music, language, and origins 51a clear demarcation between the two is likely to obscure as much as it
reveals.
Language as representationLet us now look at a few of the ways in which language and music
were understood prior to the changes in conceptions of language in
the eighteenth century. Whether on the basis of traditional religion or
of rational theology, language is broadly assumed to be grounded in a
stable reality, and one major task of language is to represent that real-
ity accurately.^2 The difficulties involved in achieving this are often not
regarded as inherent in the nature of language, and are seen rather
as being generated by human failure to understand things clearly. The
perceived substantial tie between word and world is evident in many
ways. In the ‘doctrine of signatures’, for example, nature is itself ‘lin-
guistic’, it furnishes ways of ‘reading’ itself that allow its truth to be
manifest in resemblances between its differing parts. When such ideas
become less convincing in the light of the advance of science the pro-
cess of disenchantment of nature compels thinking about language to
change. One consequence of this is the idea that music may be a sur-
vival of a kind of language that still has the sort of relationship to reality
that was present in the doctrine of signatures. Even though this idea
cannot now be defended, it underlines the importance of looking at
why music was understood in such ways.
Modernity is a contested term, being characterised in different ways
and located at differing times by different theories. Much of the debate
over this issue revolves around what the essential changes are regarded
as being that ‘modernity’ brings about. To this extent it is possible to use
music itself as offering a way of characterising modernity, the changes
in music at the time being closely connected to other social and cul-
tural changes, but not simply determined by them. In the Pythagorean
and Platonist conceptions that dominate the Middle Ages and much of
the Renaissance,^3 music consisted of Harmonia, Rhythmos and Logos:
‘By Harmonia one understood regulated, rational relations of notes
2 This is somewhat misleading because it underplays the role of rhetoric. As is well known,
though, philosophers since Plato have been suspicious of rhetoric because it supposedly
distorts truth.
3 The issue of the Renaissance is much more complex than is suggested by this reductive
sketch, but if one of the key issues in modernity in the sense I am using the term is the
change in the understanding of language, the point made here can stand.