Beauty and Ugliness as Aesthetics Aspects in Medieval Music: Order in Disorder
Antonio Celso RIBEIRO
Original title: Beleza e Feiura como aspectos estéticos na Música Medieval: a Ordem na Desordem
Published in Mirabilia Journal
Keywords: Beauty, Disorder, Medieval Music, Order, Treatises, Troubadours, Ugliness.
Through a brief examination of anonymous music treatise La Doctrina de Compondre Dictatz, this work intends to expose some aesthetic aspects of the medieval songbook, confronting its main genres and making some considerations about beauty and ugliness in the songs of troubadours.
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 transit of the medieval truth to the modern knowledge – Chronicle of a phase that out of orbit
Carlos ENRIQUE BERBEGLIA
Original title: El tránsito de la verdad medieval al conocimiento moderno – crónica de una fase que se desorbita
Published in The Medieval Aesthetics
Keywords: Authority, Belief, Effectiveness, Limit, Need, Order, Precision, True.
The Middle Ages, in their lengthy centuries of existence, sum up a polysemous era. It is an epoch that bridges the gap between a preceding time, which it knows and from which it extracts enhanced knowledge and experience, and a succeeding time, which it ignores as a human period but knows at a suprahuman level, a knowledge coded as the end of times, which they consider imminent, although that imminence may take centuries to come true. Polysemous because, in spite of appearances, and much interpretation with an ideological bias that considers it a monolithic era ruled by just one way of thinking and acting in consequence, it treasures and displays literatures expressed in languages that, later on, will come to light in their full richness with the dawn of nationalities, philosophies that, though influenced by their theological and Greco-Latin root, become prodromes of future thought, technological and architectonic changes that will last indelibly. It was an age that possessed extended self-awareness, in contrast with the following ones, which reprocess it at a more and more accelerated pace and occasionally downplay its importance. It believed it was the owner of absolute truth; in this respect it does differ from subsequent times, except for the means it implemented to defend it, given that those “subsequent times”, in spite of disowning it, do not usually resign themselves to the fragility of the knowledge it obtains and resort to inquisitorial methods to defend it. The subtitle of this essay refers to the exorbitance that characterized the end of this era, depreciated or appreciated depending on the spirit of those times succeeding it, which means that each period reinterprets it, the destiny of everything human, which, from “our perspective”, medieval people sought to overcome.
