Journal article

Publication year: 2011

Pages: 1-29

Journal: Plainsong & Medieval Music

Volume number: 20

ISSN: 0961-1371

eISSN: 1474-0087

DOI Link: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0961137110000173

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Abstract: 
Using well-known texts by Augustine, Jacques de Liege and Guido of Arezzo, this article tries to show that, despite prior misunderstandings, medieval authors of music theory considered it a given that sensuous pleasure was the ultimate goal of music. Only by way of anachronistic readings of the sources have historians constructed an aesthetics that blended aesthetics with mathematical and theological ideas. A close reading of the sources, taking into account their cultural contexts, reveals the intentions of the authors that are at the root of the texts. Those intentions, it is argued, were not aesthetical, and any attempt to interpret them from such a perspective would be misleading. Yet careful consideration of those intentions opens the view for remarks that are truly aesthetical as well as for hints suggesting that aesthetical judgements, while self-evident, were not considered matters for written discourse but for orality.

Harvard Citation style: Hentschel, F. (2011) The sensuous music aesthetics of the Middle Ages: the cases of Augustine, Jacques de Liege and Guido of Arezzo, Plainsong & Medieval Music, 20, pp. 1-29. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0961137110000173

APA Citation style: Hentschel, F. (2011). The sensuous music aesthetics of the Middle Ages: the cases of Augustine, Jacques de Liege and Guido of Arezzo. Plainsong & Medieval Music. 20, 1-29. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0961137110000173