I would like to draw your attention to the half-century between 1590 and 1640. This is the period in which the seven personalities I have chosen for my forthcoming book lived, worked and rose to prominence, wrestling with similar issues and intricacies and breathing the same European air. Together they formed an overwhelming constellation of intellectual energies that exerted a powerful attraction then and later. Each of them made a ground-breaking contribution to the development of new ideas with radical advances in their respective fields. Together, they turned the philosophical and artistic life of Europe upside down. Modernity begins here.
The intellectual septet sets off into the modern age
The septet consisted of mathematicians, astronomers, scholars, poets, painters and a musician, all born within a few years of each other in the 60s or 70s of the 16th century: Six of them are well-known, prominent figures - Francis Bacon (b. 1561), Galileo Galilei (b. 1564), Johannes Kepler (b. 1571), William Shakespeare (b. 1564), Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (b. 1571) and Peter Paul Rubens (b. 1577). Less prominent is the seventh, whom I am including here against all expectations - the composer Claudio Monteverdi (born 1567). You won't find him in any overview of the culture of this period. This is surprising when you consider that music, which was anything but a marginal phenomenon for scholarly circles at the time, not only developed into a credible medium of dialogue with the world and held up a mirror to its time with all its thinking and aspirations, but even became a driving force.
I therefore find it puzzling that cultural historians often avoid music, as if it hardly deserves attention and is not worthy of being included in the study of the era. It is as if one is somehow exempt from having to think about its significance. You risk overlooking a crucial element in the cultural landscape, much like the Italian clergy who roundly refused to look through Galileo's telescope and see with their own eyes that the moon had craters and mountains like our earth. I wonder whether this is because music, being so mysterious and fleeting, is difficult to define and defies verbal description - be it with poetic metaphors or reduced to technical jargon that only specialists can understand. Or could the reason also be that many non-specialists do not feel sufficiently qualified and therefore shy away from commenting on music?
The importance of music is increasing
This was definitely not the case in the 17th century: without exception, all natural philosophers, painters and writers of the time attached great importance to music. Mathematics, science, art and music were still inextricably intertwined at that time. Both Galileo and Kepler formulated their theories and discoveries using musical terminology and regularly used musical metaphors in their writings. In all likelihood, they would both have acknowledged that their theoretical and practical investigations would have been incomplete without music. Shakespeare's plays are also permeated by music. As Aldous Huxley put it, "Shakespeare laid aside his pen and called for music" when the unspeakable needed to be said.
Musicologists, on the other hand, have not always served their own cause: they habitually address an audience consisting exclusively of themselves and seem to suffer from cultural myopia. With a few exceptions, they seem reluctant to examine the many ways in which music and the related arts interact and are unwilling to recognise how music reflects and advances the human experience. Very rarely, for example, do they link a major figure such as Monteverdi with other contemporary innovators working in parallel in other fields, or place the development of his music in a social, political and intellectual context.
This book is an attempt to redress some of this imbalance. I will draw attention to how music in this period, as a humanistic art form, is catching up with the related arts, and to the crucial role Monteverdi played in this process. Whereas in the previous era music was still designed to reflect and serve the divinity or to strive for "harmony of the spheres", it now became a medium on a par with poetry in the exploration of human emotional states. Among all the musicians of his generation, Monteverdi stood alone in exploring how human emotions could be captured in organised sound and woven into compositions such as madrigals, motets or - even more boldly - in extensive music dramas that signify the beginning of opera.
The importance of Monteverdi
It is because I am drawing long-overdue attention to a musician who was once described as the "creator of modern music" that Claudio Monteverdi occupies such a central position in this book. The passionate language of his music draws us in and holds us spellbound by his will to embrace the irrational and inexplicable, the material and the beautiful beyond measure. The sound waves seem to connect directly with our auditory nerves. There are no barriers or filters that diminish the pleasure of his music. What's more, there is a strong sense of meeting a real person across the centuries - recording a conversation that spans time, and experiencing an extraordinarily close connection between the man and his music. This gives rise to the strange feeling that he is addressing us directly and personally.
Since Monteverdi played a key role in reorienting the aims and techniques of music, the aim of this book is to hold up a mirror to an imaginary solar system in which music - especially his music - is the centre of gravity. The other figures in this constellation of seven, which played such a decisive role at the time, resemble the larger planets moving in their elliptical orbits, sometimes approaching, sometimes receding. My aim is to capture a highly intense moment - a slice of human and cultural history over the last four and a half centuries.
Historians agree that the year 1600 marked the beginning of a century of turbulent progress in all the sciences and arts. It led to an era of unprecedented innovation and change. For some people, it was a time of optimism - of broadening horizons and sudden liberation. For others, however, it was deeply unsettling: their fears underlie the anxious, millennial-like mood that emerges in some of Shakespeare's late plays: "The world is out of joint" [Hamlet, 1.5.205] or "No human being can endure such suffering and horror" [King Lear, 3.2.48-49]. We also find this sentiment in John Donne's thoughts on the instability of a world which, now that man and the earth have been displaced from the centre of the world, has lost not only the certainty of its ancient erudition, but also its innermost cohesion and reliability:
A new Philosophy calls all in doubt,
The element of fire is quite put out;
The Sun is lost, and th'earth, and no man's wit
Can well direct him where to look for it.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Tis all in pieces, all coherence gone,
All just supply, and all relation.
(Anniversaries, I. 205-08)
Fortunately, at least three personalities at the time had the "wit" mentioned here, i.e. the necessary intelligence to set out in search of new contexts of meaning. They were Francis Bacon, Johannes Kepler and Galileo Galilei. It is hard to imagine three more contrasting personalities; yet together they were able to make huge leaps with new models of thought that produced some of the boldest scientific and artistic breakthroughs of the 17th century. In Bacon's case, this led to a new methodology for establishing basic scientific principles - a methodology that would replace the abstruse guesswork and reliance on the teachings of antiquity.
Monteverdi and the constellation around him lived and shone at the very moment when the old certainties were beginning to collapse and when the confidence that man was secure in a safe, static world, which had prevailed after the Middle Ages, was increasingly shaken by the opening up of access to a new world. At the same time, the attraction and risks of a home-grown religion meant that the old Catholic Church panicked and was (initially) unable to face up to the problem and reform itself. As we try to gain an understanding of this confusing historical period in which the spheres of artistic and intellectual exploration were so fruitfully intertwined, I hope that by addressing these gaps and relating music to other art forms and sciences, we can make some headway in illuminating the cultural landscape of the time.
