Writing Assignments

Course Readings

  • Introductions and Origins
    • Selections from Plato, Aristotle, and Saint Augustine, in Oliver Strunk, ed., Source Readings in Music History (New York: W. W. Norton, 1950), pp. 3–24 and 73–75.
  • Antiquity and the Middle Ages: number in celestial and social harmony
    • Martin West, “Music Therapy in Antiquity,” in Music as Medicine, ed. Peregrine Horden (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000), pp. 51–67.
    • Marsilio Ficino. The Book of Life, trans. Charles Boer (Irving, TX: Spring Publications Inc., 1980), pp. 3–20 and 158–164.
  • Renaissance perspectives I: Marsilio Ficino
    • Selections from The Letters of Marsilio Ficino, trans. members of the Language Department of the School of Economic Science, London (London: Shepheard-Walwyn, 1975–2015), vol. 1: No. 5 “Medicina corpus, musica spiritum, theologia animam curat” pp. 39–40; No. 7 “De divino furore,” pp. 42–48; No. 92, “De musica,” pp. 141–144.
    • Marsilio Ficino, All Things Natural: Ficino on Plato’s Timaeus, trans. Arthur Farndell (London: Shepheard–Walwyn, 2010), chapters 29–33, pp. 51–71.
    • D.P. Walker, Spiritual and Demonic Magic: From Ficino to Campanella (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1975), pp. 3–29.
  • Renaissance perspectives II: music and melancholy
    • Peter Amman, “Music and Melancholy: Marsilio Ficino’s Archetypal Music Therapy,” Journal of Analytical Psychology 43 (1998): 571–588.
    • Penelope Gouk, “Music, Melancholy, and Medical Sprits in Early Modern Thought,” in Music as Medicine, ed. Peregrine Horden (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000), pp. 173–194.
  • Early modern science and sound I: the philosophy of human and celestial bodies
    • Stillman Drake, “Music and Philosophy in Early Modern Science,” in Music and Science in the Age of Galileo, ed. Victor Coelho (Dordrecht: Kluwer Publishers, 1992), pp. 3–16.
    • Roseen Giles, “The Inaudible Music of the Renaissance: From Marsilio Ficino to Robert Fludd,” Renaissance and Reformation 32, no. 2 (2016): 129–166.
  • Early modern science and sound II: Kepler, Galileo, and the Scientific Revolution
    • Penelope Gouk, “The role of harmonics in the scientific revolution,” in The Cambridge History of Western Music Theory, ed. Thomas Christensen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 223– 245.
    • Owen Gingerich, “Kepler, Galilei, and the Harmony of the World,” in Music and Science in the Age of Galileo, ed. Victor Coelho (Dordrecht: Kluwer Publishers, 1992), pp. 45–63.
  • Music, healing, and the senses
    • Robert E. Butts, “Tickles, Titillations, and the Wonderful Accidents of Sound: Galileo and the Consonances,” in Music and Science in the Age of Galileo, ed. Victor Coelho (Dordrecht: Kluwer Publishers, 1992), pp. 115–127.
    • Linda Phyllis Austern, “Musical Treatments for Lovesickness: The Early Modern Heritage,” in Music as Medicine, ed. Peregrine Horden (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000), pp. 213–245.
  • Medicine and art in the age of the Enlightenment: pills to purge melancholy
    • Penelope Gouk, “Music’s Pathological and Therapeutic Effects on the Body Politic: Doctor John Gregory’s Views,” in Representing Emotions: New Connections in the Histories of Art, Music, and Medicine, eds. Penelope Gouk and Helen Hills (Farnham: Ashgate, 2005), pp. 191– 207.
    • Charles Brotman, “The Undulating Self: The Rhythmic Conception of Music and the Emotions,” in Representing Emotions: New Connections in the Histories of Art, Music, and Medicine, eds. Penelope Gouk and Helen Hills (Farnham: Ashgate, 2005), pp. 209–221.
  • Health and physiognomy: music and the body  
    • Martha Feldman, The Castrato: Reflections on Natures and Kinds (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2015), preface [e-book available via library catalogue]
    • Belcastro, Todero, Fornaciari, and Mariotti, HFI and castration: the case of the famous singer Farinelli, Journal of Anatomy 219 (2011): 632–37.
    • Sigma Xi, Medical Insights into the Castrati in Opera, American Scientist 75, no. 6 (1987): 578–83.
  • Medicine, art, and science: the 19th century
    • David Gentilcore, “Ritualized Illness and Music Therapy: Views of Tarantism in the Kingdom of Naples,” in Music as Medicine, ed. Peregrine Horden (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000), pp. 255–272.
    • Cheryce Kramer, “Music as Cause and Cure of Illness in Nineteenth- Century Europe,” in Music as Medicine, ed. Peregrine Horden (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000), pp. 338–352.
    • James Kennaway, Bad Vibrations: the history of the idea of music as cause of disease (Burlington, VT: Ashgate 2012), excerpts from chapters 1 and 2.
  • Contemporary perspectives in music therapy
    • Michael P. Steinberg, “Music and Melancholy,” Critical Inquiry 40, no. 2 (2014): 288–310.
    • Björn Lemmer, “The rhythm of the heart—the tempus of music—Mozart, Ligeti, and the Rat,” in Music that Works: Contributions of Biology, Neurophysiology, Psychology, Sociology, Medicine and Musicology, ed. R. Haas and V. Brandes (Vienna: Springer, 2009), pp. 167–178.
    • Peter Burke, “Rituals of Healing in Early Modern Italy, “in The Historical Anthropology of Early Modern Italy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), pp. 207–220.