Augustine of the liberal art, while words such as the verb cantare and related words such as cantus, canticum, cantilena were used of performed music.⁵ The latter, he observes, was ‘foreign to the culture of the upper class’ and was generally regarded as the activity of ‘despised professions’.⁶ The liberal art of musica was something ‘reserved for the elite and denied to the masses’.⁷ Whereas we value a sensibility to performed music, Marrou observes that this was alien to classical culture: that a classical philosopher, such as Augustine, immersed in the Platonic tradition, would have possessed no notion of such sensibility – or indeed, of ‘art’ as we would now understand it; rather, he comments, ‘He was simply aware of sensus, sensation, which is much less honourable; it is the least elevated activity of the soul, where the demands of the body play a detrimental role.’⁸ In this book we will be arguing that in his reflections on music Augustine, in fact, subverts what Marrou depicts as an elite culture which had no place for the actual performance of music; that, in practice, he possessed an acute sensibility to music, which, although it caused him some ambivalence, he did not ultimately deny or avoid. Rather, we will demonstrate that he was increasingly persuaded that it was only by means of temporal, mutable, sensuous sound, rather than eternal, immutable, rational rules, that the truth which the philosophers sought could be apprehended by fallen human beings. We will see that he maintained that this truth was known by faith rather than reason; by love rather than the intellect; by the masses rather than the elite. In other words, we will argue that for Augustine the apprehension of truth was less a rational exercise and more a matter of what we might call, following the poet Geoffrey Hill, ‘sensuous intelligence’, and that in this, music had a key role to play.

In the same Platonic vein, writing under the pseudonym he used as a music critic – Henri Davenson – Marrou further argues that, even when sounded music delights us, it does so because it evokes an ideal sound or archetype within – one which we hear with our inner ear, in the silence of the soul – and that it is only according to this archetype that we are able to hear and to judge performed music.⁹ In relation to musical composition he therefore observes that ‘the composer imitates the silent music which he discovers in the abstraction of his heart in sonorous forms’;¹⁰ that ‘composition is imitation … of a spiritual harmony, perceived in the silence of the soul by an inner ear’.¹¹

In this instance, Marrou’s distinction between an inner and an outer music, heard by the inward or outward ear, by the mind or the senses respectively, does, in fact, resonate with what Augustine sometimes observes – at least in theory: he distinguishes between what he calls a ‘verse in the mind’ – in other words the eternal and immutable laws or rules which govern verse and which allow us to judge it – and a ‘verse in the voice’, in other words poetry or music performed and heard, which is but an imitation of the inward laws.¹² Commenting on ‘the age of this age’ in contrast to ‘this age’ (Psalm 9.6) he observes,

The age of this age is that which consists in unchangeable eternity. It is like a verse which exists in the mind and a verse which is spoken (uersus in animo, et uersus in uoce). The former is understood, the latter is heard; the former regulates the latter. That is why the former is effective in art and endures, whereas the latter sounds in the air and is gone. Likewise, the mode of being of this changeable world is defined by that unchangeable world, which is spoken of as the age of this age. And for this reason the latter endures in the art (in arte Dei), that is, in the wisdom and power of God, but the other is carried on through the providential administration of the created order (in creaturae administratione peragitur).¹³

What we will need to ask, in what follows, is whether this ‘art’ – here understood as the inward, eternal, immutable archetype of verse, in a Platonic context; the wisdom and power of God, in a Christian context, – is indeed something we are now able, in practice, to comprehend and use in order to judge. I will argue that in a theological context – where he finds himself taking account of creation from nothing, the Fall and God’s providential economy – Augustine tends to speak, not in terms of the Platonic distinction between eternal, ideal form and temporal imitation but rather in terms of our perception of the ‘art’, or wisdom and power of God, by the senses: that the ‘verse in the mind’ is only perceived through the ‘verse in the voice’; that the ‘invisible things of God are known through the things that are made’ (Rom 1.20); and that the art and wisdom of God is incarnated and revealed to us in the Son made flesh. In other words, I will argue that Augustine teaches that the art, wisdom and power of God are only perceived through what he calls, in the text we have just cited, ‘the providential administration of the created order’, and most especially, through what he will identify in book 6 of De musica, as the temporal, sensuous music of God’s creating, ordering and redeeming love, which, by inspiring our love, returns us to its source and end.¹⁴

The art of music

Augustine was the only early Christian writer to devote a work specifically to music – his De musica.¹⁵ He tells us that he began to write it after his baptism (Easter 387) and after having returned from Italy to his home town of Thagaste in North Africa (388/9).¹⁶ He probably completed it towards the end of 391. Living in a lay community of ‘servants of God’, free of his demanding job as municipal rhetor, having relinquished any plans to marry, and well before priestly or episcopal duties took their toll, he presumably did so with a liberating sense of having the time and space to undertake ambitious projects. It is one of the few surviving works we now possess of what he tells us was a projected series of seven, devoted to each of the seven liberal arts, which he began to write in Milan and which he hoped would enable him to continue his journey from, as he puts it, ‘the corporeal to the incorporeal’ (retr. 1.6).¹⁷ In other words, it appears that by following a rigorous programme of study, he intended to train his mind, and those of his companions, through intellectual and moral purification, to dwell on eternal and immutable truths rather than the messy stuff of everyday business. Returning to Milan in 387, fresh from a post-conversion, classical-type retreat in the country villa of a friend, which had been devoted to philosophical dialogue on the big questions, he wrote the book on grammar and began others on dialectic, rhetoric, geometry, arithmetic and philosophy.¹⁸ It is clear that Augustine the new convert had not left the schoolroom entirely behind, but evidently intended to take it with him, insofar as it proved useful in coming to terms with his newly embraced faith.

Augustine’s De musica is thus a distinctly odd work – at least for us: a school book On Music as a liberal discipline, a dialogue in which the master works with evident accomplishment and skill to lead his pupil through the technicalities, definitions and practice of poetic metre, to cover the ‘curriculum’, as it were. What was Augustine, the new Christian convert, thinking of and what can we learn about a Christian appreciation of music – as a theoretical discipline as well as in practice – from this treatise?

I don’t think anyone in the ancient world would have lifted an eyebrow on first encountering the De musica; at least, their eyebrows would no doubt have remained comfortably in place over the course of its first five books and then shot up when they...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Contents 
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1. The Conversion of the Senses
• 2. The Conversion of the Affections
• 3. The Conversion of the Voice
• Bibliography
• Index
• Imprint