On MusicEver since I read Ted Gioia's Music: A Subversive History I have been reminded of how there are people who have felt obliged to sound off on Augustine's treatise. Paul Hindemith, at least, summarized what was actually in De Musica in the lectures that became Hindemith's book A Composer's World: Horizons and Limitations, but even his summary was a bit idiosyncratic. Hindemith may have misunderstood aspects of Augustine's treatise but he didn't foundationally misrepresent what was going on in the book. Gioa's bid at a history of music has reminded me that when it comes to popular level descriptions of what Augustine did and didn't say about music there are much worse historical and historiographical takes on Augustine than Hindemith's, Gioia's being most prominent.The Fathers of the Church: A New Translation (Volume 4)Augustine, translated by Robert Catesby TaliaferroCopyright © 1947 by Ludwig SchoppISBN-10 : 0-8132-1319-3ISBN-13 : 978-0813213194On MusicBOOK IPage 172…M. Music is the science of mensurating well. Doesn’t it seem so to you?D. It might seem so, if it were clear to me what mensuration is.…Page 173…M. Don’t let this disturb you, that, as you just said, in all things made, music included, measure must be observed, and yet that this is called mensuration in music. …M. For you to understand that mensuration can regard music alone, while measure, from which the word is derived, can also be in other things. In the same way diction is properly attributed to orators, although anyone who speaks says something, and diction gets its name from saying. …Page 174M. Then, mensuration is not improperly called a certain skill in moving, or at any rate that by which something is made to move well. For we can’t say anything moves well unless it keeps its measure.…Pages 175-176M. Music is the science of moving well. But that is because whatever moves and keeps harmoniously the measuring of times and intervals can already be said to move well. For it is already pleasing, and for this reason is already properly called mensuration. Yet it is possible for this harmony and measuring to please when they shouldn’t. For example, if one should sing sweetly and dance gracefully, wishing there-by to be gay when the occasion demanded gravity, such a person would in no way be using harmonious mensuration well. In other words, that person uses ill or improperly the motion at one time called good because of its harmony. And so it is one thing to mensurate, and another to mensurate well. [emphasis added]
One of the key difficulties of talking about Augustine's definition of music as a science of measuring well is that we have more than a thousand years of reception history within which scholarly pundits and counter-pundits have written a lot about what we're supposed to understand Augustine to mean without necessarily going back, at the pop level writings, to what Augustine actually said. People can therefore, a la Ted Gioia's take on De Musica, respond to buzzwords and associations. "Mensurate" would be more readily translated as modulation but, per the translator's comments in this edition, "modulate" is a term too bound up with specific music educational jargon to be used. That is itself another testimony to how English-language discussion of Augustine's never-finished treatise on music has been fraught with the pedagogical reception history and baggage of American music education before Americans are even situated to read an English translation of Augustine!
That part where Augustine has the master in the dialogue say "... we cant say anything moves well unless it keeps its measure" is important for the subsequent punishingly tedious technical discourse on the numbers necessary to conceptualize the counting of rhythms that are constituent part of meter. If we want to distinguish between 3/4 and 2/4 we need to know what 2, 3, and 4 are as numbers and to be able to count them off in proportional ways. But that's merely the mensuration part, the measuring. Augustine clearly built sensitivity to cultural contexts and norms into his definition of music as a science.
If one of the most Pythagorean and neo-Platonic of treatise writers on music could grant this point then we need to be particularly wary of American post-Romantic era polemics that consider any reference to numbers and counting as somehow a terrible math-nerd effort to suppress the magic and beauty of music. To take that path with respect to Augustine is to confuse and conflate the reception history of what Augustine wrote with later post-Pythagorean or potentially early medieval theoretical concepts with Augustine's never-finished treatise. We "could" decide everything about Augustine was wrong because of neo-Platonic trends in the realm of "absolute music" in the era of the 19th century or we could decide that if we go back to the source, i.e. Augustine himself, that what the Romantic era post-German Idealists ideologues on aesthetics decided to use with post-Augustinian ideas doesn't have to be what we're stuck with.
That the art of music has been intertwined for thousands of years with the available science of acoustics and concepts of human cognition (whether ancient pneumatology or more recently psychology and research on cognition) may be a problem for people who want their music to be "magic". But does it have to be? Augustine, of course, converted to Christianity and wrote as a Christian, so for him humanity bearing the image of God meant that there was an element of the image of God in human music. In other words, Augustine's rambles about numbers didn't drain the "magic" out of music as long as you are working with an idea that humans are not "just" the bones and meat and chemicals coursing in their bodies.
A commenter mentioned there's a new translation of De Musica in the works so that intrigues me. I've made a case that if people today read Augustine without, say, a Ted Gioia style pejorative frame, Augustine's technical handling of Latin poetic rhythm could correspond to the concept of "flow" in hiphop but that would depend on contemporary music pedagogues making use of Augustine's theoretical treatise not as a talisman for adjudicating past battles within music pedagogy but as a springboard for using Augustine's unfinished treatise as a catalyst for cross-genre synthesis and musical exchange.
To wade further into this lake of thought would involve a concept that in Baroque music theoretical treatises was known as the doctrine of the affections but I don't want to skip centuries ahead from Augustine's De Musica to what Baroque theorists were getting into.
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