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Books > History > History of specific subjects > Social & cultural history
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Composing the World - Harmony in the Medieval Platonic Cosmos (Hardcover)
Loot Price: R1,670
Discovery Miles 16 700
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Composing the World - Harmony in the Medieval Platonic Cosmos (Hardcover)
Series: Critical Conjunctures in Music and Sound
Expected to ship within 12 - 19 working days
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We can hear the universe! This was the triumphant proclamation at a
February 2016 press conference announcing that the Laser
Interferometer Gravity Observatory (LIGO) had detected a "transient
gravitational-wave signal." What LIGO heard in the morning hours of
September 14, 2015 was the vibration of cosmic forces unleashed
with mind-boggling power across a cosmic medium of equally
mind-boggling expansiveness: the transient ripple of two black
holes colliding more than a billion years ago. The confirmation of
gravitational waves sent tremors through the scientific community,
but the public imagination was more captivated by the sonic
translation of the cosmic signal, a sound detectable only through
an act of carefully attuned listening. As astrophysicist Szabolcs
Marka remarked, "Until this moment, we had our eyes on the sky and
we couldn't hear the music. The skies will never be the same."
Taking in hand this current "discovery" that we can listen to the
cosmos, Andrew Hicks argues that sound-and the harmonious
coordination of sounds, sources, and listeners-has always been an
integral part of the history of studying the cosmos. Composing the
World charts one constellation of musical metaphors, analogies, and
expressive modalities embedded within a late-ancient and medieval
cosmological discourse: that of a cosmos animated and choreographed
according to a specifically musical aesthetic. The specific
historical terrain of Hicks' discussion centers upon the world of
twelfth-century philosophy, and from there he offers a new
intellectual history of the role of harmony in medieval
cosmological discourse, a discourse which itself focused on the
reception and development of Platonism. Hicks illuminates how a
cosmological aesthetics based on the "music of the spheres" both
governed the moral, physical, and psychic equilibrium of the human,
and assured the coherence of the universe as a whole. With a rare
convergence of musicological, philosophical, and philological
rigor, Hicks presents a narrative tour through medieval cosmology
with reflections on important philosophical movements along the
way, raising connections to Cartesian dualism, Uexkull's
theoretical biology, and Deleuze and Guattari's musically inspired
language of milieus and (de)territorialization. Hicks ultimately
suggests that the models of musical cosmology popular in late
antiquity and the twelfth century are relevant to our modern
philosophical and scientific undertakings. Impeccably researched
and beautifully written, Composing the World will resonate with a
variety of readers, and it encourages us to rethink the role of
music and sound within our greater understanding of the universe.
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