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There is not very much done in this area, as Angela and others have noted. The topic -- and indeed the whole broader question of the Platonic revival and the transformation of Western music -- is of considerable importance, but few scholars seem to have recognized this (or been able to deal with the sources).

Gary Tomlinson is brilliant, but the magic book is his weakest by a fair margin. I've started into the area, mostly working a bit later, but I've not published much on it yet. Angela and Penelope Gouk you know. There is an excellent book by H. Floris Cohen, referenced quite a bit by Gouk, which examines the mathematical end of the problem (note that Galileo Galilei's father Vincenzo was an important theorist and composer).

I would suggest digging into the work of Claude Palisca, who was for a long time at Yale. He laid the best extant groundwork for the kind of study you're interested in. Look up every lead you find in the latest Grove Online, and see what's been done more recently. You will certainly need to know a good deal about music history and a little theory, but your question is posed such that it looks like you have this.

Last but not least, I'd be interested in discussing the problem with you off-list; these days I'm best reached at [log in to unmask]

Yours,
Chris Lehrich

On 9/1/2014 8:39 AM, Angela Voss wrote:
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Dear Ken,

That is indeed a very interesting thread to follow and to my knowledge no one has. I wonder if it has any associations with the idea of 'phantasia' as the faculty of soul which is able to receive images from the Divine Mind and translate them into sense-perceptions, especially as there is a semi-improvised quality to the fantasia. Reminding me of Ficino's 'diligence and divine inspiration' as necessary qualities for the musician who wants to embody planetary archetypes in improvised (or semi improvised) music.

I'd be very interested in anything you discover around this!  I agree of course, that a coincidence is never 'just' a coincidence.

 

all the best

Angela

 

Visit www.angelavoss.org for the MA in Myth, Cosmology and the Sacred
 
 
From: Society for The Academic Study of Magic [[log in to unmask]] on behalf of Ted Hand [[log in to unmask]]
Sent: Sunday, August 31, 2014 11:18 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: [ACADEMIC-STUDY-MAGIC] Magic and music

Joscelyn Godwin is a good scholar to read and get in touch with. 
He's a music professor and big in the esoteric studies scene.



On Sun, Aug 31, 2014 at 3:03 PM, K R Perlow <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
Has anyone else on this list explored the interplay of Renaissance music and magic?  The particular coincidence which intrigues me is that of the the fantasia as a popular polyphonic compositional form with the rise and fall of the Renaissance neo-Platonist revival. The first known polyphonic fantasia (i.e., a piece so named) was by Josquin des Prez, ca. 1490, and the last (before occasional Romantic and modern revivals) by Henry Purcell in 1680.  I've read Gary Tomlinson's work on music and magic, also Penelope Gouk, but neither addresses that particular topic (and so I consider that sometimes a coincidence is just a coincidence, but that's hard for a Platonist to swallow).  Any other leads?

Ken Perlow


-- 
Christopher I. Lehrich
Boston University
Vice President, NAASR