Moving the Immovable 49
akin to the rhetorical and grammatical arts of the trivium than to the mathematical arts of
the quadrivium. Above all, Mei was interested in how music could rejoin drama and litera-
ture, leaving behind its old connection with mathematics and astronomy. Thus, Mei ’ s
letters to Vincenzo contain scarcely any of the old planetary lore. For instance, in 1581
Mei compared the turning movements of the ancient Greek chorus to “ the movement of
planets from west to the east and returning to the west ” ; coming to a standstill, the chorus
“ signified the stability of the earth around which those movements are made, ” hence a
geocentric cosmos.^30 Thus, Vincenzo ’ s own comment about cosmology in his Dialogue
comes as a surprise: “ Like the many lines drawn from the center of a circle to the circum-
ference, which all gaze back at the center, every musical interval in the octave sees itself
as if in a mirror, like the planets [ stelle ] do in the sun, not otherwise than the way everyone,
depending on individual capacity, receives from it the person ’ s being a perfection. ”^31
Vincenzo clearly indicates that he considers the sun to be the center of the planetary
system, and his argument is based on diagrams of the musical scale such as Glarean illus-
trated (see figure 3.2a), in which the sun ’ s position is surrounded symmetrically by whole
tones on either side, the interval separating it from the planets on either side of the picture,
and likewise of the semitones and whole tones throughout the octave, read outward from
the sun as center , so that “ each musical interval in the octave sees itself as if in a mirror,
like the planets do in the sun. ” Vincenzo has taken a diagram based on a geocentric world-
picture (as Glarean and those before him had assumed) and used it to argue that the sun
is the true musical and hence also cosmological center. Vincenzo uses the musical sym-
metries he discerns in the solar-centered octave as a way of expressing his astronomical
preference for the heliocentric cosmos.
Though he does not mention Copernicus, Vincenzo is writing almost forty years after
De revolutionibus , so that we infer that he must have known of the basic idea of the new
astronomy. If so, he may have been one of the first in Italy to evince such awareness.^32
But how could he have come by it? The most likely hypothesis goes back to his teacher,
Zarlino, whose own cosmology seems to have been quite geocentric, judging by the wholly
traditional account of the musica mundana , the “ music of the spheres, ” he included near
the beginning of his seminal Istitutioni harmoniche ( Harmonic Institutes , 1558) ( figure
3.5 ). Zarlino does show an interest in symmetries of musical intervals and their correspon-
dence with cosmology, though applied to the relations between the four physical elements
( figure 3.6 ), rather than to the planetary system.
Zarlino, however, revealed his own interest in astronomy in two shorter writings: Intorno
il vero anno, & il vero giorno, nel qual fu crucifisso il N. S. Giesv Christo redentor del
mondo ( On the True Year of the Crucifixion of Our Lord Jesus Christ , 1579), which
addressed a long-standing chronological controversy, and Le risolutioni d ’ alcune dimande
fatte intorno la correttione del calendario di Giulio Cesare ( Resolution of All Requests
Concerning the Correction of the Calendar of Julius Caesar , 1589), which addressed the
call of Pope Gregory XIII to find the best means of rectifying the growing divergence