Cardano and Scaliger in Debate on the Revival of Ancient Music

Abstract

The rediscovery of ancient ideas about the power of music inspired Renaissance scholars to formulate a tantalizing view of the restoration of the wonderful music of the ancient Greeks. But from the start of this revival, skeptical voices questioned the feasibility of any attempt to establish a historically informed music practice. This article explores the changing status and authority of classical music-theoretical sources in sixteenth-century Italy by analyzing the famous debate between Girolamo Cardano and Julius Caesar Scaliger on ancient ideas about sound, hearing, and the power of music. Both voices mark a pivotal early stage in the emergence of early modern musical science, in which scholars began to study musical phenomena in accordance with a new philosophy of nature but had no established research agenda upon which to rely when doing so. Their attempts to theorize, in terms of natural phenomena, the seemingly inexplicable musical wonders recounted in traditional sources demonstrate that the tradition of Pythagorean and Platonic mathematics could not be easily discarded in the mid-sixteenth century. Cardano and Scaliger inspired later generations of scholars to formulate new theories in which music was valued less for its numerical perfection and supernatural power than for its sensory qualities and natural effect on the passions of the soul—ideas that would come to underpin the development of acoustics and music aesthetics in later centuries.