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During a period of tumultuous change in English political,
religious and cultural life, music signified the unspeakable
presence of the divine in the world for many. What was the role of
music in the early modern subject's sensory experience of divinity?
While the English intellectuals Peter Sterry (1613-72), Richard
Roach (1662-1730), William Stukeley (1687-1765) and David Hartley
(1705-57), have not been remembered for their 'musicking', this
book explores how the musical reflections of these individuals
expressed alternative and often uncustomary conceptions of God, the
world, and the human psyche. Music is always potentially present in
their discourse, emerging as a crucial form of mediation between
states: exoteric and esoteric, material and spiritual, outer and
inner, public and private, rational and mystical. Dixon shows how
Sterry, Roach, Stukeley and Hartley's shared belief in truly
universal salvation was articulated through a language of music,
implying a feminising influence that set these male individuals
apart from contemporaries who often strictly emphasised the
rational-i.e. the supposedly masculine-aspects of religion. Musical
discourse, instead, provided a link to a spiritual plane that
brought these intellectuals closer to 'ultimate reality'. Theirs
was a discourse firmly rooted in the real existence of contemporary
musical practices, both in terms of the forms and styles implied in
the writings under discussion and the physical circumstances in
which these musical genres were created and performed. Through
exploring ways in which the idea of music was employed in written
transmission of elite ideas, this book challenges conventional
classifications of a seventeenth-century 'Scientific Revolution'
and an eighteenth-century 'Enlightenment', defending an alternative
narrative of continuity and change across a number of scholarly
disciplines, from seventeenth-century English intellectual history
and theology, to musicology and the social history of music.
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