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"Music's exclusive function is to structure the flow of time and keep order in it." Igor Stravinsky |
"Without music, life would be a mistake." Friedrich Nietzsche |
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| Coincident with the invention of the printing press, emphasis on analysis informed all disciplines. Around the same time that composers began using notational scores, artists began to rely on sketchbooks and scientists recorded their observations in notebooks. Leonardo and Alberti wrote treatises for young artists on the science and mathematics of art, and urged them to use their powers of observation and to study their subjects from nature, not from imagination. Meanwhile Francis Bacon outlined a new scientific methodology, which was also based on precise measurement from direct observation. And the vocabulary of measurement also appeared in music's new lexicon. Words such as "scales," "measures," "meters," "parts" and "pieces" were used in music as they were in science.* (*Footnote: The apotheosis of this trend in music was reached in the early nineteenth century when the metronome, essentially an upside-down timepiece, became commonplace in music just when the measurement of absolute time was at its height in science. Music, art and physics shared other important parallels, chief among which was the organization of all three based on an intersecting horizontal and vertical. Soon after artists began laying out the coordinates of horizontal and vertical, the basis of perspective, composers refined the coordinates of musical notation, key and counterpoint, using horizontal bar and vertical staff. Almost simultaneously, scientists were greatly aided in their work by the widespread use of scientific graphs which plotted functions, otherwise not visual, on an abscissa and ordinate. A single, favored point of view became fundamental to all three disciplines. In perspectivist art, the entire canvas was designed to be seen by a passive spectator, standing in the favored location several feet in front of the painting. In physics, an external reality could be measured because the observer was peering at it through a telescope from a favored position of absolute rest. In music, the principle of a single point of view became manifest in the form of key. The discovery that key could unify a composition came about in reaction to the florid exuberance of polyphony, which had transformed music in the late medieval period and was reaching a crescendo climax in the Renaissance. As composers attempted to create compositions of ever greater complexity, music became increasingly disjointed. But late in the sixteenth century a group of innovative Italian artists and composers formed the Camerata, intending to resurrect pure linear Greek music in response to polyphonic compositions that, to their ears, was beginning to sound cacophonic.9 They called themselves the Camerata because they met "in camera" behind closed doors (camera in Italian means room), and they met clandestinely because during the Inquisition an attempt such as theirs to free music from the Church's authority could still be considered subversive. In accord with the rise of Humanist sentiment, and the need to hear individual voices, around 1600 the Camerata introduced the idea of the basso continuo -- a shorthand indication of bass line harmony running through a piece of keyboard music usually accompanying the singer -- which returned clear organization and Greek linearity to musical composition. Basso continuo was like a thin stiff rod thrust through the entire length of a composition that lent to the piece a certain sense of unity. As with perspective in painting, the basso continuo served as a horizon line in that it created a regulative framework in which to fit the different melodic lines. A series of harmonic chord progressions were explicitly defined and sounded by the basso continuo. The idea of a home key arose in musical composition about the same time and embodied the same unitary principle. The basso continuo contributed to composers' early recognition of the importance of a unifying key. Key became the favored and privileged tonal center of a composition, corresponding to the perspectivist viewpoint in art and absolute rest in science. One of the founding members of the Camerata was the peppery theorist-composer, Vincenzo Galilei, the father of Galileo. The elder Galilei played an important part in introducing the concept of basso continuo which contributed to the acceptance of a home key. A single key corresponds in principle to the inertial rest frame in science coincidentally discovered by his son! From the time the concept of key was established, beginning in the late sixteenth century, and continuing well into the nineteenth, a composer selected a specific key for each composition and rarely ventured far from this unifying construct. The single home key, like the focal point of perspective and the concept of absolute rest, represents a world whose point of view is monocular and mathematically organized. This principle allowed each discipline to order the parts of any of its compositions into a hierarchical and coherent set of relationships. Alberti's perspective, Newton's Principia, and J.S. Bach's Art of the Fugue each manifest this singular notion, and all represent nothing less than the reordering of thought itself.
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