between the active force, the stars, and the passive receiver, the human organism, with the song, which
imitates the attributes of the stars in a form assimilable by the human organism, as the effective mediator
of the influx. As translated by Gary Tomlinson, the leading modern investigator of the occult branches of
musical humanism, Ficino’s rules are these:
(1) To examine what powers in itself and effects from itself a given star, constellation, or aspect
has, what these remove and what they provide; and to insert these into the meanings of our
words so as to detest what they remove and approve what they provide.
(2) To consider what star chiefly rules what place or person, and then to observe what sorts of tones
and songs these regions and persons generally use, so that you may supply similar ones, together
with the meanings just mentioned, to the words which you are trying to expose to the same stars.
(3) To observe the daily positions and aspects of the stars and investigate to what speeches, songs,
motions, dances, moral behavior, and actions most people are principally incited under these, so
that you may imitate such things as far as possible in your songs, which aim to agree with similar
parts of the heavens and to catch a similar influx from them.^14
Thus, to channel the benefits of Venus, one makes a song that is “voluptuous with wantonness and
softness”; to channel the sun’s influence one makes a song that has “grace and smoothness” and is
“reverential, simple, and earnest”; and so on. Not technical perfection but uncanny efficacy is the goal.
What did these songs sound like? Who sang them? Did they work? Wouldn’t we like to know! But Ficino
never wrote down any of his astrological songs, and (as Tomlinson has emphasized) they are irrevocably
lost behind the oral curtain to those, like us, who depend on our literacy (and on empirical reasoning
rather than analogy) for knowledge.
Not only Ficino’s explicitly astrological songs, but a great deal of more ordinary music-making, too,
was credited with irrational magical force during what we now call the Renaissance. There is a famous
memoir by a French diplomat, published in 1555, of the playing of the Italian lutenist Francesco da
Milano (1497–1543), that resonates with what Ficino called raptus or trance, what modern
anthropologists call “soul loss,” and what the more recent language of spiritualism calls “out-of-body
experience.” Francesco had been hired to entertain the company at a noble banquet:
The tables being cleared, he chose one, and as if tuning his strings, sat on the end of the table seeking out a fantasia. He
had barely disturbed the air with three strummed chords when he interrupted the conversation that had started among the
guests. Having constrained them to face him, he continued with such ravishing skill that little by little, making the strings
languish under his fingers in his sublime way, he transported all those who were listening into so pleasurable a melancholy
that—one leaning his head on his hand supported by his elbow, and another sprawling with his limbs in careless
deportment, with gaping mouth and more than half-closed eyes, glued (one would judge) to the strings of the lute, and his
chin fallen on his breast, concealing his countenance with the saddest taciturnity ever seen—they remained deprived of all
senses save that of hearing, as if the spirit, having abandoned all the seats of the senses, had retired to the ears in order to
enjoy the more at its ease so ravishing a harmony; and I believe that we would be there still, had he not himself—I know
not how—changing his style of playing with a gentle force, returned the spirit and the senses to the place from which he
had stolen them, not without leaving as much astonishment in each of us as if we had been elevated by an ecstatic
transport of some divine frenzy.^15The last phrase in this description of musical shamanism or sorcery, about “ecstatic transport” and
“divine frenzy,” is rife with neo-Platonist buzzwords. At the other end of the passage we get a valuable
clue to the music through which the sorcerer wielded his magic. To “seek out” (chercher in French,
cercar in Italian) is the root word behind ricercare, and a fantasia, as we already know, is an early way
of describing “made up” (as opposed to quoted) music. We get a glimpse of a ricercare-in-action, the kind
of thing that only occasionally got written down, and the kind of effects it could produce, not on the
permanent page but in ephemeral performance. The passage celebrates the power of the artist-improviser,
the diametrical opposite from the artist-creator of the literate ars perfecta ideal. It celebrates the power