Renaissance Music Quotes

There have been, of course, many other insatiable polymaths, and even the Renaissance produced other Renaissance Men. But none painted the Mona Lisa, much less did so at the same time as producing unsurpassed anatomy drawings based on multiple dissections, coming up with schemes to divert rivers, explaining the reflection of light from the earth to the moon, opening the still-beating heart of a butchered pig to show how ventricles work, designing musical instruments, choreographing pageants, using fossils to dispute the biblical account of the deluge, and then drawing the deluge. Leonardo was a genius, but more: he was the epitome of the universal mind, one who sought to understand all of creation, including how we fit into it.

The English were fascinated with the Italian people and their amazing Epicurean culture. Italian poetry, painting, pornography, music, drama, fashion, wine, women, cheese, anything Italiano was a premium commodity in London during Shakespeare’s day.

Whether we consider hip-hop as an evolved manifestation of the Harlem Renaissance or something completely new under the sun, it clearly has moved beyond the stage of just entertaining lives to that of informing and empowering lives.

No," she said. "No. It's only a bad time. A terrible time, but not everyone will die. And there will be wonderful times after this. The Renaissance and class reforms and music. Wonderful times. There will be new medicines, and people won't have to die from this or smallpox or pneumonia. And everyone will have enough to eat, and their houses will be warm even in the winter." She thought of Oxford, decorated for Christmas, the streets and shops lit. "There will be lights everywhere, and bells that you don't have to ring.

Notwithstanding the memories of slavery, and in the face poverty, ignorance, terrorism, and subjugation still deeply woven into their lives, the embittered past of blacks was taken onto a much higher plane of intellectual and artistic consideration during the Renaissance.

Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Letter to Christian Goldbach, April 17, 1712: “Music is the occulted arithmetic exercise of a soul that does not know it is counting.

Art, music, poetry, and everything else that I do have this one purpose—increasing the intensity of my consciousness and life

The Devil’s interval”, Logan murmured. She looked at him. “I’m sorry?” “The flatted fifth. G flat, for example, over C. It was a particular interval between two notes banned from church music in the Renaissance for it’s supposedly evil influence.

Except Caitlyn. High school dating, drill team, school spirit—it all seemed silly to her. Why did it feel like high school was crushing her soul? She had nothing concrete she could point to. All she knew was that she didn’t belong here. She preferred old, used clothes to new ones; her iPod was full of classical music; and photos of castles and reproductions of old European art covered her bedroom walls, including a Renaissance painting of a young girl in white, named Bia. It should have been pop singers on her wall, or movie stars

Whatever else a modern feels when he looks at the night sky, he certainly feels that he is looking out--like one looking out from the saloon entrance on to the dark Atlantic or from the lighted porch upon dark and lonely moors. But if you accepted the Medieval Model you would feel like one looking in. The Earth is 'outside the city wall'. When the sun is up he dazzles us and we cannot see inside. Darkness, our own darkness, draws the veil and we catch a glimpse of the high pomps within the vast, lighted concavity filled with music and life. And, looking in, we do not see, like Meredith's Lucifer, 'the army of unalterable law', but rather the revelry of insatiable love. We are watching the activity of creatures whose experience we can only lamely compare to that of one in the act of drinking, his thirst delighted yet not quenched. For in them the highest of faculties is always exercised without impediment on the noblest object; without satiety, since they can never completely make His perfection their own, yet never frustrated, since at every moment they approximate to Him in the fullest measure of which their nature is capable.

The final new elements in music making (as opposed to listening, considered in the next section) were introduced by Carl Maria von Weber (1786–1826). Weber had a diseased hip and walked with a limp but he was a virtuoso of the guitar and an excellent singer, until he damaged his voice by accidentally drinking a glass of nitric acid.

There still exists - even today - a yearning, a nostalgia for European solidarity, a solidarity of European culture. Regrettably, solidarity itself no longer exists, except in hearts, in consciences, in the minds of a few great men at the heart of each nation. European consciousness - or what one might call a ‘cultural European awareness’ - had been on the wane for years ever since the awakening of national identity. You could say that patriotism has killed Europe. Patriotism is particularism. ... However, European culture goes back much further than the nations of Europe. Greece, Rome and Israel, Christendom and Renaissance, the French Revolution and Germany’s eighteenth century, the supranational music of Austria and Slavic poetry: these are the forces that have sculpted the face of Europe. All these forces have forged European solidarity and the European cultural consciousness. None of these forces know national boundaries. All are the enemies of that barbarian power: so-called ‘national pride’.

Everyone knows that the Arts are Grammar, Dialectic, Rhetoric, Arithmetic, Music, Geometry, and Astronomy. And almost everyone has met the mnemonic couplet Gram loquitur, Dia verba docet, Rhet verba colorat, Mus canit, Ar numerat, Geo ponderat, Ast colit astra. The first three constitute the Trivium or threefold way; the last four, the Quadrivium.

And so it is in poetry also: all this love of curious French metres like the Ballade, the Villanelle, the Rondel; all this increased value laid on elaborate alliterations, and on curious words and refrains, such as you will find in Dante Rossetti and Swinburne, is merely the attempt to perfect flute and viol and trumpet through which the spirit of the age and the lips of the poet may blow the music of their many messages. And so it has been with this romantic movement of ours: it is a reaction against the empty conventional workmanship, the lax execution of previous poetry and painting, showing itself in the work of such men as Rossetti and Burne-Jones by a far greater splendour of colour, a far more intricate wonder of design than English imaginative art has shown before. In Rossetti’s poetry and the poetry of Morris, Swinburne and Tennyson a perfect precision and choice of language, a style flawless and fearless, a seeking for all sweet and precious melodies and a sustaining consciousness of the musical value of each word are opposed to that value which is merely intellectual. In this respect they are one with the romantic movement of France of which not the least characteristic note was struck by Theophile Gautier’s advice to the young poet to read his dictionary every day, as being the only book worth a poet’s reading.

Berlin is to electronic music what Florence was to Renaissance art: crucible, arbiter, patron. Credit for this could go as far back as Bismarck; the city owes its peculiar fertility as much to the follies of statesmen and generals as to any generation of ardent youth. Citizens have spoken and sung for many years of the “Berliner Luft”—“the nervous, endlessly quivering Berlin air,” as Conrad Alberti wrote in 1889, “which works upon people like alcohol, morphine, cocaine, exciting, inspiring, relaxing, deadly.

Few exchanges in the history of science have leaped so boldly into the future as this one, which occurred a thousand years ago in a region now often dismissed as a backwater and valued mainly for its natural resources, not its intellectual achievements. We know of it because copies survived in manuscript and were published almost a millennium later. Twenty-eight-year-old Abu Rayhan al-Biruni, or simply Biruni (973–1048), hailed from near the Aral Sea and went on to distinguish himself in geography, mathematics, trigonometry, comparative religion, astronomy, physics, geology, psychology, mineralogy, and pharmacology. His younger counterpart, Abu Ali al-Husayn ibn Sina, or just Ibn Sina (ca. 980–1037), grew up in the stately city of Bukhara, the great seat of learning in what is now Uzbekistan. He was to make his mark in medicine, philosophy, physics, chemistry, astronomy, theology, clinical pharmacology, physiology, ethics, and music theory. When eventually Ibn Sina’s magisterial Canon of Medicine was translated into Latin, it triggered the start of modern medicine in the West and became its Bible: a dozen editions were printed before 1500. Indians used Ibn Sina’s Canon to develop a whole school of medicine that continues today. Many regard Biruni and Ibn Sina together as the greatest scientific minds between antiquity and the Renaissance, if not the modern age.

For the great eras in the history of the development of all the arts have been eras not of increased feeling or enthusiasm in feeling for art, but of new technical improvements primarily and specially. The discovery of marble quarries in the purple ravines of Pentelicus and on the little low-lying hills of the island of Paros gave to the Greeks the opportunity for that intensified vitality of action, that more sensuous and simple humanism, to which the Egyptian sculptor working laboriously in the hard porphyry and rose-coloured granite of the desert could not attain. The splendour of the Venetian school began with the introduction of the new oil medium for painting. The progress in modern music has been due to the invention of new instruments entirely, and in no way to an increased consciousness on the part of the musician of any wider social aim.

And health in art - what is that? It has nothing to do with a sane criticism of life. There is more health in Baudelaire than there is in [Kingsley]. Health is the artist's recognition of the limitations of the form in which he works. It is the honour and the homage which he gives to the material he uses - whether it be language with its glories, or marble or pigment with their glories - knowing that the true brotherhood of the arts consists not in their borrowing one another's method, but in their producing, each of them by its own individual means, each of them by keeping its objective limits, the same unique artistic delight. The delight is like that given to us by music - for music is the art in which form and matter are always one, the art whose subject cannot be separated from the method of its expression, the art which most completely realises the artistic ideal, and is the condition to which all the other arts are constantly aspiring.

Though each of them was of a type quite different from the others, all of them were beautiful; but I had been looking at them for so few moments, and was so far from daring to stare at them, that I had not yet been able to individualize any of them. With the exception of one, whose straight nose and darker complexion marked her out among the rest, as a king of Arabian looks may stand out in a Renaissance painting of the Magi, they were knowable only as a pair of hard, stubborn, laughing eyes in one of the faces; as two cheeks of that pink touched by coppery tones suggesting geraniums in another; and none of even these features had I yet inseparably attached to any particular girl rather than to some other; and when (given the order in which I saw their complex whole unfold before me, wonderful because the most dissimilar aspects were mixed into it and all shades of colour were juxtaposed, but also as confused as a piece of music in which one cannot isolate and identify the phrases as they form, which once heard are as soon forgotten) I noticed the emergence of a pale oval, of two green eyes, or black ones, I had no idea whether they were those whose charm had struck me a moment before, in my inability to single out and recognize one or other of these girls and allot them to her.

Though each of them was of a type quite different from the others, all of them were beautiful; but I had been looking at them for so few moments, and was so far from daring to stare at them, that I had not yet been able to individualize any of them. With the exception of one, whose straight nose and darker complexion marked her out among the rest, as a king of Arabian looks may stand out in a Renaissance painting of the Magi, they were knowable only as a pair of hard, stubborn, laughing eyes in one of the faces; as two cheeks of that pink touched by coppery tones suggesting geraniums in another; and none of even these features had I yet inseparably attached to any particular girl rather than to some other; and when (given the order in which I saw their complex whole unfold before me, wonderful because the most dissimilar aspects were mixed into it and all shades of colour were juxtaposed, but also as confused as a piece of music in which one cannot isolate and identify the phrases as they form, which once heard are as soon forgotten) I noticed the emergence of a pale oval, of two green eyes, or black ones, I had no idea whether they were those whose charm had struck me a moment before, in my inability to single out and recognize one or other of these girls and allot them to her. The fact that my view of them was devoid of demarcations, which I was soon to draw among them, sent a ripple of harmonious imprecision through their group, the uninterrupted flow of a shared, unstable and elusive beauty.

None,” Einstein said. “Relativity is a purely scientific matter and has nothing to do with religion.”51 That was no doubt true. However, there was a more complex relationship between Einstein’s theories and the whole witch’s brew of ideas and emotions in the early twentieth century that bubbled up from the highly charged cauldron of modernism. In his novel Balthazar, Lawrence Durrell had his character declare, “The Relativity proposition was directly responsible for abstract painting, atonal music, and formless literature.” The relativity proposition, of course, was not directly responsible for any of this. Instead, its relationship with modernism was more mysteriously interactive. There are historical moments when an alignment of forces causes a shift in human outlook. It happened to art and philosophy and science at the beginning of the Renaissance, and again at the beginning of the Enlightenment. Now, in the early twentieth century, modernism was born by the breaking of the old strictures and verities. A spontaneous combustion occurred that included the works of Einstein, Picasso, Matisse, Stravinsky, Schoenberg, Joyce, Eliot, Proust, Diaghilev, Freud, Wittgenstein, and dozens of other path-breakers who seemed to break the bonds of classical thinking.52 In his book Einstein, Picasso: Space, Time, and the Beauty That Causes Havoc, the historian of science and philosophy Arthur I. Miller explored the common wellsprings that produced, for example, the 1905 special theory of relativity and Picasso’s 1907 modernist masterpiece Les Demoiselles d’Avignon.

One argument of Uniqueness is that it is not any particular renaissance, revolution, or liberal institution that marks out the West, but its far higher levels of achievement in all the intellectual and artistic spheres of life. I relied on Charles Murray’s book, Human Accomplishment: Pursuit of Excellence in the Arts and Sciences, 800 B.C. to 1950, to make this argument.[1] This book is the first effort to quantify ‘as facts’ the accomplishments of individuals and countries across the world in the arts and sciences, by calculating the amount of space allocated to these individuals in reference works, encyclopaedias, and dictionaries. Murray concludes that ‘whether measured in people or events, 97% of accomplishment in the scientific inventories occurred in Europe and North America’ from 800 BC to 1950.[2] Murray also notes the far higher accomplishments of Europeans in the arts, particularly after 1400. Although Murray does not compare their achievements but compiles separate lists for each civilisation, he notes that the sheer number of ‘significant figures’ in the arts is higher in the West in comparison to the combined number of the other civilisations.[3] In literature, the number in the West is 835; whereas in India, the Arab World, China, and Japan combined, the number is 293. In the visual arts, it is 479 for the West as compared to 192 for China and Japan combined (with no significant figures listed for India and the Arab World). In music, ‘the lack of a tradition of named composers in non-Western civilization means that the Western total of 522 significant figures has no real competition at all’.

In many fields—literature, music, architecture—the label ‘Modern’ stretches back to the early 20th century. Philosophy is odd in starting its Modern period almost 400 years earlier. This oddity is explained in large measure by a radical 16th century shift in our understanding of nature, a shift that also transformed our understanding of knowledge itself. On our Modern side of this line, thinkers as far back as Galileo Galilei (1564–1642) are engaged in research projects recognizably similar to our own. If we look back to the Pre-Modern era, we see something alien: this era features very different ways of thinking about how nature worked, and how it could be known. To sample the strange flavour of pre-Modern thinking, try the following passage from the Renaissance thinker Paracelsus (1493–1541): The whole world surrounds man as a circle surrounds one point. From this it follows that all things are related to this one point, no differently from an apple seed which is surrounded and preserved by the fruit … Everything that astronomical theory has profoundly fathomed by studying the planetary aspects and the stars … can also be applied to the firmament of the body. Thinkers in this tradition took the universe to revolve around humanity, and sought to gain knowledge of nature by finding parallels between us and the heavens, seeing reality as a symbolic work of art composed with us in mind (see Figure 3). By the 16th century, the idea that everything revolved around and reflected humanity was in danger, threatened by a number of unsettling discoveries, not least the proposal, advanced by Nicolaus Copernicus (1473–1543), that the earth was not actually at the centre of the universe. The old tradition struggled against the rise of the new. Faced with the news that Galileo’s telescopes had detected moons orbiting Jupiter, the traditionally minded scholar Francesco Sizzi argued that such observations were obviously mistaken. According to Sizzi, there could not possibly be more than seven ‘roving planets’ (or heavenly bodies other than the stars), given that there are seven holes in an animal’s head (two eyes, two ears, two nostrils and a mouth), seven metals, and seven days in a week. Sizzi didn’t win that battle. It’s not just that we agree with Galileo that there are more than seven things moving around in the solar system. More fundamentally, we have a different way of thinking about nature and knowledge. We no longer expect there to be any special human significance to natural facts (‘Why seven planets as opposed to eight or 15?’) and we think knowledge will be gained by systematic and open-minded observations of nature rather than the sorts of analogies and patterns to which Sizzi appeals. However, the transition into the Modern era was not an easy one. The pattern-oriented ways of thinking characteristic of pre-Modern thought naturally appeal to meaning-hungry creatures like us. These ways of thinking are found in a great variety of cultures: in classical Chinese thought, for example, the five traditional elements (wood, water, fire, earth, and metal) are matched up with the five senses in a similar correspondence between the inner and the outer. As a further attraction, pre-Modern views often fit more smoothly with our everyday sense experience: naively, the earth looks to be stable and fixed while the sun moves across the sky, and it takes some serious discipline to convince oneself that the mathematically more simple models (like the sun-centred model of the solar system) are right.

In his Dialogue "Timaeus" Plato had a demiurge to create the globe-shaped world according to musical laws, including the human soul. Fifteen hundred years later, that still found an echo in the Renaissance. And in those days the architects realized that the musical harmonies had spatial expressions -- namely, the relationships of the length of strings, and spatial relationships were precisely their only concerns. Because both the world and the body and soul were composed according to musical harmonies by the demiurge architect, both the macrocosm and the microcosm, they must therefore be guided in their own architectural designs by the laws of music.

Of these five features, harmonic consistency is clearly the most culturally specific. The idea that music should consist of rapidly changing chords is a deeply Western idea, in a double sense: it is deep, insofar as it characterizes much Western music since before the Renaissance; and it is Western, since there are many cultures in which the notion of a “chord progression” simply plays no role. (Many traditional non-Western styles are purely monophonic, or feature an unchanging “drone” harmony;

Unfortunately for the composers of the time, wealthy Renaissance merchants were more likely to commission a painting than a composition. The painting could be owned, repeatedly shown off, and later resold, unlike the music. The financial incentive to commission a composition, which can be enjoyed by any audience member, was weaker. Paintings were closer to private goods, and musical performances were closer to public goods.

You said to get involved with people, that I can’t learn about connections in a vacuum.” I agreed. “So what’s not working?” She pulled a long list from her purse. “This,” Linda said, “is a list I put together of all the involvements I’ve had in the past few months. And nothing’s happening.” I read the list, which looked something like this: Dancing lessons: ballroom, disco, and line Sports: sailing, rollerblading, golf, and tennis Music: opera, modern, and piano lessons Art: ceramics and museums Spiritual: Bible study, worship, and missions Career: Ongoing training, night school to earn an MBA “What are you grinning at?” Linda asked me. I wasn’t even aware I was smiling. I told her, “This is a proud moment for me. I’ve never met a real live renaissance woman.” “Now I’m really confused,” Linda said. I explained, “Linda, this is the most well-rounded, comprehensive, and exhausting list I’ve ever seen. I can’t imagine how you can even get up in the mornings. But it’s not solving your problem. “These are all great activities, designed to develop you and help you in your life. But each of them is primarily functional, rather than relational. Their goal is competence in some skill, or recreation, or learning more about God’s creation. But relationship isn’t the goal. These are ‘doing’ things, not ‘connecting’ things.” Linda started to get it. “You know, I’ve noticed that I am talking to people at these activities. But all the talk is about tennis or management theories. I’ve wondered when someone in the classroom was going to ask me about my emotional and spiritual life.” “Don’t hold your breath,” I said.

The first is the belief that the universe is essentially harmonious, and that the source of that concord lies in mathematical proportions which can be directly related to musical harmonies. Pythagoras, in an oft-repeated legend, was said to have meditated on the sound of smiths beating hammers upon anvils, and to have argued that a hammer half as heavy produced a note an octave above its full-sized fellow.3 More important were the experiments with a single string, or monochord, attributed to him by his successors. If a stretched string is divided exactly into two it produces a sound an octave higher than the fundamental pitch (the ratio 2:1), the intervals of the fourth and fifth can similarly be expressed as the ratios 4:3 and 3:2 respectively, and all other intervals can be described in mathematical terms.4 These numerical proportions were then extended to describe the relationships of the planetary spheres, both in their relative distance one from another, and in the speed of their movement. The ideas were given influential (if obscure) expression in Plato’s Timaeus, and endlessly elaborated in succeeding centuries up to the Renaissance. One of the final manifestations of this understanding is provided in the illustration of cosmic harmony from Robert Fludd’s Utriusque cosmi … historia 1

Mani Kaul, the most strikingly non-narrative of the Indian arthouse filmmakers of the sixties and seventies, was also a student and exponent of the dhrupad. I don’t know if it was his exposure to the raga that made his films (according to many) notoriously slow, and Kaul (this is known to relatively few) a ferocious critic of the Renaissance. The Renaissance painting, like proscenium theatre, or, indeed, the realist story, gives centre-stage to a protagonist – that is, the human being. Renaissance art’s development of perspective helps consolidate the rules of realism: a foreground or central theme, and a background occupied by what’s necessary to complete the portrait of the protagonist. Kaul’s cinema wished to be unfettered by hero or theme; he wanted the camera to devote itself equally to recording things ordinarily consigned to ‘background’.

Venice was undoubtedly the most international city of the Renaissance, thanks to its trade, the gatepost between Europe and the East and between Europe and Africa. Englishmen and continental Europeans hoped they could develop navies like the great Venetian fleet, and thus profit from this international trade. Although by the 1590s, when Shakespeare wrote The Merchant of Venice, the wealth of Venice was in fact beginning to fade, its image in Europe was of a golden and luxuriant port. This image of the city Shakespeare could have gleaned from books like the expatriate Italian John Florio’s A World of Words, or through the music of another expatriate, Alfonso Ferrabosco; a little later Shakespeare’s audience would have seen the influences of the great Venetian architect Palladio on the architecture of Inigo Jones. Venetian society appeared as a city of strangers, vast numbers of foreigners who came and went. The Venice which Elizabethans saw in their imagination was a place of enormous riches earned by contact with these heathens and infidels, wealth flowing from dealings with the Other. But unlike ancient Rome, Venice was not a territorial power; the foreigners who came and went in Venice were not members of a common empire or nation-state. Resident foreigners in the city—Germans, Greeks, Turks, Dalmatians, as well as Jews—were barred from official citizenship and lived as permanent immigrants. Contract was the key to opening the doors of wealth in this city of strangers.

There is, however, no disputing that music can play a decisive role for good or evil, for happiness or sadness, for self-discipline or lack of self-control. In short, that music can and does profoundly affect the actions of people, was written about before and after Christ, on through the Middle Ages and the Renaissance and well into the 20th century. The concept that music can “soothe the savage breast” and greatly affect character is well established in the history of mankind and in the history of music.

The fourteenth-century court artists of Ife made bronze sculptures using a complicated casting process lost to Europe since antiquity, and which was not rediscovered there until the Renaissance. Ife sculptures are equal to the works of Ghiberti or Donatello. From their precision and formal sumptuousness we can extrapolate the contours of a great monarchy, a network of sophisticated ateliers, and a cosmopolitan world of trade and knowledge. And it was not only Ife. All of West Africa was a cultural ferment. From the egalitarian government of the Igbo to the goldwork of the Ashanti courts, the brass sculpture of Benin, the military achievement of the Mandinka Empire and the musical virtuosi who praised those war heroes, this was a region of the world too deeply invested in art and life to simply be reduced to a caricature of “watching the conquerors arrive.” We know better now. We know it with a stack of corroborating scholarship and we know it implicitly, so that even making a list of the accomplishments feels faintly tedious, and is helpful mainly as a counter to Eurocentrism. There

Pray to GOD, the Ascended Masters, the Archangels, and the Elohim Masters, for the awakening of the people of the Earth. Pray to these Masters for the saving of the rain forests, to stop gang violence, to save the whales. Pray for the economic systems of the Earth to become more responsive to cooperation and the dictates of the Soul and Mighty I Am Presence. Pray to GOD and these Masters for a renaissance of the arts and music in a spiritual manner. Pray that scientists around the world be infused with New Age technologies, understandings and insights, so diseases such as AIDS, the Ebola virus, and cancer can be cured. Pray to GOD and these Masters for a complete transformation of the religions of the Earth, so the contamination of negative ego concepts is cleared from their doctrine, as well as judgmentalness, self-righteousness, and intolerance. Pray to GOD and the Masters for the complete transformation of every aspect of our civilization, to reflect the ideals and values of the Divine Plan of GOD and the Planetary Hierarchy!

But it is the personal synthesis of elements taken from a wide variety of historical styles and periods that most strongly links the church music with Vaughan Williams’s output as a whole. This can be observed anywhere but is perhaps best illustrated by the Mass, a work whose neo-Tudor associations have obscured awareness of a wider eclecticism. Techniques favoured by sixteenth-century English church musicians – false relations, fauxbourdon-like textures, contrasts between soloist(s) and the full choir – are indeed present, but they are combined with others – canon and points of imitation, sectional division of the text (articulated by textural contrasts), emphasis on the church modes – that were the lingua franca of the period, common to English and continental music alike. Even these Renaissance techniques are but a ‘starting-point’32 for what is clearly a highly personal essay, however.

What caused the cultural shifts of the ’60s? I accepted the consensus that the civil rights movement, the folk music renaissance, sexual freedom, and the psychedelic world had been the immediate stimuli, but I wanted to dig into older and deeper roots for that most intriguing era. I ended up finding a fundamental origin in the ongoing relationship between white, often young Americans and African American culture, primarily music.

Authentic divination systems passed down by our ancestors are a special type of heritage bestowed upon the human family. From a practical standpoint, divination systems can often provide a fresh perspective on the changing times and world, which is to our collective advantage. They also help us satisfy an ancient and instinctual need to better understand life and our place in the Universe.

Banks listed the conventional-wisdom explanations for the Renaissance: Prosperity, which provided money and markets to support art Peace, which provided the stability to seek artistic and philosophical progress Freedom, which liberated artists from state or religious control Social mobility, which allowed talented poor people to enter the arts The paradigm thing, which brought new perspectives and mediums that created a wave of originality and expression.

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Reardon, Colleen. Holy Concord Within Sacred Walls: Nuns and Music in Siena, 1575–1700. Oxford University Press. Rose, Mary Beth, editor. Women in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Syracuse University Press. Ruggiero, Guido. The Boundaries of Eros. Oxford University Press. Schutte, Anne Jacobson. Aspiring Saints. Johns Hopkins University Press. Siraisi, Nancy G. Medieval and Early Renaissance Medicine. University of Chicago Press. Sobel, Dava. To Father: The Letters of Sister Maria Celeste to Galileo. Fourth Estate. Sperling, Jutta Gisela. Convents and the Body Politic in Late Renaissance Venice. University of Chicago Press. Trexler, Richard C. Public Life in Renaissance Florence. Academic Press. ________. The Women of Renaissance Florence. Pegasus Press.

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Duke Ercole’s condition deteriorated and he lay listening to the gentle music on his favorite clavichord. Sinking slowly, with the family gathered about his bed, Ercole beat time to the music with his hand.

He was a rich man but not, by the appearance of his will, an intellectual one. He did not mention any of the possessions typical of a Renaissance humanist: no books, no musical instruments, no maps. He did not remember any writer, though he is said to have associated and collaborated with other writers in the tightly connected world of literary London for more than two decades. For all his wealth, he did not make any bequest to the Stratford grammar school that had allegedly nurtured him, nor any provision for his eight-year-old granddaughter’s education. (Other men of letters often made bequests to their alma maters or provided money for children’s education.)

wandered through Stratford, waiting to hear back. The main downtown area was small and pedestrian, centered on the local tourist industry. Most of the buildings were in the half-timbered Tudor style, lending an air of Renaissance authenticity to the town. Quaint street signs helpfully funneled bumbling tourists toward the attractions: “Shakespeare’s Birthplace” or “Holy Trinity Church and Shakespeare’s Grave.” On High Street, I passed the Hathaway Tea Rooms and a pub called the Garrick Inn. Farther along, a greasy-looking cafe called the Food of Love, a cutesy name taken from Twelfth Night (“ If music be the food of love, play on”). The town was Elizabethan kitsch—plus souvenir shops, a Subway, a Starbucks, a cluster of high-end boutiques catering to moneyed out-of-towners, more souvenir shops. Shakespeare’s face was everywhere, staring down from signs and storefronts like a benevolent big brother. The entrance to the “Old Bank estab. 1810” was gilded ornately with an image of Shakespeare holding a quill, as though he functioned as a guarantee of the bank’s credibility. Confusingly, there were several Harry Potter–themed shops (House of Spells, the Creaky Cauldron, Magic Alley). You could almost feel the poor locals scheming how best to squeeze a few more dollars out of the tourists. Stratford and Hogwarts, quills and wands, poems and spells. Then again, maybe the confusion was apt: Wasn’t Shakespeare the quintessential boy wizard, magically endowed with inexplicable powers?

But humanistic learning is also an end in itself. It is simply better to have escaped one’s narrow, petty self and entered minds far more subtle and vast than one’s own than never to have done so. The Renaissance philosopher Marsilio Ficino said that a man lives as many millennia as are embraced by his knowledge of history. One could add: A man lives as many different lives as are embraced by his encounters with literature, music, and all the humanities and arts. These forms of expression allow us to see and feel things that we would otherwise never experience—society on a nineteenth-century Russian feudal estate, for example, or the perfect crystalline brooks and mossy shades of pastoral poetry, or the exquisite languor of a Chopin nocturne. Ultimately, humanistic study is the loving duty we owe those artists and thinkers whose works so transform us. It keeps them alive, as well as us, as Petrarch and Poggio Bracciolini understood. The academic narcissist, insensate to beauty and nobility, trapped in the diversity delusion, knows none of this. And as politics in Washington and elsewhere grows increasingly unmoored from reality, humanist wisdom provides us with one final consolation: There is no greater lesson from the past than the intractability of human folly.

The former are given musical characteristics loosely associated with music of the Italian Renaissance. Bianca and her suitors are given an a cappella pseudo-madrigal in “Tom, Dick or Harry,” the bluesy “Why Can’t You Behave?” is transformed into a Renaissance dance (the pavane), and several of the Shrew songs display the long-short-short figure () characteristic of the sixteenth-century Italian canzona

The Young Tradition’s third and final album, Galleries (1968), was an epic of time-banditry, whizzing through the seven ages of English folk song, from field to ballad to seventeenth-century Puritan hymns. It boldly juxtaposed music by Renaissance poet Thomas Campion and Methodist preacher Charles Wesley, making one daring leap forward to blues singer Robert Johnson’s complaint of stones in his passway, and with a pastiche ‘Medieval Mystery Tour’ copped from Bert Jansch and John Renbourn. A staple diet of English folk was also included in the shape of ‘John Barleycorn’, ‘The Husband and the Servingman’ and ‘The Bitter Withy’. But the most eyebrow-raising element was the instrumental ensemble that made its guest appearance on two songs, Campion’s ‘What If a Day’ and the traditional ‘Agincourt Carol’. The Early Music Consort’s David Munrow, Christopher Hogwood and Roddy and Adam Skeaping were among the first of a new breed of authentic instrumentalists, avid collectors of medieval rebecs, shawms and hurdy-gurdies, reviving a medieval Gothic and Renaissance repertoire all but lost to the classical mainstream. Their approach was at once scholarly and populist; in what was to prove a short life, Munrow managed to raise the profile of Early Music significantly, with around fifty recordings and plentiful appearances on TV and radio. Munrow and Bellamy had this in common: neither was afraid to tilt quixotically at a canon.

Music oxygenates the limbic system; it works in that space created where our monotonous daily life intersects with our romantic dream flutters. The vibrant cadence of music oscillates in the innate gap between the fibers of our reptilian brain and our mammalian brain. Music hinges us together; its heady beat connects the new human brain to the elder parts of the body. Musical flutters trigger electrical impulses and release chemical secretions in the brain that stimulate our bodies to shake, rattle, and roll. Music projects us into an altered state of emotional renaissance. Sound waves of charging notes invade us akin to an irrepressible spectral force that occupies our mind and body.

Opera was born in Florence at the end of the sixteenth century. It derived almost seamlessly from its immediate precursor, the intermedio, or lavish between-the-acts spectacle presented in conjunction with a play on festive occasions. Plays were spoken, and their stage settings were simple: a street backed by palace facades for tragedies, by lower-class houses for comedies; for satyr plays or pastorals, the setting was a woodland or country scene. Meanwhile the ever-growing magnificence of state celebrations in Medici Florence on occasions such as dynastic weddings gave rise to a variety of spectacles involving exuberant scenic displays: naval battles in the flooded courtyard of the Pitti Palace, tournaments in the squares, triumphal entries into the city. These all called upon the services of architects, machinists, costume designers, instrumental and vocal artists. Such visual and aural delights also found their way into the theater—not in plays, with their traditional, sober settings, but between the acts of plays. Intermedi had everything the plays had not: miraculous transformations of scenery, flying creatures (both natural and supernatural), dancing, singing. The plays satisfied Renaissance intellects imbued with classical culture; the intermedi fed the new Baroque craving for the marvelous, the incredible, the impossible. By all accounts, no Medici festivities were as grand and lavish as those held through much of the month of May 1589 in conjunction with the marriage of Grand Duke Ferdinand I and Christine of Lorraine. The intermedi produced between the acts of a comedy on the evening of May 2 were considered to be the highlight of the entire occasion and were repeated, with different plays, on May 6 and 13. Nearly all the main figures we will read about in connection with the birth of opera took part in the extravagant production, which was many months in the making: Emilio de' Cavalieri acted as intermediary between the court and the theater besides being responsible for the actors and musicians and composing some of the music; Giovanni Bardi conceived the scenarios for the six intermedi and saw to it that his highly allegorical allusions were made clear in the realization. Jacopo Peri and Giulio Caccini were among the featured singers, as was the madrigal composer Luca Marenzio, who wrote the music for Intermedio 3, described below. The poet responsible for the musical texts, finally, was Ottavio Rinuccini, who wrote the poetry for the earliest operas...

Like Edwards, many of the best Renaissance thinkers were blessed with a jack-of-all-trades erudition. When he wasn’t revolutionizing astronomy, Copernicus practiced medicine and law. Johannes Kepler based his theory of planetary motion on the ebb and flow of musical harmony. Better known in his day as a lawyer, statesman, writer, and courtier, Francis Bacon helped to pioneer the scientific method. A theologian named Robert Boyle laid the foundations of modern chemistry. Leonardo da Vinci, the poster boy for polymaths, was a gifted painter, sculptor, musician, anatomist, and writer, as well as a startlingly prolific inventor.

Within the emerging African American literary tradition, the exploration of blues forms and themes was begun by Langston Hughes, Sterling Brown, Zora Neal Hurston, and other writers in the Harlem Renaissance and the New Negro movement. Blues as criticism arose during and after the Great Depression from authors such as Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, and Albert Murray, and during the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s important contributions were made by Amiri Baraka, Larry Neal and others. In the present period, many African American scholars working in the disciplines and fields of music, history, folklore, drama, poetry, art, literary criticism, cultural studies, theology, anthropology, etcetera have acknowledged the blues as a hearth of African American consciousness. As stated earlier, the social sciences remain a barrier not breached.

Missa Brevis. As far as Renaissance vocal music goes, Mr. Palestrina's compositions for the church are the pinnacle.

The Renaissance extended the definition of la passione to an all-consuming dedication to a worthy pursuit, most often beauty in its infinite variety. Its passionate artists and artisans unleashed the greatest creative flowering the world had ever seen. A few centuries later the Romantics yearned to become impassioned and quiver with the intensity of their ardor. Jurists blamed “crimes of passion” on high-octane emotions that exploded into acts of unspeakable violence. [...] Passion—and passion alone—lifts us above the ordinary. Without passion, there would be no literature, no art, no music, no romance, perhaps none of the wonders Italians have wrought. Beyond sentiment or emotion, la passione italiana qualifies as a primal force of nature that cannot be ignored or denied. “When a passion chooses you, there’s nothing else you can do,” says a friend whose family produces wine and olive oil in Umbria. “Whatever happens in your life, that fire inside you is always burning. You need to follow it. It’s like betraying yourself if you try not to, and the price for betraying yourself is very, very high.

To this faith, the world owes the modern institutional versions of orphanages, hospitals, and higher education, along with the intellectual revolutions of the Enlightenment. Renaissance painting and architecture, classical music, and the abolition movement, as well as the modern movements for workers’ rights, women’s suffrage, and civil rights, were all by-products, directly or indirectly, of Christian beliefs and actions. Despite Christianity’s positive influences in many areas, Christians were also responsible for the Crusades, the Spanish Inquisition, the Thirty Years’ War, the genocide of native civilizations in the Americas, the Salem witch trials, American slavery and the slave trade, the Third Reich in Germany, “the Troubles” in Northern Ireland, the Rwandan genocide, and other atrocities. Clearly, Christianity has been both a positive and negative force in the world.