Music as Love. – On Some Strange Fragments of Medieval and Renaissance Musical Speculations

The paper attempts to sketch a picture of avatars of the platonic god Eros in a collage of accidentally chosen texts and interpretations. The pieces of the puzzle could be loosely called musical theories of platonic inspiration and are held together by the same basic philosophical intuition. In the works of Boethius and then in the Renaissance, Eros is manifested as an answer to the classical question quid est musica. The collage of the presented texts displays the presence in the platonic intuition of the hidden congruence of the various dispersed modes of our existence, concluding that each fragment of human existence (philosophy, science, music) constitutes nothing else than the avatar of universal Love. Hence this paper acts as a shield against the ever-growing forces of rationalistic, thought, which also under the influence of early seventeenth-century scientific revolution were to reshape the reasoned discourse that induced a disciplined and professionalized fragmentation in man’s existence.

Full Text