Music and dance in the paintings of Nicolas-Antoine Taunay (1755-1830)
Bárbara DANTAS
Original title: Música e dança nas pinturas de Nicolas-Antoine Taunay (1755-1830)
Published in Music in Antiquity, Middle Ages & Renaissance
Keywords: Dance, Modern Painting, Music, Nicolas-Antoine Taunay.
The French painter, Nicolas-Antoine Taunay, lived in a confused time. It witnessed one of the most important political upheavals the world has ever seen, the French Revolution. Even though he was in the “eye of that hurricane”, his painting pleased both the monarchy and the republicans. An example of this are the landscape paintings in which he referred to an iconography linked to dance and music, more specifically, to the roda and to fête galante. This work, therefore, intends to demonstrate how modern landscape painting, normally dissociated from a political content, is also a symbolic expression of power while referring to classical and melancholic themes.
Music, Liberal Arts, and transcendence in Augustine of Hippo (354-430)
Luiz Cláudio Luciano França GONÇALVES
Original title: Música, Artes Liberais e transcendência em Agostinho de Hipona (354-430)
Published in The Kingdom of the Spirit
Keywords: Liberal Arts, Music, Transcendence.
The dialogue De musica (387/391) is part of the unfinished project of the Disciplinarum libri, undertaken by Augustine of Hippo (354-430) on the liberal arts. At the time, the author conceives the musical discipline as scientia bene modulandi, kind of knowledge that has as its goal the understanding of the transcendent signs that underlies and governs the corporeal world. Taken in its proper and worthy sense – as a science that rises beyond the sensitive sphere –, the art of music is dedicated to the revelation of the incorporeal nature that sustains the modus and, at the end, leads to contemplation of its transcendent source. It is an anagogical path, by which the soul, turned to its noblest activity, deciphers, through reason, the divine order inscribed in proportion and measure of the material world.
Musica Dolorosa – Symphony of the Sublime and the Grotesque
Antonio Celso RIBEIRO
Original title: Musica Dolorosa – Sinfonia do Sublime e do Grotesco
Published in Rhythms, expressions and representations of the body
Keywords: Body, Middle Ages, Music, Self-flagellation, Sin, Soul.
The present work intends to briefly analyze the role of the music in the mortification of the human body as atonement for sins, either voluntary as in the ritual of self-flagellation, and/or imposed for corporal punishment being both perceived as a source of pleasure, pain, desire, and expiation culminanting in the spectacle of scourging. Starting from the concept of the duality of the soul and the body, as suggested by several medieval allegories, the paper aims to make correlations between music, body, desire, religious fanaticism and madness in European Middle Ages, being these relationships the corporeality of musical and religious experience, i.e. through the experience of (self)-imposed flagellation, ascestics would insist the human body would function as a musical instrument where it skin, tendons, throat, torso could be beaten, strechted, plucked, and strummed to produce resonances that were in accord with the pitch and timbre of the crucified Jesus, whose exposed ribs and extended sinews turned him into the harp of the salvation in countless medieval allegories.
Musical Palimpsestism in the Sephardic traditions in the profane/sacred context in the transmission of knowledge and the perpetuation of traditions
Antonio Celso RIBEIRO
Original title: O Palimpsetismo musical nas tradições judaicas sefarditas no contexto profano/sacro na transmissão do conhecimento e perpetuação de tradições
Published in
Keywords: Alterity, Authorship, Bakhtin, Dialogism, Jewish, Knowledge Transmission, Music, Palimpsestic, Sacred, Secular.
The aim of the present work is to analyze the reuse of secular traditional melodies from the Sephardic culture with sacred texts adapted for liturgical service, hypothesizing that this procedure works well for knowledge transmission and perpetuating traditions. Disregarding any insinuation or intention of profanity in making this interchange of melody/text, profane/sacred, a convention enshrined by a custom consecrated since the Middle Ages, the main scope of this paper, both among Christians and Jews, I resort to the analogy with the technique of palimpsest – reutilization of parchment whose primitive text has been scraped or washed off to give way to another – to understand the migration of meanings between the profane/sacred genres covering en passant the concept of authorship, alterity and dialogism of the Russian philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin.
Saint Augustine and the definition of Music as Scientia (De Musica I, IV, 5)
Luís Carlos Silva de SOUSA
Original title: Santo Agostinho (354-430) e a definição de Música como Scientia (De Musica I, IV, 5)
Published in Music in Antiquity, Middle Ages & Renaissance
Keywords: Modulation, Music, Order, Reason, Saint Augustine, Scientia, Transcendence.
The objective of this work is to analyse the use of the term Scientia in the definition of Music proposed by Saint Augustine in the work De Musica (I, IV, 5). The Music, one of the seven Liberal Arts, was understood by Augustine as a manifestation of th order of audible realities. The Music had as its object not exactly modulatio, but bona modulatio. Many animals are capable of modulation, they fellow numerical laws: but, for Saint Augustine, the Music was a Scientia bene modulandi, and it assumed a specific, transcendent telos (τέλος). The term Scientia could not be dispensed with, since ignorance of the bona modulatio, as an exercise of Reason, could cause disorder in the use of song.
The Cantigas of Santa Maria – a musical treasure of the reign of Afonso X, the wise man (1252-1284)
Lenora Pinto MENDES
Original title: As Cantigas de Santa Maria – um tesouro musical do reinado de Afonso X, o Sábio (1252-1284)
Published in Music in Middle Ages and Early Modernity
Keywords: Cantigas, Music, Poetry.
Produced in the alfonsine scriptorium, the Cantigas de Santa Maria constitute a true encyclopedia of medieval music. Inserted in the medieval European troubadour movement in its Marian aspect in which the Virgin Mary takes the place of the lady of the court. They survived in four richly illuminated manuscripts with the record of all their melodies on the staff of five lines and squares neums developed a little earlier by the master Guido D’Arezzo. Considered a treasure by the wise king, the books of the songs also possessed healing powers. Some cantigas record passages of the life of its royal author.
The Concept of Beauty in Medieval Nativities from England and Spain
Vicente CHACÓN-CARMONA
Published in Pleasure in the Middle Ages
Keywords: Beauty, Landscape, Music, Nativity, Religious drama, Shepherds.
Medieval nativity plays, in particular those dealing with the adoration of the shepherds, tend to depict two well distinct worlds, namely before and after the characters learn about the birth of the Messiah. English and Castilian playwrights depict the postlapsarian world prior to Jesus’s birth as a gloomy, barren place inhabited by rough ignorant creatures awaiting their redemption. Even if beauty is not staged as such in these plays, it is clear that the characters, due to their moral state, are unable to appreciate the aesthetics of their surroundings. It is the aim of this article to analyse and compare the strategies utilised by the authors in order to stimulate the characters and make beauty somehow apparent to the spectators both in the English and the Castilian traditions. Special attention is paid to the roles played by landscape, language, and music.
The Music in Don Quijote by Miguel de Cervantes (1547-1616)
Antonia Javiera CABRERA MUÑOZ
Original title: La Música en el Don Quijote de Miguel de Cervantes (1547-1616)
Published in Music in Middle Ages and Early Modernity
Keywords: Don Quijote de la Mancha, Miguel de Cervantes, Music.
This article deals with Music in the great work Don Quixote de la Mancha (1605 and 1615), written by Miguel de Cervantes (1547-1615) during the Spanish Golden Age. In this relationship between the two Arts (Literature and Music) we emphasized the protagonist character of the work, Don Quixote de la Mancha, who, in both parts, gradually evolve his musical sense to see himself as a fully musical character in the second part: Music is present in various attitudes of his in several episodes, using the recitation and singing, instrumental, general knowledge and even dance to show their musical skills. Several authors have studied this relationship in detail, so that in this work we made a brief synthesis of some contents with the purpose of introducing the Brazilian reader to this relationship in Don Quixote, since in Brazil there is nothing published on the subject, as verified in the main research databases available to the general public and specialized. We begin with a brief synthesis of the life and work of Cervantes, highlighting his literary path to understand a little of his worldview as an intellectual; then we dedicate ourselves to his relationship with Music, the musical environment of his time and how the musical expression was introduced in his works; at once, we made a cut of Don Quixote musician, by highlighting some musical aspects that character shows. The analysis of Don Quixote showed that Music is as much pastoral as in the urban or contemporary to Cervantes. In reading the work, it was also verified that Music unfolds in three ways that correspond to its three outputs: in the first, the musical elements are scarce and simple and show, crudely, the contrast between what imagined by the knight and rural reality; in the second, the same happens as in the first, but little by little the gentleman is contemplating reality as it is and are the other characters who try to convince him that everything is a product of enchantments; in the third, Don Quixote assumes the role of musician in the manner of the knight-errant.
The Music. One of the keys to understanding Time
Ricardo da COSTA
Original title: A Música. Uma das chaves para a compreensão do Tempo
Published in Music in Antiquity, Middle Ages & Renaissance
Keywords: History, Liberal Arts, Methodology, Music.
The purpose is to present José Enrique Ruiz-Domènec’s (Spanish Historian 1948- ) methodology for the study of the Past: the appreciation of Music – traditionally one of the seven liberal arts – in historical studies as a key element for understanding the history of cultures in time. To do this, we will concentrate on four of his books: España, una nueva historia (2009), Personajes intempestivos de la Historia (2011), Europa. Las claves de su historia (2012), and Escuchar el pasado. Ocho siglos de música europea (2012). In them three characters are presented that symbolize the imperative need for Music studies to find the key to the Past: Pope Gregory, the Great (540-604) and the creation of the universe European sound with Gregorian chant, Mozart (1756-1791) and the rational sense of civilization of the Ancien Régime, and Joaquín Rodrigo (1901-1999) and the incurable nostalgia of Spanish in Aranjuez Concert (1939).
The musician and humanist Damião de Góis (1502-1574)
Márcio Paes SELLES
Original title: O músico e humanista Damião de Góis (1502-1574)
Published in Music in Middle Ages and Early Modernity
Keywords: Court, Humanist, Music.
Damião de Góis, was born in Alenquer in a family of the Portuguese nobility, grew up in the court of D. Manuel I where he had access to musical learning. Later, a diplomat under King John III had contact with Franco-Flemish music, developed in the chapels of the court of Burgundy and lived with important humanists of his time as Erasmus and Bembo. His compositions as well as his musical taste in the French-Flemish style served as an argument in a complaint in the Holy Office that ended up leading to his death in 1574.
