Music as a Liberal Art: The Poetry of the Universe

Abstract

This article explores the place of music in the classical liberal arts curriculum, which consists of the trivium (the arts of language) and the quadrivium (the arts of number). Music is part of the quadrivial disciplines and studied as applied arithmetic. However, as argued in this article, it is also a bridge to the discipline of rhetoric, which is part of the trivium. The article begins with a brief review of St. Augustine’s De Musica, the first in a planned (but unrealized) series of dialogs on the value of the classical liberal arts to the emerging Christian culture of Antiquity. It proceeds to a discussion of music and its relation to the contemporary American liberal arts curriculum. Two case studies follow that address the ontological reality of music as a time-bound medium, and attempts to mute this reality in the service of creating a sense of timelessness. Thus subsuming the temporal into the Divine–what Augustine called “a poem of the universe”. The first case study is Dante Alighieri’s Paradiso, which is a journey through the heavens with each planet representing one of the seven liberal arts as preparatory to the Beatific Vision. The second case study focuses on J.S. Bach’s attempts to create a sense of timelessness in the St. Matthew Passion by the use of musical forms and musical rhetorical devices that tend to abolish time. The article concludes with suggestions on how teachers can use 20th and 21st-century movements in Western art music as pathways to appreciate music’s pivotal role in the Catholic liberal arts tradition.