Jubal vel Pythagoras, quis sit inventor musicae?

Vol. LXIV, No. 1 JOS ANI, 1910 MG CANON> THE MUSICAL QUARTERLY JOAN PEYSER Editor PAUL WITTRE Associate Editor ROBERT C. PEARCE JUBAL VEL PYTHAGORAS, QUIS SIT Business Manager INVENTOR MUSICAE? (a Address all editorial communications to By JAMES W. McKINNON THE MUSICAL QUARTERLY 866 Third Avenue, New York, NY, 10022 W HAT HAS Athens to do with Jerusalem: what is there in common between the Academy and the Church, between heretics and Christians?’ Thus thundered the third-century Church Address change of address notices, undelis erable copies and orders for subscriptions to Father Tertullian, proclaiming what is possibly the most basic conThis study was originally presented at the November, 1974, meeting of the Ameri- CIRCULATION OFFICE can 48-02 48th Ave., Woodside, N.Y, 11377 Music examples engraved by M. Wildberger. Earlville, N.Y, 13332, Copyright© 1978 by G. Schirmer, Tne. Musicological Society, Washington, D.C. It aspires to convey historiographic meaning on at least three levels. The first is the surface one which purports to shed +%tne light on the development of musiculogy by surseying the principal issue of the discipline's pre-history: whether Jubal music. conveys echoes of Secondly, it or Pythagoras holds certain famous priority as discoverer historiographic theses of from earlier in our century, such as those advanced in Carl Lotus Becker's The Heavenly City of the 18th-Century Philosophers and Charles Homer Haskin's The Renaissance of the 12th Century; these have been absorbed and appropriately qualified within general historiography, but have vet to run their course in musical historiography. Finally the essay reintroduces the generalization, even the hyperbole, of a mode of musicological presentation long since unfashionable; it does so in trepidation of potentially offending specialists, but conficdent that certain legitimate historical concerns Will otherwise go unexpressed. 1 De praescriptione haereticorum Series Latina, 11 vii, ed. Migne. Patrologiae Cursus (Paris, 1844), col. 20. Subsequenth Completus: the Migne edition will be ab. breviated PL for the Latin series and PG for the Greek. For the sake of convenience the practice will be followed here of citing standard series of texts such as those of Migne. Gerbert. and Coussemaker, unless more recent editions differ from them significantly. Copyright® 1978 by G. Schirmer, Inc.

weeny - This surprising contradiction of Tertullian's position is explained flict in Western thought: the conflict between Greek reason and Judaeo-Christian faith. We might expect that Tertullian’s ecclesiastiat least partially by the circumstance that these Christian luminaries cal descendants, the medieval musical theorists, will echo his position write of music as one of the four mathematical disciplines of the when they discuss the two principal claimants to the title of the in- * ventor of music: the Bible’s Jubal and the Greeks’ Pythagoras. The quadrivium; in such a context one might say that Jubal appears as respective cases of each are based on Genesis 4:21, which cites Jubal specific circumstance that several of them follow the authority of as “the father of them that play upon the harp and the organ,”? and the Greek legend, which tells of Pythagoras’ discovery of the musical burst is not entirely typical of the early Christian attitude toward proportions from the sounds produced by a blacksmith’s hammers.” Greek learning; many of the dominant figures of the patristic period, However, most of the earlier theorists do not favor Jubal; rather men like Clement of Alexandria, John Chrysostom, and Augustine, they profess a curious neutrality succinctly expressed by Isidore: “Moses says Tubal, of the family of Cain before the flood, was the worked out an accommodation with classical erudition, for after all, inventor of music; but the Greeks say Pythagoras. . . .”* Indeed this lian in a more fundamental sense: they were at war with Grecoexplicit neutrality is belied by an implicit prejudice for Pythagoras. Roman paganism, and in accepting the compromise which Ter- Of the nine published theorists who discuss the discovery of music. tullian refused they fashioned highly partisan rationalizations, such ranging from the fifth-century Boethius to the thirteenth-century Engelbert, only three, Isidore, Aurelian, and Johannes Affligemensis, as whatever truth there was in Plato's writings derived from the cite Jubal, and they do so in brief, perfunctory fashion. All nine, on the testimony of the Greeks to the authority of Scripture, and the the other hand, cite Pythagoras, and, with the exception of Cassiodorus and Isidore, dwell at some length on the implications of his ease with which their spiritual descendants, the medieval ecclesiastdiscoveries in the fabled smithy.5 explanation. 2"pater canentium cithara et organo" according to the Vulgate, the relevant text for our purposes; the original meaning of the Hebrew instrumental terms, a matter the second phase of the medieval evidence. the abrupt shift in favor a Hebraic interloper among the Hellenes. There is also the more Boethius, who spoke only of Pythagoras. Then, too, Tertullian’s outwhat other erudition was there? Still, they were united with Tertulwisdom of Moses.® It is unthinkable that they would have preferred ical writers on music, seem to have done so stands in need of further However, that task will be better performed after considering of interest to present-day organologists, is not a concern of the medieval authors. 3 The legend, from its earliest extant appearance in Nichomachos of Gerasa to the late Middle Ages, is surveyed by Hans Oppermann, “Eine Pythagoraslegende.” Bonner Jahrbücher, CKXX (1925), 284-301. There are two other excellent studies ‘ which deal broadly with both the Pythagoras and Jubal legends: Paul E. Beichner, The Medieval Representative of Music, Jubal or Tubalcain?, Texts and Studies in the History of Medieval Education, No. 2, The Medieval Institute, University of Notre of Jubal taken by several theorists of the High Middle Ages: the thirteenth-century Franciscan Aegidius Zamorensis leads the way, followed by the early fourteenth-century Jacques de Liege, and the author of the Summa musicae attributed by Gerbert to Johannes de Muris. Aegidius recounts the standard tale of Pythagoras’ discoveries, Dame (Notre Dame, Indiana, 1954); and Judith Cohen, “Jubal in the Middle Ages,” Yuval: Studies of the Jewish Music Research Centre, ed. Israel Adler and Bathja Bayer, III (Jerusalem, 1974), 83-99. The historiographic observations of Cohen are but then declares: very similar to those made here. discover something of this art, he was nevertheless not its first discoverer or Assuming . . . that the philosopher Pythagoras with his lively ingenuity did Musica author, As we have it through Hebraic truth, from the divinely inspired chronicles, (St. Blaise Abbey, 1784), I. 20. The in the fourth chapter of Genesis, and from a gloss on the passage, and from appearance of the name Tubal seems simply a variant spelling of Jubal; however, the eventual introduction into musical writings of Jubal's biblical half-brother Tubal- Rhabanus, and Josephus the outstanding writer of history, and the Scholastic 4 Sententiae de musica Sacra Potissimum cain will ii, ed. M. Gerbert, Scriptorum (hercafter, Gerbert), 3 vols, create genuine confusion among authors. Ecclesiastici Beichner's study, de cited above, dwells upon this confusion. monica 5 All, with the exception of Boethius, De musica i, 10, PL 63, col. 1176-77, appear in Gerbert: Cassiodorus, Institutiones musicae, 1, 15; Isidore, Sententiae de musicae, Musica, II, 183; Johannes Cottonis 1, 20; Aurelian Reomensis, Musica disciplina, 1, 31-32; Regino Prumiensis, De harinstitutione, 1, 289-40; Guido d'Arczzo, Micrologus, 11, 23-24; Theogerus, (now Affligemensis), Musica, II, 233-34; Engelhertus Abbas Admoniensis, De musica, II, 305-306. 6 See, for example, Clement of Alexandria, Stromata V, xii.

ya mes, History? Tubal the son of Lamech by his wife Ada. was the father of those who play upon cithara and organ, but not the instruments themselves which were invented long afterwards. He was first and foremost to discover the proportions and consonances of music. so that the work of the shepherd. which is burdensome and attenuating for the body with its nightly watches, its labors and anxieties, might be turned into pleasure.? Thus Aegidius, citing Pythagoras’ discovery a complex to Jubal. historical Then he tradition, narrates the reassigns curious apocryphal story of the two pillars: Therefore since Jubal had heard that Adam had prophesied concerning two judgments, of which the first was through water and the second through fire, lest the knowledge of music discovered by him perish. he carefully inscribed it on two columns, thereby transmitting in writing the principles of this knowledge. One of the columns was marble. which would not be dissolved in a Hood: the ather of brick, which would not be destroyed by fire or flame. The marble one indeed. according to Josephus, was afterwards discovered in Syria.” Aegidius continues at some length, and rather than quote him in full three additional points will be extracted, the first of which. involving the blacksmith theme, is possibly the crux of his narrative. He reminds us that the very next verse, Genesis 4:22, tells us of his half-brother Tubalcain “who was a hammerer in every work of brass and iron,” in short, the proto-blacksmith just as Jubal was the protomusician. Jubal could scarcely forego such an opportunity and, PEAK Y -anmve as WJ « to the exclusion of Pythagoras. but rather to establish his priority in time. Chronology is the central consideration, and Aegidius goes on to cite numerous subsequent savants, with Greeks predominating, who added to the body of musical knowledge. Indeed he goes so far as to proclaim explicitly a theory of progress centuries before many historians would allow him to." saying. “the younger, the greater the insight, as is manifest in the more ancient philosophers, then in Socrates, then in Plato, and finally in Aristotle.” The third point, incidental when compared to the preceding, has to do with the part that the observation of nature has in musical discovery. Aegidius tells us of various post-Jubal authors who describe musical observations derived from the song of birds, especially the nightingale, the nocturnal whispering of wind in the forest, and other natural phenomena." This seemingly romantic theme, in all probability derived from uncited Roman poets, will become a commonplace of post-Renaissance music history. Jacques de Liége and the Pseudo-Johannes de Muris recapitulate the views of Aegidius, modifying them only in detail. Jacques, for example, wishing to specify Pythagoras’ contribution to the progress of musical knowledge and no longer able to attribute the discovery of the consonances to him, suggests that “perhaps he invented some new instruments which did not exist before.”1* thus creating an ironic “delighted by the sound of the hammers, as we have it in the Scholastic History, he cleverly deduced from their weights the proportions and consonances arising from them . . . which discovery the Greeks fictitiously attributed to Pythagoras.”!" The second point is probably the most basic from a historiographic point of view. It is clear from the narrative of Aegidius as a whole that he does not wish to set up Jubal as a discoverer of music 7 Aegidius has the plural, historiis scholasticis, here as well as below (cf. n. 10), but surely he refers to one work: Peter Comestor's Historia scholastica, from which his own narrative is derived. Jacques de Liège will cite Peter by name, Speculum musicae 1, vi, ed. Roger Bragard, Corpus Scriptorum de Musica (Rome, 1955-1973) 3, 1, 26. 8 Gerbert, II, 371-72. 9 Gerbert, 11, 372. According 10 Josephus it was not Jubal himself, but the family of Seth which inscribed the pillars; for the history of the confusion see Cohen, “Jubal . +", pp. 86-92. 10 Gerbert, 11, 372. The word fabulose, translated I here “fictitiously.” docs not sccm to indicate mora) disapproval; rather it probably means much the same as the English word “fabulously” when used in its proper sense of referring to marvelous tales and fables. 11 For manv decades historians followed the lead of J. B. Bury's classic, The Idea of Progress: An Enquiry into Its Growth and Origin (London, 1920), which establishes the conception as the product of the Enlightenment, explicitly excluding the Middle Ages from any share in its development. On the other hand, W. Warren Wager, in “Modern Views of the Origins of the Idea of Progress.” Journal of the History of Ideas, XX VII (1967), 55-70, describes the “new orthodoxy” of the post-World War Il period, replacing Bury’s position, Briefly, the new orthodoxy. presaged by Cari Becker and Christopher Dawson, and established by a series of thinkers, including Reinhold Niebuhr, John Baillie. and Emile Brunner, sees the idea of progress as a secularized offspring, indeed a bastard offspring. of the optimistic strain in Christian eschatology. Aegidius’ statement, while having more in common with the new posi. tion than the old, is actually quite different from both. It contradicts Bury in that it is an incontestable medieval expression of the idea. and differs from the new orthodoxy in that it is non-theologically motivated. The explanation for this is implicit in the splendidiy documented study of Johannes Spörl: “Das Alte und Neue im Mittelalter,” Historisches Jahrbuch, L (1930), 297-341, 498-524. which shows the idea to be present in isolated fields of endeavor during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, but not as an over-all world view in the eighteenth. and nineteenth-century manner. 12 Gerbert. 11, 373. 13 Gerbert. Il, 372.73. 14 Speculum musicae, Bragard, op. cit., 1, 26.

osos significance of Aegidius’ position. What he writes results from the coming together for the first time of two venerable medieval literary traditions: that of ars musica and that of universal history. What change of roles with Jubal. Pseudo-Johannes embellishes the “idea of progress” with a vivid. if not gracefully expressed. metaphor: “In this manner.” he writes, "from a brook of the highest spring, through is the latter? Aegidius gives us a succinct summary of it when, as his the collection of waters. there comes into being the ship-bearing river." The most significant variation comes when Jacques extends Aegidius’ embryonic history beyond antiquity and the Old Testament into the Christian era: he cites Guido's contributions to source for the Jubal story, he cites Genesis, a gloss on it, Josephus, Rabanus, and the scholastic history. It begins with the Old Testament, which contains a superb series of historical works, organized into a canon by the historically conscious Jews of the last centuries chant and those of Lambertus and Franco to mensural music.** before Christ. Josephus, the first-century A.D. Jewish historian, sets lt is true that not all contemporary theorists maintain the new the pattern for subsequent universal history in his Antiquitates doctrine. Some like the thirteenth-century Lambertus!* and Jerome of Moravia!f seem unaware of it and maintain the traditional posi- Judaicae, a commentary, in the broad sense, on the Old Testament. Eusebius of Caesarea extends the tradition in his Chronikoi kanones tion even if expressed in the new intellectualist language we should expect from Dominican scholastics. The early fourteenth-century Walter Odington, however, is aware of it and takes the interesting (ca. 303) and Historia ecclesiastica (ca. 303-325); he does so chronologically to include the Christian church and outwardly to include the Gentiles. step of denying it explicitly: Granted that through the histories we know Jubal to be the first to practice music, Pythagoras nevertheless was the first to measure consonances by weights, parallel “> A device he employs in the latter is the drawing up of chronological tables comparing biblical-Christian 20 It should be emphasized that this essay is concerned only with the tradition of and he left to posterity the findings of precise reason.!® universal history; much of what is said will not apply to other medieval historical He presages the position of eighteenth-century writers like Gerbert and Hawkins, who with all due respect to the historical tradition are constrained to associate the rationalization of musical discovery with conquest. standard English-language a Greek. Writing (New York, 1942), and especially Harry E. Barnes, 4 Writing (Norman, Okla., It is now time to take stock and consider the historiographic 15 Summa musicae, Gerbert, 111, 194. This treatise does not cite the involvement of Tubalcain, but does place Jubal first for reasons of chronology. The author, writing sometime between 1274 and 1313, is unknown; see Ulrich Michels, Die Mu:siktraktate des Johannes de Muris. Beihefte zum Archiv für Musikwissenschaft, VIII (Wiesbaden, 1970), 16-17. 16 Bragard, op. cit., 1, 27. The Pseudo-Simon Tunstede also includes Guido and Franco, but does not follow Aegidius in asserting the priority of Jubal, Quatuor principalia musicae, ed. E. de Coussemaker, Scriptorum de Musica Medi Aevi . . . (hereafter, Coussemaker), 4 vols. (Paris, 1864-76), IV, 206-7. 17 Tractatus de musicà, Coussemaker, 1, 253-54. 18 Tractatus de musica, Coussemaker, I, 6-7. Others maintaining the traditional position are Johannes de Muris, Gerbert. III, 249; Marchettus de Padua, Gerbert, 111, 65-66; and Johannes Kekius, Gerbert, 111, 322, 19 De speculatione musicae ii, Coussemaker, I, 198. Odington must certainly refer here (per historias) either to Peter Comestor or at least the tradition of historical commentary on Scripture commencing with Josephus and culminating in Peter; were with Chaldean, Greek, Roman, and Egyptian history. Another significant genres such The ar: RgeaGfUtieOEnFrSoadàA-.sMe. as hagiography. chronicles, literature on medieval royal biography, historiography surveys. James W. and is far from Thompson. 1938), are lacking in 4 elementary works of travel and satisfactors. The two History Historical of History of Historical insight. sympathy. and synthetic ability. Of the two famous interpretative essays. Benedetto Croce's, Theory and History of Historiography Collingwood's (1917), trans. D. Ainslee The Idea of History (Oxford, 1946), the (London, 1921). and R. G. latter strikes the present author as both more cogent and less remote from the primari sources. There are at least two recent works of broad scope by professional historiographers, but thev touch only indirectly on issues relevant to this essav; William J. Brandt, The Shape of Medieval History Age (New Haven, 1966), and Benoit Lacroix, L'Historien au Moyen (Montreal, 1971), One hoped the necd would be supplied in the recent survey by the eminent medievalist Bery! Smalley, Historians in the Middle Ages (London, 1974), but rather than a standard work like her The Study of the Bible Middle Ages in the (Oxford, 1952), we have the product of a curious editorial decision to publish a popular book on a subject of interest only to professionals. Some of the most lucid pages on medieval universal history appear in Eva Matthews Sanford, “The Study of Ancient History in the Middle Ages.” The Journal of the History of Ideas. V (1944), 21-43: and especially the chapter, “The Historical Tradition,” in Jean Seznec's classic The Survival of the Pagan Gods Barbara F. Sessions (1940), trans. (New York, 1953). Once again we are reminded of the overwhelming contribution ta cultural history of the Warburg-related iconographers. he simply repeating the standard reference to Jubal from the ars musica tradition, 21 Actually, Eusebius’ works influenced Western historiography by way of subsehe would cite Moses or Genesis rather than the historiae. Moreover, in an earlier quent Latin revisions: Jerome's of the Chronikoi, updating it to 378. and Rufinus' of passage he displays knowledge of Comestor when he writes: “. . . thus say those who the Historia, updating it to $95. think that Jubal, the son of Lamech, was the inventor of this science,” ibid. 1, p. 192.

sa eee a Jjutuds vel r y Misagula> di vas: . step is taken by Augustine when, in his De civitate Dei (413-26), he establishes the scheme of periodization which was to endure for more than a millennium: he distinguishes six periods — trom: Adam to the flood; from the flood to Abraham (Moses. in some authors); from n.k-es$+ Moses to David: from David to the Babylonian captivity; from the capuvity to Christ (more precisely John the Baptist); aud from Christ by and large lost on medieval historians, who are content to use his framework, actually deriving it from the Historiae adversus paganos (418) of his popularizer Orosius. The tradition of universal history is Ages by authors such as Isidore and Rabanus, culminating finally in Peter Comestors Historia scholastica, or simply Historiae (ca. 1173), a required textbook in thirteenth-century Paris“ and the direct source of the Jubal-Pythagoras doctrine of Aegidius and Jacques de Liège. Comestor, inthe ambiguous attitude toward later history which is still present in Padre Martini, but the vast compilation of the Dominican Vincent of Beauvais, the Mirror historiale, works its way up to the year 1244.°% Peter's and Vincent's collections are immensely influential and continue to be copied, translated, and eventually printed for the next four centuries. medieval schemes of periodization, most notably that of the four kingdoms, deriving from interpretations of the four beasts from Daniel 7. Though obsolete, it is still maintained by some political historians of the seventeenth century, but fails to exert much influence on music history. For a summary explanation, see Smalley, Historians, pp. 32-38. 23 See Saralyn R. Daly, “Peter Comestor: Master of Histories,” Speculum, XXXII (1957), 62-73. 24 The relevant passage of Peter Comestor appears in PL, CXCVIII, col. 1079. While it is certain that these musical authors are directly dependent upon Peter, it is by no means obvious that Jacques and subsequent music theorists know Aegidius. Thus occasional references in this essay to the “Aegidian position" are not meant to imply such knowledge. 25 The year 1250 in a later extension. For an over-all view of Vincent's work see B. L. Uliman, “A Project for a New Edition of Vincent of Beauvais," Speculum, VIII (1933), 312-26. The musical portion of Vincent's work is published in Gottfried Giller, Vincenz von Beauvais O.P. (um 1194-1264) und sein Musiktraktat im Speculum Docirinale, Kölner Beiträge zur Musikforschung, XV (Regensburg, 1959). The discovery of music is dealt with in Book XVII, chapters 24 and 25 (Göller, pp. 103-105). Unlike Peter Comestor, Vincent makes no attempt at historical synthesis and simply compiles enthusiastic embrace of the entire past, biblical, pagan, or whatever, and its preoccupation with chronology. Eusebius and Orosius had included pagan history in order to establish the claims of Christianity, but the medieval historians accepted pagan gods and historical figures as part of their heritage: Zoroaster, Isis. Osiris, Apollo, Pythagoras, the Middle Ages were enabled by it to indulge their encyclopedic impulse and to integrate them into their all-inclusive schemes. Ironically. they even reinvest them, now that they are on the same side, so to speak, with some of their original mythic power, just as they cause the saints with their miracles to share in the power of God. We are prepared now to return to the question left unanswered toward the beginning of this study: why medieval theorists fail to display the antipagan partisanship of Church Fathers like Tertullian. cidentally, fails to extend his history into the Middle Ages, displaying 22 There are other standard The most noteworthy traits of medieval universal history are its and Plato are integrated into the biblical chronology of Adam, Moses, and David, with their respective accomplishments and mutual influences enumerated. The specific conceptual device making this possible is euhemerism, so-called from Euhemerus, the third-century B.C. pagan philosopher who sought to rationalize the Greek gods as ancient heroes, deified after their exploits had faded into the past.#° Christian authors of the patristic period exploited euhemerism to obvious polemical advantage, denouncing the pagan gods as frauds, mere human beings deceitfully posing as deities; but historians of to the present.” Augustine’s profound interpretative concerns are maintained in the Middle y UAFRr?A It is a matter of radically different historical background: in the third and fourth centuries the new Church was engaged in a struggle to the death with Greco-Roman paganism, but in the Middle Ages paganism was only a memory, encountered not in everyday life, but in the pages of venerable manuscripts. Thus the earlier theorists follow their sources without scruple in their preference for Pythagoras, while the later theorists turn to Jubal, not because they have been converted to the message of Scripture, but because they are persuaded of Jubal's chronological priority. One might say that the patristic view is dualistic, with the known world divided into two camps, whereas the medieval view is monistic. or, rather, encyclopedic: the medieval scholar sees the world as a self-contained 2 There is a vast literature on euhemerism: works combining both command of the sources and sure interpretative grasp are P. Alphandery, “L’Euhemerisme et les debuts de l'histoire des religions au Moyen-Age.” Revue de l'histoire des religions, relevant texts; the result in this case is the juxtaposition without comment of the con- CIX (1934). 1-27; and J. D. Cooke, “Euhemerism, A Medieval Interpretation of tradictory Boethius and Comestor texts. Classical Paganism,” Speculum, 11 (1927), 396-410.

The Musical Quarterly Italian theorists add nothing to the historical outline of Aegidius. but on the other, modern intellectual historians are virtually unanimous in tracing the beginnings of western historical consciousness 10 Renaissance humanism.** Before attempting to resolve this contradiction, something must be said about the conception of “historical consciousness” or the synonymous “sense of history.” Actually, in its full nineteenth- and twentieth-century western form, it is a comprehensive outlook on reality involving difficult epistemological questions, but for our purposes a functional definition can be achieved by isolating its more obvious traits. Peter Burke has done this with admirable efficiency in The Renaissance Sense of the Past, where he singles out three: (1) “the sense of anachronism,” manifested, for example, in Petrarch when he recognizes ancient Rome to be qualitatively different from the present;? (2) “the awareness of unit, and his task is to integrate into it everything he knows, including ancient pagan lore and learning. | The other trait we have singled out as most characteristic of the medieval universal historian, his preoccupation with chronology. has deep roots. He looks back upon a five-millennial succession of related events, Creation, Fall, Redemption, etc., whereas the classical historian had tended to see history as a series of repeatable cycles. The sense of chronology was most pronounced in the twelfth century among politically conscious historians like Otto of Freising and William of Tyre, as well as biblical scholars like Peter Comestor, In the thirteenth century it gave way to the timeless speculation of the great philosopher-theologians like Thomas Acquinas, but yet enjoyed at least a minor resurgence in the musical thought of Aegidius and subsequent theorists. What it achieves there is the creation of a skeletal music history, exceedingly brief, yet, in a sense, complete: the evidence," as displayed in Valla’s exposure of the ninth-century :* and (3) “the interest in forgery, “The Donation of Constantine causation,” that is, the search for historical explanations more rational and less generalized than, say, Divine Providence or the whims of Fortune. While it may be arguable whether Renaissance historical explanations are that much of an improvement on those of the most renowned musical figures of universal history, like Jubal, David Mercury, Pythagoras, are extracted and set down in chronological order against the background of the Six Ages. This is no less. as we shall see, than the basic plan of post-Renaissance music history; one ls tempted to suggest that Johannes Forkel's occasionally cited title Middle Ages, it is incontestable that medieval historical writing was strikingly deficient in the first two of these traits, and that they appear with increasing frequency, either singly or together. in fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Italian historiography. the founder of musicology, be surrendered to Aegidius Zamorensis.” * * % The Renaissance” presents a curious interlude in the progress of the Jubal-Pythagoras saga. On the one hand the most eminent ea 27 ne Schrade once made an assertion superficially similar to that made here, Einführung in die Musikgeschichtsschreibung älterer Zeit," Musikerzichung vu (1930), 3-13, reprinted in Leo Schrade: De Scientia Musicae Studia atque Ora. tiones, ed. Ernst Lichtenhahn (Stuttgart, 1967), pp. 17-33. He maintained that the very question, quis sil inventor musicae, regardless of the stercotyped answer, bespcaks a historical consciousness (historischer Besinnung). The present author, on the contrary accedes to che generally accepted view that the western intellectual trait referred to as historical consciousness is a post-medieval phenomenon, and fails to detect any note: worthy exception in the quis sit . . . question, The particular answer given to it by Aegidius, however, will prove to be historiographically significant . | | 28 This term will be used many times during the next several pages without qualification or explanation, but the thoughtful reader should be aware that the ee is not entirely innocent of the twentieth-century literature on its controversial istory. Suffice it to say that the term is used within the context of the new orthodoxy cc ee position of Ferguson, Chabod, Panofsky, Baron, Mattingly. er È The position is best described, possibly, as a synthesis of the original Pina thesis with the antithesis of the at is to say that, after all persistence of medicval traits twentieth-century medievalists’ reaction: the proper qualifications are acknowledged, such throughout the period, among the various facets of cultural, political, and regional social differences. life, there as the differences was after all per DWaPeohr) e, Ae ARaeu a Renaissance, a broad movement introducing distinctly new and profoundly important characteristics into European civilization. 29 Among the works consulted on this point and infiuentia) in establishing the Renaisview of Renaissance historiography maintained here are: Peter Burke, The Modern of ons Foundati Kelley, R. Donald 1969): (London, Past sance Sense of the Historical Scholarship (New York, 1970): Hans Baron, The Crisis of the Early Italian s and Renaissance, rev. one-vol. ed. (Princeton, 1966); Myron P. Gilmore, Humanist(Prince. dini Guicciar and lli Machiave Gilbert, Felix 1963); Mass., ge, Jurists (Cambrid ton, 1965); Wallace K. Ferguson, The Renaissance in Historical Thought (Boston, mus des 1948); Hans Baron, “Das Erwachen des historischen Denkens im Humanis will literature l Additiona 5-20. Quattrocento,” Historische Zeitschrift, CXLYII (1938). be cited at appropriate places in the text. 80 For a full appreciation of this point sce Theodor Mommsen, “Petrarch's Conception of the ‘Dark Ages’,” Speculum, XVII (1942), 226-42, 31 For more on the development of critical method, see Kelley's previously cited Foundations of Modern Historical Scholarship, which stresses the part played by philology, especially as applied to the legal tradition, in the development of historical method.

{he Musical Quarterly Quibbles aside, then, Burke's scheme is gener ally acceptable, but when turning 10 music history we find it to be only a partially e historical writing, ry tradition, a process in which chronology is the key factor, and only then Pythagoras in the Renaissance. Only one theorist writing in Italy seriously considers the question of their priority: Johannes Gallicus, a Flemis h-born Carthusian monk, who completed his Ritus canendi vetustissimus et novus in Mantua sometime during the reign of Pius II ( 1458-64). He is unique in his partisanship on Jubal's behalf, relating substa ntially the same material as Aegidius, but with an unprecedente d tendentiousness. For the first time we have a true follower of Tertullian: I marvel that men of our time, learned and expert, indeed even ecclesiastics are able to put faich in those who say that the modes of music were discovered under rocks, as was mentioned above, or in drops of water or earthen caverns unless perhaps they think that Jubal simply built the organ or the cithara. ” thought among the foolish, and that neither he first nor anybody else sang before the flood. Which, if it be true... . then indeed the sacred pages, which do not lie, have not given us che truth. For Moses wrote of this Jubal. .. 32 Johannes continues with standard Josephus-Comestor-Aegedi us docering, but again with a distinct change in tone, as when he writes: Boethius, copying the fables and boasting of the Greeks , attributed the entire glory of this matter to the philosopher Pythagoras.” He displays a second distinctive quality in the consis tency with which he alludes to the priority of Jubal throu ghout subsequent chapters of his treatise; there are at least half a dozen references to him in the liber primus, specifying his contri butions to musical science and distinguishing them from later Greek refinements, example his discovery of the four basic proportional strings fully attributed by the Greeks to Mercury) for (boast: and the subsequent adito .. — partisanship and consistency of argumentation, These traits which contrast with medieval neutrality and acceptance of contradicthere is no comparable music history. There fore our primary task tion in mind we can return to the treatment afforded Jubal and a scribed by Buethius.** is a substantial body of medieval and Renaissanc to observe the exercise of the traits of historical consciousness, or. as they might better be called, the historical virtues. The issue, therefore, is not the refinement of music history, but its estab lishment, and with this distinc- Vs dition of eleven strings by the Greeks to make up the fifteen deadequate conceptual tool, lt must be remembered that while there 15 to trace the growth of a music histo "roma N} — are unique to Johannes, having no immediate influence tion** upon subsequent musical literature. They are singled out here because they suggest a historiographic principle: the coherence and consistency of Johannes' historical position owe much to the stimulation provided by his polemical motivation — his prejudice, if you will. Unlike medieval theorists who write among colleagues sharing common views on fundamental issues, Johannes writes as one at war with a hostile intellectual environment, perhaps as a conservative monk among progressive humanists.*° On a broader front the controversies of the Reformation will have much to do with the shaping of western historical consciousness. As D. R. Kelly says: “the exposure of most myths, it seems, was made in the name of honor or faith rather than of truth, and the search for new sources of information was seldom disinterested. The achievements of historical scholarship should be restored to their ideological context. . . ."* But, as indicated above, Johannes has no followers. That series of outstanding Italian theorists from Gafforio to Zarlino, for all their sophistication in matters of temperament and tuning. display no interest in the historical issues involving Jubal and Pythagoras. Not unexpectedly, they lack the ideological impetus of Gallicus, but. 34 Coussemaker, IV, 303-6. 35 The peculiar medieval trait, cited several times above, of juxtaposing directly conflicting opinions, is mentioned also by Lawrence A. Gushee, “Questions of Genre in Medieval Treatises on Music," Gattungen der Musik in Einzeldarstellungen: Gedenkschrift Leo Schrade, ed. Wulf Arlı, Ernst Lichtenhahn, and Hans Oesch, Erste Folge (Bern/München, 1973), p. 375). This splendid essay is rare among writings on medieval music theory for its sophistication in gencral medieval intellectual history. 36 Leo Schrade, in “Renaissance: The Historical Conception of an Epoch,” Kongress-Bericht Internationale Gesellschaft für Musikwissenschaft Utrecht 1952 (Kasse), 1953), reprinted in Leo Schrade: De Scientia, pp. 317-19, takes precisely the opposite view, proclaiming Johannes as the first musical humanist. Granted that Johannes studied under Victorino da Feltre at Mantua, there is nothing in his treatise to warrant the full-blown Renaissance consciousness Schrade attributes to him. Whetber or not he is actually an antihumanist, which is suggested here for want of a more plausible alternative, he certainly maintains a conscrvative position against a host of contemporaries he looks upon as stulti, insensati, and, by implication, godless. The precise determination of Johannes’ ideological bias secms a sufficiently interesting task for 32 Coussemaker, IV, 299. 83 Coussemaker, IV, 300. an enterprising historiographer. 37 Foundations of Modern Historical Scholarship, p. 11.

more the point, they are innocent also of Aegidius’ chronology, and even display an unblinking accept sense when considering those modest manifestations of historical consciousness which are in fact present in Renaissance musical writing. Modern musical historiographers are generally reconciled to this. of ance of historical contradiction strikingly similar to that of theorists. Gaflorio, for exampie, recounts with standard lb Boethian material the earlier medieval seeming approval the on Pythagoras’ discoveries, but ‘Typically, they point out that there is no music historian comparable to Vasari, and quite rightfully they explain it by citing Leonardo's famous dictum to the effect that while art works survive, music then + the discussion with one brief unreconciled reference to ubal: Josephus, however. attributed this Pythagorean investigation to Jubal vanishes after its performance.** But the compulsion to maintain an unqualified, and in fact exaggerated, Burchardtian position is too strong, and the same authors insist upon the Renaissance origins of western musicology, dismissing out of hand the possibility of any medieval contribution. In doing so they ignore the implications of the inventores musicae, and emphasize instead that interesting new befor the flood, who, indeed, fearing that very flood, since Adam had pro hesied to the human race that the world would suddenly perish by flame or on inscribed on two columns that very pleasing and special art of sound, . . . "38 o Aaron's treatment of the inventori de la musica is even more peculiar, He enumerates the many mino commonplace of Renaissance musical] literature which we first encounter when Tinctoris in his Liber de arte contrapuncti (1477) praises Dunstable, Dufay, Ockeghem, etc., exclaiming “there exists no composition except from the past forty years which is considered by r inventors of music, in a manner reminiscent of Isido re, reserving, however, for Pythagoras, that “diligent investigator a special place ,” who “gave order to the consonances” and who “reduced to the certain and firm judgm ent of the mind what others rashly wished to untrustworthy whim of the ears.”®® But with the surprising declaration that gi > he concludes his discussion pue have the old Testament as the foundation of our true Christian i gli are told in it and believe it to enesis, the learned as worth hearing.’ A series of subsequent theorists and other authors single out their immediate forebears for similar admiration: Glareanus, for example, eulogizes Josquin,* Zarlino speaks with reverence of his teacher, Willaert,* and Cosimo Bartoli comleave to the dubious and that Tubal was the founder of musical d ical me pares Josquin to Michelangelo. be the truth what Moses says in sci science, he who was of the There are any number of such references. They all have subtle, and at times not so subtle, differences of intention and context, but do, nevertheless, as Kahl and Kümmel maintain, share two important traits: a new appreciation of the composer’s individuality and a i family Zarlino is free from such obvious contradictio n, but still shows no Interest in the historical impli cations of the subject. In a chapt er entitled, “Della origine et certezza della musica, '*! he combines standard information on the inventors with scholastic doctrine on the relation of the five senses to knowledge, in order to demonstrate the firm and ancient position of music among the mathematical sciences. He reminds one of the thirteenth-century preoccupation with philosophic issues, and its corollary disin terest with history. In short, the outstanding Italian theorists displa y, if anything, a retrogression from the historiographic achievemen t of Acgidius. What, then, of the vaunted historical consciousness of the Renaissance; did it fail to have its effect upon musical literature? By and large it did, and this is the fundamental circumstance to have in mind 48 Franchino Gafforio, Theorica Musice, I, 8 (Milan, 1492) [no pagination]. 39 Pietro Aaron,,Thoscanello de la Musi usica, I, ii ii (Venice, i 2 % Thoscanello, 1, ii. iit, #1 Gioseffe Zarlino, Le Istitutioni harmoniche, 1, i (Venice, 1558), 34. nm. . aeng1d7ro 42 Making the reference to Leonardo are Herbert Birtner, “Johann Joseph Fux und der Musikalische Historismus,” Deutsche Musikkultur, VII (1942-43), 3: Willi Kahl, “Das Geschichtsbewusstsein in der Musikanschauung der italienischen Renaissance und der deutschen Humanismus,” Hans Albrecht in Memoriam, ed. Wilfried Brennecke and Hans Hasse (Kassel, 1962), p. 40; and Werner F. Kümmel, Geschichte und Musikgeschichte, Marburger Beiträge zur Musikforschung, Bd. 1 (Marburg, 1967), 16. Each cites the other in turn, a symptom of their more general mutual dependence: the Kümmel book especially relies upon Kahl for its view of Renaissance musical historiography. The three are ostensibly the most scrious discussions of the subject in print. Unfortunately they are all hampered by an extreme nincteenth-century conception of the Renaissance with its corollary disdain for the Middle Ages. unrelieved by acquaintance with the sort of literature alluded to in n. 28 above, much of which, although written by German-born scholars, appeared first in English. 43 Coussemakcr, IV, 77. p. 362. 4 Heinrich Glarcanus, Dodecachordon, Lib. 111, cap. 24 (Basel, 1547). $5 Le Istitutioni harmoniche, Proemio, p. 2. 46 Cited in Gustave Reese, Music in the Renaissance (New York, 1954), p. 259.

Us bts jubal Vel Pythagoras gms aus a) Possibly the most remarkable of ıhe northern inventores musicae discussions is the opening chapter of the Practica musica (Bern, 1556) by the German Lutheran, Hermann Finck: it is compositionally more coherent than Adam of Fulda’s and more complete in heightened aesthetic reaction to his work.* It seems fair to label these genuine Renaissance impulses, but do they constitute historical consciousness? Considering them in the abstract the answer must be No: the three are by definition distinct insights, having in its categorization of moderns than Tinctoris’. There are, moreover, a number of significant details: among them the first date in common only that exercise of the imaginative intelligence we term insight. Indeed, there is something antihistorical about an attitude which denies validity to the entire musical past other than one's immediately preceding generations. But this is answering simplistic argument with simplistic refutation. Quite possibly there is some relationship to dawning historical consciousness in many of these passages, and ultimately each merits a thorough examination in its full context. This is a task beyond the 17 Naure 1480 and a little thereafter were others far — “circa the literat superior to their precedessors”;®° and an explicit attribution of the moderns to the same historical sequence as Jubal and Pythagoras — “in our time there are new inventors (novi inventores), among them Nicolas Gombert. . . .”5! There is, however, a curious omission; Finck fails to mention the prominent medieval musicians. This order: a number of northern theorists incorporate such passages into could very well result from Protestant motivation, but subsequent Lutheran authors, like Calvisius and Printz. nevertheless tend to pay their inventores musicae sections, thus enriching and bringing up to full respect to medieval musicians. scope of the present essay, but one broad suggestion is very much in date the traditional medieval framework. Tinctoris is the first to do There is no wish here to exaggerate the accomplishment of the so: in the oft-quoted prologue to the Proportionale musices (ca. musicians of the church from Ambrose to Johannes de Muris, and northerners: their history of music remains embryonic, even primitive, and they display little indeed of the historical virtues proposed by Burke. A sense of anachronism, for example, is belied by one of the very points singled out in Finck as significant: his classification of concludes with an enthusiastic reference to the moderni, Ockeghem. Jubal, Pythagoras, and Gombert, as inventores in the same sense. Busnois, Regis, and Caron, whose immediate fons et origo is among There are at best traces of the awareness of evidence,* and historical explanation is virtually nonexistent. The one historical virtue they 1476), he begins with the protomusicus Jubal and other ancients from David to Pythagoras, follows with a paragraph of praise for the the English of whom Dunstable is the chief.*8 Adam of Fulda, the German scholar-musician, in chapter 7 of his De musica (1490), presents essentially the same material as Tinctoris. It is, however, altogether more medieval in tone, lacking especially the intense sense of special worth Tinctoris attaches to the moderni. The most interesting portion of the chapter is its conclusion: How many there are who follow him [Boethius]: Gregory. Isidore, Guido. Odo. Berno, Johannes de Muris; and near my own time. the most learned William Dufay and Anthonius de Busna, whom we wish to follow in both word and deed. If we enquire, however. who among all was the first, 1 think, it is that very Jubal, because he preceded all chronologically (tempore); for the holy scripture mentions him as inventor and no other.4? practice is the proto-virtue, a respect for chronology. It may well be that a thorough study of their seemingly more sophisticated Italian contemporaries would reveal instances of superior historical insight.53 However, the concern here is not with isolated flashes of intelligence, but with the establishment of something upon which the 50 P. A ij. 51 /bid. A similar concept appears in Adrian Coclico's curious classification of musicians into four types, Compendium musices (Nuremberg, 1552); the first !YP© consists of the inventores or theorici, including Jubal, Amphion, Boetius, Ockeg®€TM: Obrecht, and alii multi. 52 For example, Finck on the claims of various Greek authors for certain inven: tores musicae: “What authors aver on the other inventors does not merit creden0eOp cit., A [verso]. . 47 The concepts are set forth in Kahl, op. cit., p. 39, and Kümmel, op. cit., pp. $3 For example, Henry W. Kaufman, The Life and Works of Nicola Vicentino, 11-18; the passages are referred to in Kahl, pp. 41-42, and Kümmel, pp. 17-20. Birtner, 1511-c. 1576, Musicological Studies and Documents, 11 (1966), 113-15. makes a good Case op. cit., p. 5, cites many of the passages, but not the concepts, and indeed backs off from attaching too much historiographic significance to the passages, p. 6. 48 Coussemaker, IV, 153-54. 49 Gerbert, HI, 341. for the historical tendency in Vicentino's thinking. And one can hardly pass over in silence the intense and prolonged historical argumentation of Vincenzo Galilei, but how can others build on a historical scheme which dismisses the polyphony of the past 150 years as barbaric and sees the beginnings of musical rebirth in Gafforio?

14 Mc IMUsILAI (ZUAILCILY Jubal Vel Pythagoras future can build: and at this point the future seems to lie with the in the De initio et progressu musices* and a few years later composes his own Opus chronologicum (1605). His chronological con- 40 benighted conservatives of the north, especially the Germans. * a a, * 19 cern is consistently evident in the De initio where he sometimes cites precise dates, for example the capture of Troy in 2769 a condito Mundo, or more often uses the Eusebian comparative method, as Music history as we know it today develops in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, reaching its first maturity in Gerbert, Hawkins, and Burney, The earliest work from that period, and what when he begins his discussion of Pythagoras: is generally acknowledged to be the first history of music, is the 70 years after the Babylonian captivity, while Superbus the last of the Tarquinian De initio et progressu musices (Leipzig, 1600) of J. S. Bach's learned kings managed affairs among the Romans, more than 600 vears after the capture predecessor at the Thomasschule, Seth Calvisius.% But surely his of Troy, 500 years before the birth of Christ, perceived that the consonant musical intervals are comprised of certain proportions. and he wished to subject them not MeanwhiJe Pythagoras, who flourished in the age of king Cambvses of Persia, little book is as much a culmination as a beginning; it gives every only to hearing but to settle them according to reason and by the certitude of appearance of being an expansion of the standard inventores musicac visual demonstration. The occasion of this demonstration was furnished by blackchapter into a self-contained work of approximately sixty-five pages. smiths, as Bocthius describes it... 90 Whether or not Calvisius actually knew Adam of Fulda and Her- The expansion evident in Calvisius is a basic trait of seventeenthmann Finck, he must have been acquainted with the tradition of and early eighteenth-century history; the period, styled by some as German university music which inspired them: their works are too the “Age of Erudition,”® is characterized by an immense accumulasimilar in outline and subject matter to be coincidental.“ But even tion of information and an inability to forego citing a single item of more significant, perhaps, is that he partakes fully of that same tradiit in published works. The historiographic implications of this will tion of medieval universal history which influenced Aegidius in the he discussed later, but for now it should be clear that we cannot first place. It was more vigorous than ever in northern Europe durgrant to the formidable tomes of this time a treatment proportional ing the latter half of the sixteenth century, a condition hinted at in to that granted the brief summaries of earlier figures like Aegidius Pasquier's Gallican remark which traces the revival of letters to and Finck. Rather, their remarks on Jubal and Pythagoras will be French scholars like Peter Comestor rather than to the Italian huisolated with a view toward illustrating what is old and what is new manists.5? Chronology remains the central concern, and this period in their historical thought. brings its sharpened critical skills to bear upon the patristic and Athanasius Kircher, the remarkable Jesuit polymath, represents medieval works. The outstanding figure of that time is Joseph Scathe scientific aspect of seventeenth-century learning. liger, whose Thesaurus temporum (1583) is a reconstruction of Eusebius’ Chronikoi canones.®* Calvisius cites both Eusebius and Scaliger a considerable interest in music. In the first book of his twelve-hundred-page Musurgia universalis (Rome, 1650), he demonstrates the 5 On the "mittelalterlich-theologischen” character of German sixteenth-century history and its “so niedern Stufe," see the standard work of Eduard Fueter, Geschichte der neuern Historiographie, 8rd ed. (Munich and Berlin, 1936), p. 181. 55 Calvisius' work forms the second portion, pp. 74-139, of a work entitled Exer- He is best known as the founder of modern Egyptolagy,f? but also manifested Ten: new empirical frame of mind with careful drawings comparing the citationes Musicae Duae, Quarum prior est, de modis musicis, quos vulgo Tonos voopened many minds to the new concept that our world has a continuous history." cant, recte cognoscendis, et dijudicandis. Posterior de initio et Progressu Musices, in “Baroque Histories of Music.” The Musical Quarterly, XXV (1939), 198. aliisque rebus eo spectantibus (Leipzig, 1600). 59 The citations appear on pp. 81 and 82, respectively, 56 Precisely determining Calvisius’ sources is a subject for-an eminently worthwhile historiographic study. 61 James W. Thompson, A History of Historical Writing, borrows it for his pre- 57 Sec D. R. Kelley, op. cit.. p. 299. Enlightenment chapter, II, 3-57, from J. Franklin Jameson's “The Age of Erudition.” 58 Scaliger goes so far as to refer to it as "my Eusebius” in his “Testament of Joseph Scaliger,” on p. 67 of the translation appearing in the Autobiography of Joseph Scaliger, trans. George W. Robinson (Cambridge, Mass., 1927). He would have Warren been surprised 60 Op. cit., p. 86, to read the claim of Dwight Allen that “Scaliger an address reprinted in the [Chicago] University Record, X (1905). 19-28; see Thompson, JI, 8. 62 See Erik Iversen, The Myth of Egypt and its Hieroglyphs in European Tradition (Copenhagen, 1961), pp. 92-99.

Jubal Vel Pythagoras The Musical Quarterly human larynx and lungs to that of various animals, with a similar E comparison of the cartilaginous parts of the ear. and with a chart of notated bird calls.“ Something of the same spirit is present when he turns to the subject of Jubal, thoroughly integrated, however, with the Aegidian view that nature plays a part in musical discovery. “Nothing is more obvious than sound in this terrestrial theatre of things.” he writes, citing the wind in the trees, the calls of birds, and the music-producing potential of reeds and of objects struck together. To him music is so natural that he maintains it would be rediscovered, through chance, talent, or experiment, even if all man- ETS to sacrifice any detail of the Pythagoras legend. He is aware that it is the dimensions of the hammers and not their weights which give rise to the basic consonances, but declares that in this instance, by the intervention of Divine Providence. the two must have coincided.** A work of rather different spirit, the 1715 Histoire of BourdelotBonnet, presents an old view with a new twist. It attributes the discovery of musical systems to Jubal, but finds the Hebrews negligent in passing on their learning to other nations. thereby enabling the Greeks, who were ambitious and scornful of all others as barkind were to be removed from earth, with the exception of a small barians, to claim credit for themselves. band of innocent children. Therefore it was not the Greeks. the Egyptians, or Chaldeans, who discovered music, but the Hebrews . who preceded these other nations chronologically. He then quotes thing of the amateur about Printz and Bourdelot-Bonnet, but with the Bolognese Franciscan Giambattista Martini we return to the pro- Much as they reflect the views of serious scholars, there is some- We have a different feeling in reading the Sing und Aling Kunst (Dresden, 1690) of Wolfgang Caspar Printz. the Lutheran church musician, who, curiously enough, is cast in the role of historiofessionalism of Calvisius and Kircher and witness the full manifestation of their tradition in Italy.’" In Volume I of Storia della musica (Bologna, 1757) he sets down the most painstaking discussion of Jubal in the entire literature, arguing for Jubal's claim to theoretical] discovery and against the view that he was only the inventor of graphic progressive by Warren Dwight Allen.“ Actually Printz not only maintains the medieval tradition, but brings to it the sort of so blatant as Printzs) deflects his over-all judgment to Jubal's adobsessive theologism and argumentativeness we have observed only in exceptional figures like Johannes Gallicus. He borrows Kirchner 's above-cited reference to objects accidentally struck together and elethe two pillars legend.” Genesis 4 on Jubal, utilizing its authority to corroborate his own reasoning and observation.** vates it to a proof that Jubal discovered percussion instruments in addition to the “harp and pipe” of Genesis 4, thus being responsib le for the three medieval genera, string. wind, and percussion.“ He is euhemeristic to excess, seeming unable to resist the identica tion of two ancient families, those of Cain and the Greek Olympia ns. The brooding Saturn is Cain himself, while Jove is his descendant Lamusical instruments. One senses that a degree of religiosity (nothing vantage, but one is much more struck by the sophisticated sifting of literary evidence which leads him to discover the erroneousness of . With Gerbert's De cantu of 1774 and Hawkins’ General History of two years later, we come to scholars who move about as far in the direction of rationalism as one can. while retaining a basic allegiance to the medieval tradition. Gerbert, who represents a “silver age” of Benedictine scholarship after its seventeenth-century “golden age,” has little to say about Jubal: he alludes without comment to Mermech, the father of Jubal; Apollo, who according to Greek legend invented both lyre and aulos, is Jubal; and Vulcan, a blacksm ith, is with equal appropriateness Tubalcain.® F inally, Printz is unwilling 68 A. Kircher. Musurgia generalis sive ars magna consoni et dissoni in X libros digesta (Rome, 1650). The drawings appear opposite pp. 22, 14, and 31, respectively, 94 Ibid., pp. 44, 45. 05 Not the only curious prejudice of his Philosophies of Music History (New York, 1939), pp. 13, 22-26, a work nevertheless admirable for its broad assault upon an important subject generally neglected among English-s peaking music historians. 60 Historische Beschreibung der edelen Sing und Kling Kunst, I, Capitel 97 Ibid., 11, 21. 20. es /bid., V. 31. 69 Pierre Bourdelot and Picrre Bonnet, Histoire de la Musique et des ses effets depuis son origine jusqu'à present (Paris, 1715): the reference appears in the Amsterdam edition (1726), I. 19. Jacques Bonnet published the work begun by his uncle, the Abbé Bourdelot, and carried on by his brother Pierre. | _ 20 There is, of course, the carlier work of Giovanni Bontempi, entitled, Historia musica, nella quale si ha piena cognitione della teorica . . . i quali inventata prima da Tubal avanti il Diluvio . . . (Perugia, 1695). I cannot claim thorough knowledge of it. but it appears to be a highly learned work within the tradition of Italian Renaissance theory rather than within the historical tradition. 71 Storia della musica, I (Bologna, 1757). 23-24.

A ML AVS UDALGI Wudsilıs) Jubal Vel Pythagoras senne's view that Jubal discovered the overtone series,”? and presages the nineteenth-century a cappella ideal when he refers disrustling of wind in the trees and the simple reed pipe of an idle shepherd.® paragingly to the instrumental inventions of Jubal of “the ungodly race of Cain.”?3 Of Pythagoras he writes with sober approbation, ac- Taking the seventeenth. and eighteenth-century music historians as a group, and looking at the over-all character of their individual cepting without demur his discovery of the musical consonances and omitting, significantly, any mention of the legendary hammers;? he invokes the dictum philosophica succedens poetica in contrasting the mathematical discoveries of Pythagoras’ time to the fables of works rather than simply their views on Jubal and Pythagoras, one is increasingly impressed by their continuity with medieval universal history. If a close reading of Calvisius reveals an expanded inventores musicae chapter, a superficial glance at the chapter headings of Printz shows the most explicit acknowledgment of the Augustinian Six Ages; in the pre-Christian portion he devotes a chapter to each of the periods, substituting only the “time of Pythagoras” for the contemporaneous Babylonian captivity. When the chronological framework is to be interrupted by some modern consideration, -e4 earlier Greek centuries.“ Hawkins shares with Gerbert a fundamentally religious outlook; for him music can be explained ultimately only as an act of God's will.?° Yet, like Gerbert, he shows little interest in Jubal, beginning his history with the Greeks and stressing the theoretical achievement of Pythagoras. He has a particularly valuable discussion on the fallacy of the weights, suggesting that Vincenzo Galilei may have first suspected it, and he inserts an Erörter der Frage, as with the discussion in chapter 4 of whether the ancients’ music resembled modern polyphonic music. Martini presents a remarkably similar pattern with the obvious linguistic difference that the interrupting discussions are called dissertazioni, and with the more substantial difference that the Six Ages are broken down into increasingly smaller chronological units as the narration nears the time of Christ and documentary material expands accordingly. Gerbert and Hawkins move beyond any obvious reliance upon the Six Ages, but Hawkins continues to use neoEusebian chronology, fixing his pre-Christian events with anno quoting at length the passage from Galileo Galilei’s Discorsi e dimostraziont mathematiche which definitely exposes it.” He mentions Jubal only in connection with musical instruments, accepting on biblical authority that he invented some, but wisely adding that they could not be those, like the organ, attributed to him in contemporary translations." On the question of the Jews and theoretical systems, he finds it plausible that a musical culture so highly developed as that of David’s time would have a rational theory, but observes that we cannot know for certain because of the absence of mundi dates, for example Ctesibius’ reputed invention of the hyproper documents.” draulis in “about the year of the world 3782. Forkel, finally, calls a halt to the search for the inventors of music, proclaiming that it comes from the heart and has always been with us. A Romantic sentiment, to be sure, but one with neoGothic resonance, as he alludes, like Aegidius before him, to the 72 Martin Gerbert, De cantu et musica sacra a prima ecclesiae aetate usque ad praesens tempus, 2 vols. (St. Blaise Abbey, 1774), II, 286. The author regrets his inability to consult Mersenne's commentary on Genesis, which deals at some length with Jubal. 23 Among the more obvious conservative traits of these works is AdfawehgRlwi?e their concentration upon theory at the expense of the repertory; another is their cultivation of the Aegidian notion of progress.®? The two come together most clearly in Calvisius. whose work could most accurately be called “Concerning the progress of music theory.” And one cannot fail to observe that Guido d’Arezzo is a more commanding figure in any of these books than composers like Josquin and Monteverdi. 78 Ibid., II, 877. 74 Ibid., 11, 379, 385, 18 Ibid., 11, 383. 76 John Hawkins, 4 General History of the Science and Practice of Music, 2 vols. (London, 1776; 2nd ed. London, 1853; reprinted, New York, 1963), p. xx. 77 Ibid., 1, 10-12. 18 Ibid., 1, 4. 79 Ibid., 1, 98, 97. 80 Johann Nikolaus Forkel, Allgemeine Geschichte der Musik, 2 vols. (Leipzig, 1788-1801), 1, 70-71. 81 General History, 1, 69. 82 Acgidian in the sense that Aegidius is the first to apply the idea to musical discovery, not in the sense that Calvisius directly derives it from him. The idea functions as a topos; see Ernst Robert Curtius. European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages (Bern, 1948), trans. Willard R. Trask (New York, 1953), p. 70 and passim.

yjuvas The Musical Quarterly would rather not have written.> All this is in sharp contrast to genuine Enlightenment historians like Hume, Voltaire, and Gibbon.” The Six Ages with its unilinear chronological premise is replaced by a four-told cyclical scheme: an initial period of darkness. then one of light in ancient Greece and Rome, followed by a plunge into the darkness of the Middle Ages. and finally the period of the Enlightenment itself which begins with at ease in the unsettled historiography of the Sixth Age. Even Burney, for all his hankering after modernity, displays better judgment in his discussion of an ancient like Aristoxenus than of a modern like the Italian humanists and has its brilliant climax in eighteenth-century France." It is essentially a dualistic view which sees the fortunes of history determined by a struggle between the forces of Byrd.8* darkness and light. of superstition and reason: it would have found favor with Tertullian but for the circumstance that its protagonists Finally, the trait that most decidedly stamps these men as medieno themes, no issues, no trends, and, above all, no shaping point of view or consistently maintained prejudice; but rather endless accumulation saved from total disorder only by chronology.** There are signs that the eighteenth-century historians begin to chafe under this regime; Burney especially is infected by the critical spirit of the Enlightenment, but he lacks the strength of his convictions and 83 Charles Burney, A General History of Music, 4 vols. (London, 1776-89; modern edition in 2 vols. by Frank Mercer. London, 1935; reprinted, New York, 1957), 1, 349.52; 11, 78. The attentive reader will notice the uncomfortable position Burney occupies in this essay. In the view of the author, he is an exceedingly clever man, genuinely attuned to the intellectual fashions of the Enlightenment, but, unlike Voltaire or Gibbon, lacking the depth to restructure history accordingly. He is, in short, a better journalist than a historian; and, in the latter category, markedly in— ferior to Hawkins. For a similar appraisal, sce Robert Stevenson, ““The Rivals’ Hawkins, Burney, and Boswell," The Musical Quaterly. XXXVI (1950) 67-82. 84 For a similar view of the basic difference between the medieval and modern 25 writes, among other things, an entire volume on the Greeks that he Less obvious perhaps, is the consistency and sureness of touch the authors display in the pre-Christian portions of their works as opposed to the rambling. hit-or-miss character of the later portions. One suspects that Martini and Peter Comestor broke off their histories at the end of the pre-Christian era for the same reason: the professionalism that caused them to feel at home within the centuries-old tradition of biblical and ancient studies made them ill val in outlook is one observable beneath the surface of their greatly expanded knowledge. When Aurelius’ page or two on Pythagoras and the Greeks become more than ten in Calvisius and more than three hundred in Martini, we are witnessing the progress of history by accumulation rather than by selection. The modern student reading these works for the first time is frustrated by the endless jumble of unpatterned detail, by the seeming inability of the author to discriminate between the essential and the inessential: the modern editor, no doubt, would employ ruthless surgery (if he knew where to start). It is the medieval encyclopedic mentality at work: all knowledge is of equal value and nothing is to be omitted. There are ver r yunagoras saw darkness where he saw light. They also abandon the attempt to compile universal histories, concentrating instead on individual, nations, monarchs. and topics.** At all times their work is characterized by discrimination and opinion, by lively prejudice and a spirit of criticism. And certainly a related awareness lies beneath their aim to be readily comprehensible and even entertaining to their readers. But to return to the conservative majority, including our music 4ar: E aSa ‘2 historians, they do manifest at least one important trait which is distinctly new. From the viewpoint of the historiographic virtues they display no dramatic development in their sense of anachronism, and unlike their opinionated Enlightenment contemporaries are exasperatingly slow to venture much in the way of historical explanation. But their awareness of evidence. that is their ability to deal 85 See the Preface to his General History. especially p. 16. 88 The views expressed here on Enlightenment and seventeenth-century historiography are based on. in addition to standard works already cited: J. B. Black, ‘lé Cd ac o: N, E,> The Art of History (Cambridge. 1926); Hugh Trevor-Roper, "The Historical Philosophy of the Enlightenment,” Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century. ed. Theodore Besterman. XXVII (Geneva, 1963), 1167-87: R. N, Stromberg. “Historv in the Eighteenth Century,” Journal of the History of Ideas. XM (1951), 295-304: and especially Arnaldo Momigliano, “Ancient History and the Antiquarian.” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, XIII toriography (1950). 285-315. reprinted in Studies in His. (London, 1966), pp. 1-37. 1 have been led to mast of these readings and to many others cited in this study by the splendid “Bibliographic Essay" in Peter Gay, The Enlightenment: An Interpretation, 2 vols. (New York. 1966), 1. 429-552. 87 11 is an implicit periodization: sce Gay, op. cit., pp. 32-88. 88 Voltaire's Essai sur des Moeurs proving exception; it is universal in (1745-56) might its attempt be looked upon as the ruleto explain everything, but omits outlook as applied to aesthelic reaction, see D. W. Robinson, A Preface to Chaucer: massive portions of conventional history and subordinates events to interpretation. Studies in Medieval Perspectives (Princeton, 1962), a work to which the present author See J. B. Black, op. cit., pp. 71-75. is much indebted.

The Musical Quarterly Jubal Vel Pythagoras with the minutiae of historical verification, is utterly beyond that of the Middle Ages, and indeed substantially like that of our own time. The seventeenth-century antiquarians developed the same techniques used today in dealing with coins, inscriptions, and characters, and made substantial progress in the philological methods initiated by the humanists. even if they left work in this area to be completed in the nineteenth century.“ . The attitude accompanying these advances was scepticism. or Pyrrhonism, as the savants of the time would have it.” IL was not, however, a radical scepticism, rejecting the genera] values and interests of the past, but one concerned with detail; indeed its foremost exponents were the Maurist Benedictines, men of great piety and pronounced loyalty to the Church, like D'Archery, Montfaucon, and HS è € ie 27 erence to his Siécle de Louis XIV claims that he has “labored like a Benedictine.”** But all in all there is a profound gulf separating the historians of the Enlightenment who looked upon themselves as the philosophes and their old-fashioned counterparts whom they disdainfully labeled the erudites. This split is the most conspicuous characteristic of eighteenth-century historiography, and an appreciation of it should dispel some basic misconceptions about the character of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century music history. Is there not present in our profession a tendency, occasionally made all too explicit, to think that (1) chronology is an invention of the seventeenth century," or even of the Enlightenment,% and (2) to attribute gradual evolution of the music historians’ position on Jubal. Not for tu the Enlightenment the very historical techniques the chief protagonists of the period denigrated?** This tendency, it seems, is of a piece with that which would trace the origins of music history to the Renaissance: thus it would begin in the Renaissance and come to fruition in the Enlightenment, those two noble adventures of the a minute do they doubt the authority of scripture or the legitimacy of the traditional historical concerns, but as critical skill develops and progressive. Mabillon, the author of De re diplomatica This combination of conservatism with scepticism in detail accounts for the general new information becomes available, the significance of Jubal decreases and that of Pythagoras, along with the whole Hellenic theoretical achievement, increases. human spirit to which we must attribute all * + that is good and * For better or for worse it seems that we are a profession with conservative origins. The temptation arises. then, to inquire whether In this, too, there is sharp contrast with the men of the Enlightenthis eighteenth-century conservatism is related to what some critics ment. Their scepticism is revolutionary rather than qualificatory; see as our twentieth-century conservatism.** One might suggest, for they reflect the institutional Church as the source of social ills and the Middle Ages as a period of monkish superstition and Gothic example, that our marvelous affinity with technical detail and our corresponding uneasiness with interpretation indicate that we have babarity. And paradoxically they also reject the meticulous critical yet to experience the benefits of the Enlightenment. Or one might - apparatus of their contemporaries and immediate predecessors. “Maldeclare that as punishment for ignoring the contribution of Aegidius heur à detail,” cries Voltaire, which might be paraphrased “do not to our discipline we are condemned forever to labor in bondage to pester me with footnotes.” There are degrees of difference in this rejection; Voltaire is the most extreme, and a colleague of his like Robertson expresses disappointment with his cavalier attitude. Then, too, Voltaire has his own brand of conscientiousness, and in ref- 9 See J. B. Black, op. cit., p. 70. 95 See Allen, “Baroque Histories of Music,” pp. 195-98. 86 See the otherwise thoughtful and valuable contribution to a neglected subject: Vincent Duckles, “Musicology at the Mirror: A Prospectus for the History of Musical Scholarship,” Perspectives in Musicology, ed. Barry Brook, Edward Downes, and Sherman Van Solkema (New York, 1972) p. 36. 89 See Momigliano, op. cit., pp. 13, 17. 97 Ibid., p. 35. The tendency to maintain these and similar views implicitly can be 80 Ibid., pp. 10-11. observed, for example, in the perfunctory remarks an early music history of Hans 91 For the Maurist contribution sce David Knowles, “The Maurists,” in his Great Historical Enterprises (London, 1963), pp. 33-62; Dom M. D. Knowles (same author), Albrecht, “Musikwissenschaft,” IX “Jean Mabillon,” Journal of Ecclesiastica! History, X (1959), 153-73. 92 Letter to Abbé Dubos, Feb. 1738, Oeuvres complètes, Correspondanc e Musicology and the European Tradition,” in Frank Ll. Harrison, Mande Hood, and 11 (Paris, 1880), $0. 83 William Robertson, History of the Reign of the Emperor Charles V, 3 vols. 7th ed. (London, 1792), I, 477, 1208. An exception to the Claude V. Palisca, Musicology “C. Musikgeschichte," general tendency is MGG, Frank LI. (Kassel, 1961). col. Harrison, “American (Englewood Cliffs, N.j., 1963), pp. 15-26: see especially his perceptive remark on Hawkins and the Gothic revival in England, p. 17. 881 have in mind, especially, Joseph Kerman, "A Profile for American Musicology.” Journal of the American Musicological Society, XVIII (1965), 61-69.

The Musical Quarterly his scholastic premises.” However, there has already been sufhcient hypothesis in this essay on the admittedly narrow basis of what our forebears had to say on Jubal and Pythagoras, and therefore a closing retreat from generality to particularity seems in order. Gibbon, that most remarkable of eighteenth-century historians, who, as Arnaldo Momigliano has shown us, achieved a rare synthesis of the erudite and philosophical historiographic virtues,’ spiced his sonorous narrative with choice bits of irony, that quality which Peter Gay sees as the ultimate historiographic virtue. There are, for example, footnotes like the following: “M. de Voltaire, unsupported by either fact or probability, has generously bestowed the Canary Islands on the Roman Empire.’ Certainly we can lay claim to no Gibbons among eighteenth-century music historians, but there is the occasional passage that should make us think the better of our musicological ancestors, as when Hawkins quotes the following from a fourteenth-century British manuscript: There was a certain smith. Thubal by name, who regulated the consonances by the weights of three hammers striking upon one anvil. Pythagoras hearing that sound, and entering the house of the smith. found the proportion of the hammers, and that they rendered to each other a wonderful consonance. When Thubal heard . . . that God would destroy the world, he made two pillars, the one of brick and the other of brass, and wrote on each of them the equiformal musical art, or plain cantus. . . . After the deluge king Cyrus, who was king over the Assyrians, and Enchiridias, and Constantinus, and after these Boethius . . . demonstrated the consonances, as appears by looking into the treatise of the latter, De Musica, Afterwards came Guido the monk, who was the inventor of the Gamma, which is called the Monochord. . . . Afterwards Guido de Sancto Mauro, and after these Guido Major and Guido Minor. After these Franco. . . . Then Philippus Vitriaco. . . . Afterward St. Augustine and St. Gregory, who instituted the equiformal cantus throughout all the churches. . . .102 We find ourselves sharing an ironic smile with Hawkins who declines comment upon the passage, saying simply that it is “too curious to be given in any other than the author's own words.” 89 Whatever measure of sober truth these assertions might contain, there can be no doubt of the subsidiary point that Aegidius is neglected. Although published in Gerbert, he is not once mentioned in the most obvious standard works like Reese, Music of the Middle Ages, and the Riemann-Haggh History of Music Theory: nor is there an article devoted to him in MGG. 100 “Gibbon's Contribution to Historical Method,” Historia, II (1954), 450-63; reprinted in Studies in Historiography, pp. 40-55. 101 The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, 6 vols. Modern Library ed. (New York, n.d.), 1, 24. 102 Genera! History, 1, 245.