The music of sense perception

Abstract

This chapter outlines early modern understanding of the mechanics of sense perception, in addition to ideas on the relationship between the senses, passions, and the soul. It explores why there was a resurgence of interest in understanding the basic principles of sense perception around the turn of the seventeenth century. The precise relationship between the body and soul raised many questions about the quality of the soul and how the senses interacted with the material body as well as the immaterial spirit or soul. In addition to discussing the passions, this chapter introduces a variety of contemporary understandings of hearing and its special relationship with the spirits. Attention is paid to Francis Bacon and his attempts to understand the hearing-to-soul relationship through observable phenomena. Music and poetry, in particular, were seen to have special abilities to motivate people’s souls and move them to action. Moreover, music’s ability to resonate with both body and soul was believed by some to have the power to change not only our actions, but our very selves, while also presenting problems for planes of materiality. This chapter also draws out examples of multi-voiced domestic music that explicitly address topics of human consciousness through discussions of sense perception and its mechanics, limits, and reliability. Song lyric considered in this chapter focus on Walter Porter, John Dowland, Thomas Vautor, and Martin Peerson. It considers the state of dreaming, illustrating its metaphorical connection to music in the early modern period. Both the process of dreaming and ‘music’s power’ raised metaphysical questions about external realities and the reliability of sense perception, a recurrent theme in domestic music, as well as contemporary drama. These examples reveal domestic repertory to be poetically sensitive to the ‘metaphysical turn’ in this period, which included not only a resurgence of interest in the basic principles of sense perception but also a sceptical re-examination of the realities created by them. Finally, Chapter 2 challenges the idea that music, or the arts in general, had no impact on intellectual developments in the so-called Scientific Revolution.

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