Ridotta alla perfettione: Metaphysics and history in the music -theoretical writings of Giovanni Maria Artusi.

摘要

This dissertation explores the metaphysical, epistemological, and historical strands in the musical thought of Giovanni Maria Artusi, notorious for his polemic with Monteverdi. Although he figures prominently in the history of music as an archconservative critic, the music-theoretical and philosophical underpinnings of his actual writings remain little studied and poorly understood. While not attempting to overturn our basic understanding of the Artusi-Monteverdi controversy, the dissertation strives to deepen that understanding by exploring the intellectual and cultural foundations of Artusi's arguments. Engaging with the frustratingly complex amalgamation of intellectual and musical influences, Artusi and Monteverdi emerge as men largely concerned with the same question: what is the position of modern music vis-a-vis its own history?;The seven chapters investigate Artusi's attempts to map his individual experiences of music onto the structure of human knowledge established through the Renaissance intellectual recourse to Aristotelian science. Artusi adopts and adjusts certain Aristotelian doctrines to make space within a largely Aristotelian structure of human knowledge for a Renaissance conception of musical understanding. It is not that Artusi represents a purely conservative stance. Indeed his ideological acts of comprehension are remarkably flexible, allowing him to make deeper "sense" out of surface aberrance. Thus when an understanding of a musical passage cannot be negotiated within Artusi's remarkably liberal system, it becomes necessary for Artusi to view it as a pernicious misstep capable of overturning not simply one theorist's system but the very conditions of the possibility of knowledge itself. However, Artusi's liberalized theory of dissonance treatment and his incipient theory of musical levels in many ways justifies seconda prattica techniques (perhaps despite his intentions). Indeed, one of the goals of this dissertation will be to demonstrate that Artusi, by pushing the Zarlinian system to its limits, opened the way not to its collapse but to its transformation.;Early chapters examine the manner in which Artusi believed that music as science intersected with musical practice. The ensuing chapters examine Artusi's understanding of music history, his liberal views on dissonance, his incipient theory of levels, and his belief in the moral imperative of modal unity.