Music and the Making of Modern Science

Alfred North Whitehead once observed that omitting the role of mathematics in the story

of modern science would be like performing Hamlet while “ cutting out the part of Ophelia.

This simile is singularly exact. For Ophelia is quite essential to the play, she is very

charming — and a little mad. ”^1 If in the story of science mathematics takes the part of

Ophelia, music might be compared with Horatio, Hamlet ’ s friend and companion who

helps investigate the ghost, discusses what may lie beyond their philosophies, sings the

sweet prince to his rest, and tells his story.

This book will examine some significant moments in the relationship of music to

science, especially those in which prior developments in music affected subsequent aspects

of natural science. By investigating this direction of influence, we question the common

presupposition that, however beguiling, music is conceptually derivative or secondary

compared to other modes of thought or perception — an effect, rather than a cause. The

examples considered in this book show the larger intellectual and cultural dimensions of

music as a force in its own right.

By virtue of its special position in Greek natural philosophy, music occupied the perfect

position to mediate between idealized mathematical objects and the world of experience.^2

Based on these ancient models, the continuing structures of learning mandated music ’ s

ensuing centrality as the “ hinge ” discipline connecting arithmetic, geometry, and the

sensual world. This both reflected and moved the profound alterations that surrounded the

birth of the “ new philosophy ” during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. My main

contention is that, in whatever directions its interventions tended, from ancient until

modern times music so deeply and persistently affected the making of science over so

many historical vicissitudes that we should tell their stories jointly. Our awareness of how

exactly music entered into the story can enlarge and deepen our understanding of the

human and intellectual dimensions of science. In so doing, we may draw more closely

together the study of “ aural culture ” and symbolic structures hitherto considered separate.

This rapprochement calls for an enriched exploration of the felt dimensions of scientific

experience, considered as a fully human activity vividly engaged with perception, feeling,

and thought.^3

Introduction