Musical Offerings, Fall 2017

52 Hall ⦁ Where Art Meets Reason culminating in the Doctrine of Affections. The Doctrine of Affections, which was introduced due to specific, enlightened philosophical thought, directly shaped musical composition in the late baroque era and also directly shaped an understanding of how music affects people. The Doctrine of Affections, or Doctrine of Affections and Temperaments as it is sometimes called, was rooted in finding scientific reasons to explain our emotional, and sometimes visceral, reactions to sounds and music. The Doctrine of Affections was actually a “revival of the ideas of antiquity.” 4 Bartolomeo Ramis de Pareia first suggested music’s relationship to the affections in the body in his Musica practica (1482), but it was not a well-known concept until Marsilio Ficino published De vita comparanda , or Three Books on Life (1489), in which he discussed the links between musical modes, bodily temperaments, and planetary harmonies. 5 Gioseffo Zarlino, in his 1558 treatise, claimed that both musicians and physicians should aim to understand the fundamental principles of harmony in order to explore music’s effect on the body and soul. He suggested that music could possibly remedy perceived illness or imbalance. 6 An affection is the state of imbalance that results from the “animal spirits and vapors” that dispose people toward certain emotions. 7 Accordingly, the Doctrine of Affections presumed that an individual’s mental states, or emotions, could be represented in music through “certain tonalities and meters as well as by distinct melodic, rhythmic, and harmonic turns and figures.” 8 The affections were “the rational connection between tones and the soul.” 9 In this way, specific musical formations could suggest and elicit specific emotional responses. The Doctrine of Affections aimed to locate and reproduce these specific musical formations. Specifically, the German view of affections sought to “understand and explain the physiological phenomena”—that of music begetting emotions—alongside an “interest in the structuring principles 4 Lang, “The Enlightenment and Music,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 1, no. 1 (1967): 96, doi : 10.2307/3031668 . 5 Thomas Christensen, ed., The Cambridge History of Western Music Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 226. 6 Ibid., 226–227. 7 Claude V. Palisca, Baroque Music , 3 rd ed. (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice- Hall, 1991), 4. 8 Lang, “The Enlightenment and Music,” 96. 9 Ibid., 100.