This will be a small essay on a huge subject, namely universal harmony, or the “music of the spheres,” called the mundana musica by the learned among our premodern European ancestors. I begin with one Sir John Davies (1568-1626), hardly a household name, but nonetheless a Renaissance man of parts. He was an Elizabethan lawyer and parliamentarian who left a footprint or two in the sands of time as a writer of elegant philosophical verse fashionable in the Inns of Court of his day. Two ambitious poems merit some attention: (Nosce teipsum, or “Know Thyself”, and “Orchestra: A Poem Upon Dauncing.”) It is the latter I touch upon here. I first encountered it as a graduate student sixty years ago, and I have been studying it a bit recently. It is full of “wit” in the Renaissance sense, meaning a large display of the playful use of wide-ranging literary learning. It pretends to be a dialogue between a secondary character in Homer, Antenous by name, and the woman he is wooing, Penelope, faithful wife of the endlessly wandering Ulysses. Antenous is perhaps the chief of the many suitors who take up residence in Ithaca in the belief or at least the hope that Ulysses is dead, leaving behind a highly desirable widow. Davies says “Orchestra” records an episode Homer forgot to include. At the literal level the poem is about a guy trying to persuade a girl to dance, but Davies so clearly has no interest in the literal level that you can forget that immediately. His interest is proposing dance as an image of the harmony of a divinely created universe.
Christian humanists delighted in finding parallels between scriptural narrative and the classical narratives of ancient Greece and Rome. When the pilgrim “Dante,” lost in a dark wood, is told by Virgil that he must undertake a difficult journey, he demurs, pleading incapacity; “I am not Æneas; I am not Paul.” He thus invokes two famous wanderers of the Mediterranean world, the one pagan and fictive, the other Christian and historical.
St. Paul’s metaphoric moral terms, enshrined in the baptismal liturgy, had a great impact on the European vocabulary, in which old and new were widely used with broad moral implications. Paul spoke of corrupted human nature as the old man, and nature regenerate in Christ as the new man. St. Augustine, taking the phrase new song from the ninety-sixth psalm interpreted the “old” and “new” songs as two versions of love, cupidity and charity. The musical metaphor embraced dance as well. Two of Chaucer’s “experts” in cupidity, Pandarus and the Wife of Bath, knew all about “the old dance.” Chaucer did not have in mind the Virginia Reel.
It is an ill wind that blows no good, and enforced Covid isolation allowed me to improve through study my ability to read the Portuguese language to a level that opened a new literature to me. At that point I had already written a book about a remarkable poem by Luis de Camões, the “Portuguese Shakespeare,” but knew little beyond the Renaissance period. Camões's poem is an extended poetic exegesis of the psalm “By the Waters of Babylon,” which is a song about songs and musical instruments and thus invited me to learn a bit about Renaissance music and music theory. The rich exegesis of the psalm (Super flumina, no. 137 in the Authorized English Bible) was a logical place to begin. That all of life, indeed all of human history is a dance is a commonplace idea in premodern Western thought. And if life is a dance, so also is death, in the Danse macabre, or Dance of Death. The music for this dance is time itself, as in Poussin’s famous painting “Dance to the Music of Time,” a title then appropriated by the twentieth-century English novelist Anthony Powell for what can justly be regarded as the Anglophone answer to Marcel Proust’s huge and famous book(s). There are not a lot of modern hymns that have impressed me, but Sydney Carter’s “Lord of the Dance” (1963) is an exception. The idea of a cosmic dance, led by a cosmic Christ seems possibly Byzantine in its inspiration.
The philosophical and even explicitly ethical examination of musical harmonies is pre-modern, indeed pre-Christian. It is the basis of what we usually call Pythagoreanism, named for its famous philosophical founder, Pythagoras who was born about six hundred years before the birth of Jesus. A legend concerning him—concerning which there is no particular reason to doubt the basic details—is that he discovered musical harmonic episodes by chance. He was walking by a large blacksmithy, where the smiths were working simultaneously on multiple anvils, beating on heat-softened metal with hammers of differing weights. Anyone with a sentient ear would probably discern the differing tones produced under these circumstances, but Pythagoras, who was of course a genius, was able to figure out the harmonic progressions involved. One of the early English vernacular alliterative poems, sometimes called by modern editors “A Satire on Blacksmiths,” begins thus: Swart smekyd smethes smateryd with smoke/dryue me to deth with den of here dyntes. That is to say, roughly speaking: “Dusky smoky smiths darkened by smoke/are going to kill me with the noise of their blows.” Until fairly recently we didn’t really understand the subject of the poem, which, though humorous and satirical, is intellectually serious. Then a good friend of mine, Richard Schrader, a medievalist (now retired from Boston College) published a brilliant article* suggesting a connection to this anecdote of Pythagoras. The recognition of the learned inspiration behind an ostentatiously vernacular and “popular” poem is unlikely to surprise any medievalist. But of course it does take somebody smart to make the recognition in the first place. The poem itself is actually rather brilliant, as the consonantal coarseness of its language seems intentionally jarring and percussive.
The interference of "artificial" lights, from gas and from electricity, make it almost impossible on our earth today to see the night sky with the brilliance experienced by our pre-Edisonian ancestors—a sad fact recognized and lamented already by Ruskin and others in the 1880s! But in one of his typically brilliant throw-aways C. S. Lewis points out that medieval sky-watchers not only saw the night skies but heard their thrilling harmonies: the mundana musica, the music of the spheres. The animator of the motion. “Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard are sweeter.” Such was the music taught to the poet Keats by an ancient ceramic urn. Therefore, ye soft pipes, play on.
Heard melodies are sweet, but those
unheard
Are sweeter; therefore, ye soft pipes, play on;
Not to the sensual ear, but, more endear’d,
Pipe to the spirit ditties of no tone:
Before this silent music--“ditties of no tone”—even the author of the “divine poem”, Dante Alighieri, fell silent. Thrilled by the silent music, the great poeta himself fell silent. The last words of his poem are these: “To the high fantasy here power failed; but already my desire and will were rolled—even as a wheel that moves equally—by the Love that moves the sun and the other stars.” Love. On that animating power of the universe the medieval Catholic Dante and the Renaissance Protestant John Davies were in agreement. Mundana musica. Quite a song, quite a dance.
*Richard J. Schrader, “The Inharmonious Choristers and Blacksmiths of MS Arundel 292,” Studies in Philology, 104 (2007): 1-14.
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