Explore the vast range of titles available.

The main expression of humanism in 16th-century music was the idea that acting on the affections meant to translate the words in sounding images, in order to bring them «before the eyes of imagination» of the listener. Oddly, few musicologists explained clearly the reasons underlying the cultural background of such techniques. One of them was a precise doctrine about the way in which imaginatio reacted to forms through the musical equivalent of rhetorical ekphrasis. Moreover, not all the sounding images were rhetorical figures. Most of the ‘episodic’ figures conceived by Franco-Flemish composers at the beginning of the century were mainly ‘symbols’, as products of Neo-Platonic metaphysics. In the last decades of the 16th century, Aristotelianism could counter the richness of Neo-Platonic symbolism only with the idea of imitation as techne, and of the figure as a conventional sign lacking its metaphysical and magic density. Musicians still translated words into music but the golden age of symbols was over, and their word painting became a rhetoric of figures inspired by mere linguistic models.

Why should a journal on Renaissance culture dedicate a section to music? And what is the very definition of music in the context of intellectual history during the Renaissance period? These questions are an invitation to interrogate the historical motivation of today’s separation of musicology from the other fields of the humanities. Mirroring that invitation, this essay proposes to think about the role of musical knowledge in the construction of European culture. The Renaissance period is a fertile ground for a reflection of this sort: it was precisely during the 15th and 16th centuries that European culture saw an extraordinary convergence of mind and work of art and science that established the basis of the modern musical time.

Aristote prétend qu’il serait vain d’exiger le même degré d’exactitude dans toutes les disciplines. Il en va ainsi des réflexions qui suivent, dont une partie repose sur des hypothèses difficiles à prouver. Et c’est ici qu’il faudrait dire, pour reprendre les termes de Rousseau du second Discours, que l’on ne saurait se flatter d’avoir vu ce qu’on ne saurait voir. La raison tient à la nature même de notre matière. En effet, une des images les plus étranges que l’on puisse rencontrer dans les mythes de la création est la représentation de l’harmonie universelle sous la forme d’une vaste toile

Some observations need to be made on the Rezeptionsgeschichte formulated by Erwin Jacobi concerning the work of Jean Adam Serre. According to Jacobi, Serre conceived a mixed system half-way between those of Rameau and Tartini that was favorably regarded by Rousseau, who admired Serre as much as did d'Alembert. The lack of evidence of this positive analysis, publicly disavowed by Serre himself, leads us to take a new look at the latter's position with respect to the major philosophical discussions of his own time. The refutation of d'Alembert's review of Serre's ideas which appeared in the Observations sur les principes de l'harmonie (Serre 1763), reveals a longstanding dispute that can be traced back to the controversy surrounding Blainville's troisième mode (1751). A specific matter -- the search for the tonic of the new mode -- served as a pretext for Serre to elaborate a new theory of the fundamental bass which was more \"precise\" than that of Rameau. At the same time, however, the complex origin of a hybrid harmonic structure, the offspring of artifice and the modal system, inevitably transforms the discussion into a dichotomy between harmony and melody, rational knowledge and creative enthusiasm. The various stages of this controversy reveal a penetrating sense of criticism, original and unyelding.