Skeptics and Believers: Music, Warfare, and the Political Decline of Renaissance Italy according to Francesco Bocchi

Abstract

There is no reason to believe that music has magic powers. But the willingness to accept unrealistic and improbable claims as true is often what animates history, and the ancient claims to music's powers are no exception. In 1572, Vincenzo Galilei wrote to the humanist Girolamo Mei with a series of questions about the theory and practice of Greek music. According to Claude Palisca's reconstruction, these questions included the most fundamental of them all: How was ancient music capable of such marvelous effects, when modern music is unable to achieve them? The intense exchange of letters and ideas that ensued culminated in the 1581 publication of Galilei's Dialogo della m?sica antica e moderna and in a heightened sense of the ambiguous position of modern music vis-?-vis the extraordinary, if perhaps lost, expressive properties attributed to the music of the ancients. That same year, the Florentine historian and polymath Francesco Bocchi published a short essay entitled Discorso sopra la m?sica, non secondo Var?e di quella ma secondo la ragione alla pol?tica pertinente. His aim was precisely the opposite: to debunk the idea that music, whether ancient or modern, possessed any such powers. His argument boiled down to the conclusion that music's real worth lay in its entertainment value, and, as far as sacred music was concerned, its ability to inspire devotion. To enjoy music as an honest pastime was not in itself a bad thing, since even Bocchi acknowledged the utility of leisure as a necess ary diversion from the burden of an active life. However, this was a far cry from the unjustifiably high esteem in which some people held music for its psychological, moral, metaphysical, and medical virtues (all of which were nonexistent, according to Bocchi). There is no evidence in his writings that he had any direct knowledge of Galilei's or Mei's ideas, although a few words toward the end of his Discorso suggest that he was at least aware of the current debate on ancient and modern music: