Contexts and functions of music in the Orbis sensualium pictus textbook by John Amos Comenius

Abstract

The present study deals with the content-related and thematic, as well as visual and semantic, contexts in which musical motifs, and words and notions with a musical meaning, are placed in the Orbis sensualium pictus textbook of John Amos Comenius. They can be found in several places in the textbook in both its textual and pictorial components. They are used for a broad demarcation of the fields in which music is presented as a philosophical and aesthetic, didactic, communication, ethical and theological phenomenon. In this way, music is presented to the children of the seventeenth century through the Orbis sensualium pictus not only in the form of its specific object or event, in its metaphorical or symbolical meaning but, first of all, as a phenomenon present in the various fields of spiritual and everyday life. The reader becomes acquainted with music in its various functions, with its form, practical utilisation, relation to other fields of art and science, its position within philosophical concepts, its ethical dimension, aesthetic values, spiritual as well as transcendental essence. The purpose of the present study is to explore the essence, present the origins, genesis, sources for inspiration and objectives of the textual as well as the pictorial form of the music syllabus in this pictorial textbook, most widely used in the European context, and, at the same time, to point out the juxtapositions, links, functions and contexts into which music is placed throughout its contents.