The Unwritable Sound of Music: The Origins and Implications of Isidore's Memorial Metaphor

Abstract

"The Unwritable Sound of Music: The Origins and Implications of Isidore's Memorial Metaphor." Isidore of Seville opens his discussion of music in Etymologiae 3.15 with a classical etymology of the term "music" borrowed from Cassiodorus's Institutiones musicae, followed by a sentence connecting the ephemerality of musical sound to musical memory which Isidore has paraphrased from Augustine's De ordine 2.14.41. He adds, however, to Augustine's formulation of the dual nature of musical sound-sensible and intellectual-an intriguing statement: "Nisi enim ab homine memoria teneantur soni, pereunt, quia scribi non possunt." The phrase, clearly stating that musical sound cannot be written, has been interpreted variously to mean that Isidore simply did not understand the abstract nature of Augustine's remarks, that he was unaware of the alphabetic pitch notation from Greek theory, and, most significantly, that Isidore had thus provided hard evidence of the nonexistence of neumatic musical notation in early seventh-century Spain. This. article places Isidore's intriguing phrase in a different context from that of music history per se and argues that it offers no evidence at all about the existence and efficiency of Wisigothic neumatic notation or about Isidore's knowledge of Greek notation-although it does shed some new light on Isidore's views about memory in general and musical memory in particular. The context is that of late Latin grammar treatises and the theoretical discussion of the production and classification of sound.