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Article: Music
- Article from:
- Europe, 1450 to 1789: Encyclopedia of the Early Modern World
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 2004 The Gale Group Inc. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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MUSIC
MUSIC.
Just as artists, poets, and men of letters looked to antiquity for direction in the mid-fifteenth century, the musically minded in early modern Europe also spoke of ancient powers lost to modern times.
The composer Johannes Tinctoris in 1474 yearned for t
he former potency in melody "by whose virtue gods, ancestral spirits, unclean demons, animals without reason, and things insensate were said to be moved!" Humanists read in Polybius that music could enrage, elevate, or enfeeble; in the
Republic,
Plato schooled his guardian class in modes that hardened and conditioned them for civic duty and emboldened the weak and effeminate; and Aristotle, in the
Politics,
distinguished ...