Musical Offerings, Fall 2017

Musical Offerings ⦁ 2017 ⦁ Volume 8 ⦁ Number 2 51 Musical Offerings , vol. 8, no. 2, pp. 51–64. ISSN 2330-8206 (print); ISSN 2167-3799 (online); © 2017, Sharri K Hall, licensed under CC BY-NC-ND ( http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/) The Doctrine of Affections: Where Art Meets Reason Sharri K Hall Cedarville University he Age of Enlightenment describes the period of political and cultural history between the late seventeenth and mid-eighteenth centuries. Music historian Paul Henry Lang describes the Enlightenment as having freed spiritual and practical life from its condition under the authority of the Church. Individuals began to assert their ability to form their own opinions based upon “unprejudiced and undogmatic” thinking. People were relying upon their own thoughts to develop their beliefs about both the natural and the supernatural world. Understandably, this had an unprecedented effect on the thought of arts and sciences and how they relate to each other. 1 The culmination of Enlightenment thought came about by a collaboration of Locke’s and Descartes’s schools of thought— perception and empiricism, respectively. The Enlightenment stood for a new order: the disregarding of all things considered irrational and the relying solely on those things easily proven by rationalism and empiricism. This led to the classification of all problems as relating directly either to natural sciences or to mathematical philosophy. 2 Music did not escape this classification. Because the musical theorists of this era were also the composers of the era, the theoretical reason behind the compositions was connected to the creative process. The composers sought to defend their art by specific assertions of their method. 3 As such, musical composition in the Age of the Enlightenment is a direct result of the philosophy of reason and science as it coincides with music, 1 Paul Henry Lang, Music in Western Civilization (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1997), 431. 2 Ibid., 431–433. 3 Ibid., 433. T