Simon Jackson. George Herbert and Early Modern Musical Culture

Abstract

In this volume, Simon Jackson presents George Herbert at the intersection of his religious devotion, musical practice, and poetic craft. Jackson’s telling is considerately attuned, vibrantly portraying Herbert within his social, musical, liturgical, and literary contexts. A certain liveliness animates the task, as Jackson draws the interpretative focus away from a static decoding of lyric set on the page, towards ‘the act of reading as a communicative process’ (20), as a sounded event in resonant interaction with the phonic life of social play, literary wit, liturgical style, and musical concord. Such interactions, Jackson insists, must attend not merely to ‘high art’ musical cultures of Tudor and Stuart music, but to popular forms of musical play, and their poetic and literary conceits (8). Chapter one begins in somewhat unobvious territory, grounding early modern musical practice in the theological conception of Augustine’s De musica, a fourth-century philosophical dialogue on poetic metre, which moves from the ‘corporeal to the incorporeal’ to light upon a metaphysics of a harmoniously ordered cosmos. Jackson locates Herbert at the twilight of such classically speculative ideas of music’s significance. In contrast, though, to William H. Pahlka’s study of Augustinian poetics and Herbert, in which the speculative idea of musical transcendence wins out over material and transient musical contingencies (28–29), Jackson is keen to retrieve the interactive dynamism between ‘fixity and flux’ (35) by which, whether in the cosmos’ architecture, the concord of body and soul, or the tempered strain of a musical string, the created gift is realized through attuned measure, that harmony may be struck, resonating fleeting sounds and human experiences with eternal realities. Jackson traces concordances of this musical and ethical charge of Augustine’s to ‘rightly measure’ (‘Man’s Medley’) in a series of Herbert’s poems; the echoes in each are brief, but commanding.