Abstract
Before throwing ourselves into the gap to explore in more detail Galileo’s idea of motion and its operatic compossibles, we need to take a deep breath and take stock of where we have arrived around the bend.
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References
See below, pp. 163f., 183.
Obviously this distinction presupposes the distinction between mimetic and non- mimetic or indicational appresentation. The distinctions are not quite the same as the antique distinction between Phantasia and Mimesis. See Janson, op. cit., loc. cit., pp. 258f, 265f. See below, pp. 176f.
Galileo Galilei, Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems—Ptolemaic & Copernican , p. 16.
Ibid., p. 17. See above, pp. 24f.
Galileo, ibid.., pp. 56f.; cf. Descartes, The Meditations Concerning First Philosophy, pp. 75f. Cf. also Jean Dietz Moss, Novelties in the Heavens, pp. 273ff. From what has been said so far, it is obvious that much more than an “architectual metaphor” (p. 275) is involved here.
Galileo, ibid.., p. 63.
See above, p.10.
Galileo, Dialogue, pp. 389f. And by also describing the orbit of the earth in the plane of the ecliptic, Salviati even relates the earth seen from the standpoint of the moon to the skies seen from the standpoint of the earth, ibid., p. 390.
Galileo, Dialogue, pp. 7, 416.
Leclerc, op. cit. , pp. 414ff.
See Maniates, p. 466. It is a difference which “stems from the incontrovertible fact that early operas still manifest an interest in la meriviglia, ohimé, degli intermedi.” The chief reason for the difference would seem to be the fact that the central focus of early opera is on narrative and lyrical recitative and the mannerist devices for involving the listener in the “lyric core” of the narrative by means of affective appresentation. See also Bukofzer, pp. 394ff. and the discussion of the different kinds of opera (likewise Maniates, p. 467) and the sorts of theatres required. For the essential elements of “meriviglia” in connection with the invention of the theatre, see Celletti, A History of Bel Canto, pp. 20ff.
Cf. Maniates, p. 465. Supposedly the first Italian Renaissance theatre to use the proscenium was the Teatro Farneses at Parma, but I seem unable to confirm this piece of “incidental intelligence.” See also Hammond, Music & Spectacle, pp. 186f.
See Drummond, op. cit. , pp. 144ff.
See Celletti, pp. 20f.; Bukofzer, pp. 393ff.; and LeClerc, pp. 419ff.
Dialogo sopra i due massimi sistemi del mondo, Opere, VII, p. 281 (Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief Systems, p. 256). The translation has been altered slightly to make it more literal.
See above, pp.151f..; below, pp. 173f.
See above, pp. 37ff. For what follows, see also Finocchiaro’s summary and commentary on the arguments about motion in the second day of the Dialogo, pp. 36ff., 54f. See Galileo, Opere, VIII, pp. 184ff. (English translation, pp. 156ff).
See above, pp.108f. and 149f.
See Stillman Drake, “Mathematics, Astronomy, and Physic in the Work of Galileo,” pp. 311 ff. Drake does not seem to realize the nature of the composite hypothesis here; see below, pp. 164f., and above, 111 f.
See Fred Kersten, “The Life Concept and Life Conviction,” pp. 109–115.
See above, pp. 89f.
Hall, The Revolution in Science , p. 103.
Above, pp.143ff.
Above, p. 143.
See Hall, op. cit., loc. cit.
See Hall, p. 103. It then comes as no surprise that “To the extent that Galileo’s subject was always the description of motions (kinematics) rather than the action of forces in producing motion (dynamics) he never quite renounced this limitation…”
Hall, op. cit., loc. cit.
Our formula shows how change in space and time is related in the case of free fall, describing how freely falling bodies behave. In other words, the laws which are constructed must always be of the sort where one aspect, we may say, is a function of another aspect. Thus in our example a functional relationship is established between time and space: S = F(t). What is important here is that there is no cause or effect involved because they have “disappeared” with the introduction of functional dependency. The functional relationship expressed by the formula, F(s, t) = O, effectively eliminates cause and effect, rendering irrelevant the very experiential datum of ordinary life from which it is extrapolated: push coming to shove. To be sure, not to eliminate cause and effect as an icastic image would mean that, for instance, a change in time causes a change in place. And this would, in turn, introduce a productive force into the picture, such as is found in the Aristotelian physics where the paradigm of the occurrence of natural events is the craftsman exerting an effort to bring about a change in the material worked upon in accord with a pre-established form and telos. Now, for Galileo, force, the “power of things,” is conceived as the function of alteration of motion. The datum of extrapolation, push coming to shove, is then a fantastic image. For us, at the moment, the significance of the “how” is that, of necessity, the experiential datum of daily life from which it is extrapolated must be rendered irrelevant so that “reality itself”’ can be rendered. Grateful thanks to Andrew Kersten for help on this footnote.
See Hall, op. cit., pp. 102ff. for the description of the advance in Galileo’s description of motion from Treatise on the Sphere to the Discourses.
See above, pp. 111 f..
It was a further step to assume, as Husserl and others have insisted, that this is the only genuine case of idealization, hence of objectivity. Everything else is then “subjective” because it is a non-idealization. This represents a further chapter in the history of modern thought which we cannot pursue here.
See above, pp. 40f.
Above, pp. 43f. For the “fate” of exponential representation, see Paul Schrecker, “On the Infinite Number of Infinite Orders,” pp. 361–373, especially pp. 363ff.
So the Latin epigram, Dialogo, p. 280: Ex hac itaque opinione necesse est diffidere nostris sensibus, ut penitus fallacibus vel stupidis in sensibilibus, etiam coniunctissimis, diiudicandis; quam ergo veritatem sperare possumus, a facultate adeo fallaci ortum trahentem? (Dialogue , p. 255f. “And from this opinion we must necessarily suspect our own senses as wholly fallible or stupid in judging sensible things which are very close at hand. Then what truth can we hope for, deriving its origin from so deceptive a faculty?”); for this notion of “sensory evidence,” see above, pp. 105f., 135f.
Ibid., p. 281 (p. 256).
Above, pp.103f.
Finocchiaro, op. cit., Chapter 3, lists and summarizes these and many other “rhetorical” —i.e., fantastic and comic—images, establishing their function in specific arguments in the text of the Dialogo. To be sure, he is concerned with assessing, finally, the “rhetorical force” of the images, even though they may be “pleasing and clever aesthetic” images in their own right. See also Moss, pp. 283ff.
See above, pp.61f., 113f. For the notion of “reason” and its intervention, see above, pp. 104f..
Above, pp. 105f., 113f., 137f.
See Walker, Chapter V, pp. 63ff.
See Plessner, Laughing and Crying , pp. 126, 128. This, again, is not obvious, i.e., whether the feelings are genuine or merely sentimental. The whole issue requires a separate inquiry into the criteria of “genuine” as opposed to “sentimental” feelings, and, in turn, of correct or incorrect verisimiltude. Plessner’s view is that “genuine” feelings are those bound to situations, i.e., serious action at the center, and not just objects. The “cultural” difference in “genuine” feelings, i.e., relative to a time or a place, is a different issue; see above, pp. 91f.
Walker, op. cit. , p. 63.
Above, pp. 73 f…
See above, pp. 91 f.. Such self-conscious exercise is certainly peculiar to the Baroque; for example, see Walker, pp. 76ff. for a case of “hardness and harshness” in a song of Vincenzo Galilei composed just to express hardness and harshness (reproduced, p. 77) and which contains “only 53 chords, mostly major, which, to my ear, give no impression of hardness or harshness, but produced the effect of a calm, solemn, rather mysterious hymn” (p. 77)—in other words, a case of self-conscious exercise of self-interpretations at odds with “ears” of a later century. Indeed, the self-interpretations are so at odds that one has to ask to “what extent are they a priori constructions, or, on the contrary, derived by induction from the practice of great composers?” (p. 76). Walker admits there is no easy answer; one may add that perhaps the self-interpretations are generically incompatible.
Ibid. , p. 64.
Walker, p. 64. Likewise the major third likes to ascend because it is of a “lively and happy nature;” or a minor tenth is weak because it likes to descend, and the major tenth rises because it is lively. See also Lippman, pp. 28f.
Above, pp. 161f..
Walker, p. 65; examples on p. 66.
See above, pp. 86f., and Walker, pp. 66ff.
Walker, pp. 67f.; cf. also the discussion of Beeckman by Cohen, pp. 132f.
See above, p70.
See above, pp.161f.
Walker, p. 69; see below, pp.198f.
See ibid., pp. 69f.; also Cohen’s discussion of Galileo’s account of the “physiological” foundations of this indicational appresentation in the Dialogo, pp. 90ff.; and above, pp. 128f.
Walker, pp. 71ff., Cohen, pp. 91ff. (and especially the reference to the studies of Costabel and Lerner which he cites), pp. 168ff. in connection with Descartes. Moreover, the appresented emotions are not themselves always without ambiguity, as is the impression from Peter Kivy’s valuable study, Osmin’s Rage. Philosophical Reflections on Opera, Drama, and Text, pp. 216ff., perhaps leaning too heavily on the “Cartesian” compartmentalization of emotions and the “possible sequence of emotions in the human experience: that being determined, in the present instance, by the Cartesian view” (p. 217); see Walker’s contrast of major and minor modes in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries with those in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and Cohen pp. 169f. (Perhaps the major disagreement I have with Kivy is his reliance on a “psychology of association” to clarify the theory of affections, and although this is of central importance, especially as concerns the Enlightenment and the use made of it in discussing the da capo form in Chapters IX and X, it misses the non-mimetic nature of appresentation of emotions even in Descartes’ Compendium musicae. That is to say, the “association” is the result of appresentation by way of opposites, i.e., the Cartesian principle of truth by least resemblance, above, pp. 104f., 135f.—and which is entailed by Kivy’s important distinction between the Baroque and contemporary interpretation of expressiveness where, on the former, music “arouses” emotions, and on the latter music possesses emotive qualities. See Kivy’s discussion of Archibald Alison, pp. 207ff.)
See above, pp. 145f.; for what follows, see Claudio Monteverdi, Orfeo; Maniates, Mannerism in Italian Music and Culture, pp. 472ff.; Kivy, Osmin’s Rage, Chapter V. For the performance of Orfeo, I prefer, for the most part, that of Nikolaus Harnoncourt and Jean-Pierre Ponnelle in 1978 at the Zurich Opera House (London: CD Video 071 203–1).
Iain Fenlon, in Whenham, op. cit., pp. 16f. As Monteverdi himself notes in dedicatory preface to first printed edition of 1609, L’Orfeo was given in the large, 4000-seat Manutuan theatre as well.
See Kivy, op. cit., pp. 73ff.; Silke Leopold, Monteverdi. Music in Transition, pp. 86ff.
See Whenham, op. cit.., p. 47.
See Leopold, pp.91f.; Hanning, Of Poetry and Music ’s Power, pp. 118ff.
See Maniates’ careful account of e.g., “Possente spirto” op. cit.., note 55, pp. 561f. and Kivy, op. cit., ibid..; Leopold, pp. 60, 89, 92f.
See above, pp. 96f.. and Manitates’ references to Guarini, op. cit.., pp. 472f.
See Maniates, p. 472. To be sure, in a few decades this and similar terms will disappear.
See Leopold, p. 85, and the citations there from Doni’s Tratto della musica scenica; also Maniates, op. cit., ibid.. For Doni, see also Lippman, pp. 42ff.
Kivy wrestles these to the ground in op. cit., Chapter V, centered around the question ultimately of just what sort of work, musical or dramatic, Orfeo is; see especially pp. 91ff.
Maniates, ibid.
Ibid., and pp. 510ff. In contrast, see Drummond, pp. 122, 135.
Palisca, Humanism in Italian Renaissance Musical Thought, p. 432.
See Celletti, op. cit., pp. 4ff.
Thus the issue of whether the stile rappresentativo is in one or some other sense “melody” is hardly important; at the least, melody rides in on the back of the stile rappresentativo regardless of whether it itself is “melodic.” See Kivy, op. cit., pp. 90f.
Leopold, op. cit.., p. 85. Maniates as well, pp. 475f. notes the strictures of Doni followed not only by Monteverdi but Peri, Rinuccini, and others as well: “We should not imagine that the shepherds depicted there were the sordid and common ones that tend the livestock today, but those of that older age when the noblest people practised this art” (Cited by Leopold, p. 85)—another case of “what seems right” in Arcadia rather than in Thrace. See also Thomas G. Rosenmeyer, The Green Cabinet. Theocritus and the European Pastoral Lyric, pp. 232ff., especially p. 235.
Harnoncourt, The Musical Dialogue, pp. 127f.
See above, pp. 113, 149f..
See above, pp. 128ff.
Maniates, p. 475. To be sure, it will not be long before Arcadia becomes the playground of the comic and ridiculous, as e.g.,in Monteverdi’s next Manutuan opera, La finta pazza l icori: “the pastoral world, which had dominated the first stage of operatic history, came to an end with the new dramas dealing with thrilling entanglements and intrigues. Only a little later stingy nymphs, sly shepherds, and vulgar gods will appear. A Narcissus who wastes away from loving his own reflection, an Echo who turns to stone because of the sorrow of love, were truly no longer part of the world.” Arcadia is “reduced to an arbitrary, interchangeable background.”(Leopold, p. 103.) That is to say, the arcadian room-milieu is indifferent to the comic or the tragic, and indifferently can be either.
Leopold, p. 85; see above, p. 155f.
Above, pp.5f..
Below, p 179.
Above, pp.69, 130f., 141f…
See above, p. 134; see Plessner, Laughing and Crying, p. 152: “What is common to laughing and crying is that they are answers to a boundary situation. Their opposition depends on the mutually contrasted directions in which man falls into this boundary situation. Since it makes itself known as a boundary situation only in the twofold way in which every possible mode of human behavior is blocked or thwarted, there are only two crisis reactions having the character of a response to such a situation. Laughter responds to the thwarting of behavior by the irremediable ambiguity of cues to action, crying to the thwarting of behavior by the negation of the relativity of human existence.” In the specious present of the fable, however, there is an ambiguity affirmed at the end of the opera as well (not in the libretto) when Orpheus and Eurydice are united in the stars. There is an ambiguous zone between laughing and crying that remains; it is a case of laughing and crying at the same time, just as with the kiss and the bite. This ambiguity of the kiss would seem to be especially Marinist in character; cf. Monteverdi’s setting, in the Seventh Book of Madrigals of 1619, of Marino’s “Tornate, o cari baci” and “Vorrei baciarti;” see Tomlinson, Monteverdi, pp. 185ff., and Leopold, Monteverdi, pp. 64f.
See below, pp. 209f..; for the difference in Act V of Orfeo see Leopold, pp. 94f.; Maniates, pp. 472f.; Sternfeld, pp. 29ff.; Drummond, p. 133.
See above, pp. 131f.
Leopold, p. 94.
Ibid. , p. 95.
Leopold, p. 97; Maniates, pp. 561f.; Harnoncourt, pp. 126ff.
See above, pp.90f.
Above, pp.98f.
See Leopold, p. 97, for the significance of the lyre in the central scenes of Orpheus and the precedence for in the Mantuan song tradition that includes Poliziano’s Fabula d’Orfeo. See also Celletti, Voce di Tenore, pp. 24ff.
See above, pp.101 f.
See above, pp. 96f. Celletti, A History of Bel Canto, pp. 26f.
Tomlinson, p. 237. In the preceding pages Tomlinson makes a strong case for his “archeologies” over against other approaches.
Musical Quarterly, pp. 346–359.
Tomlinson, p. 240.
Ibid., pp. 240f.
We have already referred in this connection to the practice of the ostinato or ground p g bass above, pp.88f., 105..
Thus we are far removed from Lawrence Ferrara’s Philosophy and the Analysis of Music, or Bruce Bensen’s “Improvising Music: An Essay on Musical Hermeneutics.”
In Angelo Solerti, Le Origini del Melodrama (Torino: Fratelli Bocca, 1903), pp. 57ff. See also Lippman, op. cit., pp. 37ff.
Traced in Leopold, Chapter 3, pp. 104ff.
See Palisca, op. cit.., pp. 431ff.; Leopold, pp. 106ff.
See Harnoncourt, The Musical Dialogue, pp. 29ff., who insists that the “freedom” to declaim lies in a distinction we have to make between the work itself and the performance. See below, pp. 209f.
palisca, p. 432.
For this distinction, see Celletti, A History of Bel Canto, pp. 7, 15, 26, 32f.
See Leopold, pp. 108f.
Ibid., p. 114. But see Harnoncourt, pp. 30f.
Ibid., p. 117.
See Harnoncourt, pp. 129f., who discusses the ways in which “the same bass was harmonized differently”—different harmonic solutions even when the “same voices are supplied” and, we may add, just as the vanishing point can be different for the same scene depicted in a painting with a correlative change in the grid or veil.
Ibid., p. 119. See below, pp.162. Perhaps it would be easier to visualize— “auralize”?—this situation if one has in mind “What child this is” of Greensleves, which is built over a descending tetrachord yielding its own peculiar harmonies.
Ibid., p. 120.
Tomlinson, pp. 207ff. provides a remarkably succinct and fascinating account of Il cannocchiale aristotelico of Tesauro. Cf. also Maniates, pp. 26ff. on Tesauro and Gracián; and Hauser, Mannerism, pp. 297ff. See also Tomlinson, Monteverdi, pp. 223ff.
Tomlinson, pp. 211. The icastic images belong to the “plain, grammatical, proper, and dialectical manner,” the fantastic to the “rhetorical, poetic and figurative manner” (p. 210).
Ibid., p. 211; see p. 242.
See Hauser, p. 298.
See above, p167.
Cf. Plessner, p. 157.
See below, pp. 196f.
Above, pp.93, 102.
For a discussion of the problems inherent in the discussion of truth and verisimilitude, see A. J. Ayer, “Truth, Verification and Versimilitude,” pp. 684–692.
See Whenham, op. cit., pp. 39ff.
See above, pp.133.
Above, p. 6.
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Kersten, F. (1997). Life at the Gap. In: Galileo and the ‘Invention’ of Opera. Contributions to Phenomenology, vol 29. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-015-8931-4_6
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