Marsilio Ficino’s Timaeus Commentary: Musical Speculations of a Renaissance Interpreter

Colloquium Musicology

Dr. Jacomien Prins, University of Warwick

Thursday 19 October 2017, 16:30 - 18:00

Nieuwe Doelenstraat 16, room 3.01

Marsilio Ficino (1433-1499) was one of the Renaissance’s defining scholars. Among his most important works was his Timaeus commentary. Despite the influence of Plato’s Timaeus in previous times, it was only with Ficino that the Latin West got its first complete translation. As one of the few Renaissance scholars to confront the challenges of Plato’s influential but also complex text, his commentary made Ficino the leading theoretician of the harmonics it propounds, but also an important interpreter of the ideas about music theory and practice it involves. In this paper, I address two questions central to Ficino’s interpretation of the Timaeus: why did he choose the theory of cosmic harmony from the dialogue as a matrix for his account of a physical world already undergoing radical change? And why did he want to revive Plato’s theory of the ethical power of listening? By investigating both Ficino’s interpretations of harmonics and of the physical and psychological mechanisms of perception and hearing, this paper argues that he used them above all to substantiate the biblical ideas that the world is a harmonic creation, that man is created with an immortal soul, and that the purpose of life is divine enlightenment. Furthermore, it demonstrates how Ficino revived Plato’s view of the delight taken in auditory perception to formulate a new music therapy in terms of a curious mixture of Neoplatonic and fifteenth-century scientific technical terms. Consequently, musical delight results from the correct perception of a sensory object as an imitation of divine harmonic order.

Dr. Jacomien Prins is a Global Research Fellow (GRF) at the Institute of Advanced Studies (IAS) and the Centre for the Study of the Renaissance (CSR) of Warwick University and an affiliated scholar at the University of Utrecht. She has worked extensively on the interaction between music theory and philosophy in the Renaissance. Her work includes 'Echoes of an Invisible World: Marsilio Ficino and Francesco Patrizi on Cosmic Order and Music Theory' (Leiden: Brill, 2014), 'Sing Aloud Harmonious Spheres: Renaissance Conceptions of Cosmic Harmony' (London: Routledge, 2017), and an edition and translation of Marsilio Ficino’s commentary on Plato’s 'Timaeus' (Harvard University Press, the 'I Tatti Renaissance Library' series (ITRL), forthcoming). She is currently working on a book project titled ‘'A Well-tempered Life’: Music, Health and Happiness in Renaissance Learning'.

Automatic pattern search in music: connecting computational methods and musicological insights

Colloquium Musicology
Dr. Anja Volk, Universiteit Utrecht

Thursday 21 September 2017, 16:30 - 18:00
Nieuwe Doelenstraat 16, room 3.01

In this talk I address the role of computational pattern search for helping us to scrutinize what it is that we “really know” about a specific type of music, if we consider ourselves to be musical experts. I elaborate my hypothesis that musical knowledge is often implicit, while computation enables us to make part of this knowledge explicit and evaluate it on a musical data set. I will discuss three examples of pattern search for corpus investigation, linked to the following questions: When are two folk songs considered to be similar to each other? What is a typical Ragtime and how has Ragtime evolved over time? What are typical chord patterns in popular music and how much do we agree on them? I discuss how musical experts and non-experts working together on developing computational methods can gain important insights into the specifics of a musical style, and into the implicit knowledge of musical experts.

Dr. Anja Volk holds master degrees in both Mathematics (1998) and Musicology (1996) and a PhD in the field of computational musicology (2002) from Humboldt University Berlin, Germany. Her area of specialisation is the development and application of computational and mathematical models for music research. The results of her research have substantially contributed to areas such as music information retrieval, computational musicology, digital cultural heritage, music cognition, and mathematical music theory. After two post-doc periods at the University of Southern California and Utrecht University, she has been awarded a prestigious VIDI grant from the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research in 2010, which allowed her to start her own research group MUSIVA on the topic of music similarity. She is a board member of the International Society for Mathematics and Computation in Music (SMCM) and of the Computational advisory board of the Lorentz Center, International center for workshops in the sciences. She co-organized the launch of the Transactions of the International Society for Music Information Retrieval, the open access journal of the ISMIR society, and is serving as Editor-in-Chief for the journal's first term.