Music and the Scientific Revolution

Two letters from Giovanni Battista Benedetti (1530–90) to the famous Flemish composer Cipriano de Rore (1515–65) mark a turning point in perceptions concerning music’s basis in number. Famous for his daring use of chromatic harmony and melody in his madrigals, de Rore was the ideal composer to consult on this matter. In his letters published in his treatise on mathematics, Benedetti argued that musical ratios should be measured in terms of vibrations rather than string lengths (as the Pythagoreans had done). In so doing, Benedetti’s new thinking helped to reposition music in the realm of acoustical science. In the new system, the significance of numbers had shifted from that of mystical cause to being descriptive of physical phenomena. Yet, in both systems the small number ratios used to express musical intervals were in fact the same as before (in either system an octave, for example, is expressed as 2:1).

Author: Giovanni Battista Benedetti
Title: Diversarum speculationum mathematicarum, & physicarum liber [Book of various mathematical and physical ideas] (Turin, 1585)
Shelfmark: D.1.26
Provenance: Gift of John St George, Queens’ Fellow (1570s)

D.1.26