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This is also the history of the return and further repression of mimesis in the history of music theory, a history that is inseparable from the history of humanism in a weak sense—the revival of ancient philosophy, literature, and arts—and in a strong sense—the determination of the humanitas of man with regard to an already established

metaphysical interpretation of nature, history, world, and of beings as a whole.1 _{In both}

senses, mimesis is the unthought ground by which this humanism is made possible. The fascination of Italian “humanists” with the accounts of the power of music over human feelings and its capacity to shape moral character—mainly those in Plato’s Republic and Aristotle’s Politics—is mimetic: it identifies them as models for something that is or is not reproduced in their own time. The erection of the ancient Greek and Roman worlds as moral, political, and artistic paradigms to which the Renaissance humanists looked up to, produced a rigorous and long lasting notion of mimesis—translated as imitatio and more specifically as aemulatio—a “poetics” in which the purpose of art was to attain the greatness of that unique moment of artistic perfection, as in the models advanced by Vasari and Zarlino.2

As educational practice, Ciceronian emulatio was conceived as the

1 _{Martin Heidegger, “Letter on ‘Humanism’” in Pathmarks, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press),} 245.

2 _{Jacob Burckhardt, The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy (New York: New American Library, 1960),} 145; Schrade, Monteverdi, 34. See note 18 above. The mimetic dimension of the self-fashioning of Italian humanism is also, in Terry Pinkard’s reading, the running thread of Hegel’s analysis of early modern Europe—in the “Bildung” chapter of the Phenomenology of Spirit—where it is trough culture (Bildung) that the individual acquires actuality (Wirklichkeit) through the sublation (Aufhebung) of its “natural self.” This process is mimetic in two ways: first, it involves the positing of the Roman world as a model to be imitated, and specifically the conceptualization of Bildung as a self-fashiong determined by “types.” As Pinkard writes, “to remain in the state of one’s ‘natural self’ was to be ‘base’; to become an aristocrat was therefore to alienate oneself into becoming that type of person who is ‘truly’ noble.” Terry P. Pinkard, Hegel’s Phenomenology: The Sociality of Reason (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1994), 151.

Second Origins—Signor &c. 145 imitation of authors who had already demonstrated their mastery, as well the attempt to further surpass them.3

Artusi references this very tradition in several places, for example when writing that innovation should not trump imitation, “massime di quelli, che sono eccellenti cosi dice Quintiliano nel Libro Decimo.”4

In the case of music, however, the fascination with ancient perfection—in the absence of anything that could be recognized as “music”—was mostly focused on understanding and accounting for what appeared as the almost miraculous power of music, in combination with the attempt to unearth and decipher the few scattered, fragmented, and contradictory ancient writings on music they could find.5

Besides the mimesis of aemulatio, however, the fascination with the effects of music, especially in Plato’s model, puts mimesis in a central place, where it remained out of sight for centuries. As this dissertation argues, the account of mimesis and mousikēin book 3 of the Republic is all but straightforward.6

Palisca has noted how Ficino’s

This analysis of the “tornness” (Zerrissenheit) of European modernity is carried to its last—comically

mimetic—consequences in Rameau’s Nephew, addressed in Part IV of this dissertation. See also John Hamilton, Music, Madness, and the Unworking of Language, (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008), 107-120.

3 _{Thus Artusi writes that Josquin, Clemens non Papa, Willaert and De Rore are themselves models of} imitation, “Non sono questi imitati da tanti, e tanti? Non s’attende adunque alla imitatione in questa facoltà? Alcuni imitano il Palestina [sic], altri Cipriano, altri il Porta, altri il Gabrielli.” Seconda Parte dell’Artusi, 42. For Zarlino, in turn, the composer must “emulate nature—and with it all that nature stands alongside in the unbroken continuum of all things (history, scientia, etc.)—which fuels the engagement of the Institutioni with musica prattica.” Moreno, Musical Representations, Subjects, and Objects, 44. As is well known, Zarlino’s non plus ultra model for imitation is Willaert, he elevates the composer to the level of paradigm, such that the purpose of music theory, as a whole, can be understood as a mimetic mechanism for the production of such paradigms, of exemplary models worthy of imitation, and of the codification of the means of imitating these models. For imitatio and aemulatio in literature and poetry during the Renaissance see Luiz Costa Lima, Control of the Imaginary: Reason and Imagination in Modern Times (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988); Gunter Gebauer and Christoph Wulf, Mimesis: Culture, Art, Society (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 62-88; G. W. Pigman III, “Versions of Imitation in the Renaissance,” Renaissance Quarterly (33:1, 1980), 1-32.

4 _{Seconda parte dell’Artusi, 42.} 5 _{Palisca, Music and Ideas, 3-12.}

6 _{The relation between music and mimesis in ancient Greek thought up to Plato is explored at depth in Part} I of this dissertation. The classic work on music in Plato is Evanghélos Moutsopoulos, la musique dans l’œuvre de Platon; See also Edward Lippman, Musical Thought in Ancient Greece (New York: Columbia University Press, 1964). For a more recent account, see Francesco Pelosi, Plato on Music, Soul and Body, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010). The relation between mimesis and music has been recently addressed in Séline Gülgönen “La Mimesis Musicale Dans Les Dialogues Platoniciens.” Phoenix 68.1/2 (2014): 97–111; for mimesis in Plato in general, see Gebauer and Wulf, Mimesis, 31-52 and Stephen

translation of Plato and the lack of technical texts on music misled sixteenth-century

readers—from Zarlino to Caccini and Monteverdi—into assuming that melos,harmonía

and logos stood simply for melody, harmony, and text in the modern sense, thus leading them to affirm the primacy of the word over music.7

This, however, is not the only problem with the reception of the Platonic account of the nature of music, specifically in the politico-philosophical context of the Republic. In my reading, the passage is determinately obscure, as it relies on a performance of Socratic ignorance that affirms the powerful capacities of music only to deny any further logical knowledge of them. In doing so, he establishes a specific relation between music and law, mousikē and nomos, which is precisely what is at stake in L’Ottuso’s

intervention. It bears clarifying that, although sixteenth-century readers did not read in the same way as we do today, a text like the Republic produces problems of interpretation that go beyond the issues of translation remarked by Palisca. Sure enough, they are

problems of translation, in which the distance that separates readers gives the text a certain kind of agency that exceeds the intentions of authors involved in their translation and reading. Thus, as argued in Part 1 of this dissertation, it is only by attending to this history, to its historiography, explicit or under erasure, that we can know anything about mimesis. Lacking any self-identity and any originality, lacking any origin, any arche, and therefore any telos, mimesis is not outside the history that attempts to bind it and write it down. That is why we must engage mimesis as a historical matter, through its historicity. The strategy is not quite straightforward but it results from the “nature” of its object: mimesis is unoriginal, anarchic. It appears and disappears from our sources. It even sets the rules for its own disappearance.

As we saw in chapter 2 when examining the famous passage in book 3 of the

Republic—which Monteverdi will later quote in his Lettera—music, for Plato, or more precisely melos “is composed of three things: speech [logos—translated as oratione by

Halliwell, The Aesthetics of Mimesis: Ancient Texts and Modern Problems (Princeton, NJ: Princeton

University Press, 2009.

Second Origins—Signor &c. 147 Ficino], harmonic mode [harmonía, harmonia], and rhythm [ruthmos, rhythmo].”8

Yet, as I pointed out—and this is the crux of the matter—there seems to be an asymmetry

between the regulation of logos and the regulations of harmonic mode and rhythm: if the myths are appropriate there would be no need for further regulation, but in continuing to discuss the “musical” modes independently, Socrates and his interlocutors point to a mimetic ambiguity in the musical elements: musical elements are supposed to imitate, correspond, or incite mimetic behavior in its listeners, but it is entirely unclear how this is so.

As we saw, at stake was the regulation of a multiplicity and multifariousness for which the aulos was the paradigm. The status of the aulos as irrational, opposed to all

logos, “many-headed,” and even barbarian, is summed up in Socrates’s remark as they go about purging the city from everything excessive and immoderate: “We certainly aren’t doing anything new in preferring Apollo and his instruments to Marsyas and his” (399c).

In its place, we found a codification of ethos that operated as an inscription upon the soul, the body and the community: all three had a similar structure that came to be regulated by a mathematical paradigm, the transcendent order of the Timaeus, which had to be preserved in the community. The guardians had the task of avoiding alterations— changes, tropes—in music since they would also transform the laws: “they must beware of change to a strange form of music, taking it to be a danger to the whole. For never are the ways of music (mousikēs tropon) moved (kinountai) without the greatest political laws (politikon nomon) being moved, as Damon says, and I am persuaded.” (424c). In other words, it is by making musical songs as mimesis of ethē, thus as repetitions of them, that they become laws, preserving and inscribing the nature and social conditions of the community.

8 _{Allan Bloom, The Republic of Plato. (New York: Basic Books, 1968). 398c. Henceforth I will cite this} translation using inline Stephanus pagination. For the translation of these terms by Ficino and their consequences for sixteenth-century humanist music theory (with their “scant comprehension of Greek music”) see Palisca, Music and Ideas, 3-4 and 154-155. I return to Monteverdi’s interpretation of this passage below.

When these texts are taken up in the context of a mimetic humanism in the Renaissance, the multiple layers and complex modes of operation produce real problems of translation. Especially in the tradition that sought to revive neo-Platonicism as a form of natural science, as magic. Ficino’s translation of Plato and his commentary on the Timaeus

would have been cited by all the parties involved in the controversy, infusing the

discussion with a cosmological metaphysics in which the powers of music were of central importance.9

This tradition would produce a “philosophy” or even a “metaphysics” of music out of what in Plato was in fact the philosophical regulation of the place and functions of the members of the State and the articulation of the mechanisms for its production and preservation—either as an actual political project or as a dissertation on the nature of man and the role of philosophy.

Furthermore, mimesis—which in Plato is multifarious, all-pervasive, and ever in need of control—would disappear in the Renaissance under what has been called a continuous fulcrum of similarities.10

In Foucault’s well-known reading of the

Renaissance, mimesis forms a homogeneous ground of similarities and correspondences that are discovered through hermeneutics and manipulated by magic. As Jairo Moreno has shown, the Foucauldian description of this episteme neatly accounts for Zarlino’s system. The taxonomy of correspondences (convenientia, aemulatio, analogia, and

sympatia) explains Zarlino’s retelling of the doctrine of musica mundana and uniquely clarifies that which allows Zarlino to theorize and justify the expansion of the

Pythagorean consonances to account for thirds and sixths in contemporary musical practice by advancing the notion of the numero Senario.11

The binding power of correspondences also accounts for Zarlino’s elaboration of the affective power of music as presented in chapters 4-9 of the Istitutioni, one of the most important attempts to face the troubling absence of the miraculous effects of music

9 _{On Ficino’s philosophy of music, see Jacomien Prins, Echoes of an Invisible World: Marsilio Ficino and} Francesco Patrizi on Cosmic Order and Music Theory (Leiden: Brill, 2015) and Gary Tomlinson, Music in Renaissance Magic: Toward a Historiography of Others (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993). 10 _{Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (London; New York:} Routledge, 2002).

Second Origins—Signor &c. 149 during the Renaissance.12

The rhetoric of this engagement is also paradigmatic: at stake is the question of why modern music cannot reproduce the same effects as ancient music did.13

Zarlino’s discussion of ancient Greek music is significant in many respects. Emphasizing the point that ancient music differs in multiple ways from that of the ancients, he gives a vivid account of the performative practice of ancient Greek music that is not far from some of Eric Havelock’s descriptions of mousikē.14

It can also be described, as is done in chapter 2 with respect to Havelock’s account, as a general acoustic assemblage of inscription.15

In Zarlino’s account, ancient Greek music, or

mousikē, is too a rhythmically-organized physiological, affective, linguistic, and sonorous performance aiming to preserve and transmit, in short to compose, the customs, mores, and laws of the community, its ethos and nomoi.16

12 _{In part II of the Istitutioni, Zarlino in fact paraphrases the pseudo-Aristotelean Problema XIX.28 quoted}

in chapter 2, (above) which explains that the musical form was called nomos because before people “learned writing they sang their laws” Andrew Barker, Greek Musical Writings, vol. 1. The Musician and his Art (Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 198 (see note 52). Zarlino: “Et cosi con tai numeri, percussioni, modi, et concenti; et con la voce humana, esprimevano materie convenevoli et buoni costumi. Nominarono poi tali determinationi Leggi: imperoche altro non è Legge nella Musica, che un modo di cantare, il qual contiene in se un determinato concento et un determinato Rithmo, et metro. Et fuorono cosi chiamate: perchioche non era lecito ad alcuno di mutare, overo innovare in esse alcuna cosa, si nelle harmonie, come etiandio ne i Rithmi, et Metri; ancora che siano alcuni, che dicano, che si ciamavano Leggi: imperoche avanti che si scivessero le Leggi civili, si cantavano tal Leggi in versi al suono della Lira, o Cettera, accioche i popoli più facilmente ritenessero nella memoria quello, che dovessero osservare.” Gioseffo Zarlino, Istitutioni harmoniche, (Venice: 1558; repr. New York, Broude, 1965), 66. Zarlino’s reference for this passage is pseudo-Plutarch’s De Musica, which he paraphrases at length. De Musica was translated by Carlo Valgulio in 1497, who believed it was by Plutarch. Palisca, Music and Ideas, 6. The actual author and date of De Musica are unknown, see Barker, Greek Musical Writings, 205.

13 _{A question that would be repeated by Girolamo Mei, Vincenzo Galilei, Giulio Caccini, and even by} Athanasius Kircher, whose account is closely modeled on Zarlino’s. See chapter 5 of this dissertation. 14 _{Eric A. Havelock Preface to Plato (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1963). See chapters 1 and 2 of this} dissertation.

15 _{On the notion of “acoustic assemblages” see Gautier, Aurality, 22. For various approaches within} classical studies to the notion of mousikē, see Murray and Wilson, eds.; Mousikè et Aretè: La Musique et L’éthique, de L’antiquité à L’âge Moderne: Actes Du Colloque International Tenu En Sorbonne Les 15-17 Décembre 2003, (Florence Malhomme and Anne Gabrièle Wersinger (eds.) Paris: J. Vrin, 2007).

16 _{For an adaptation of the concept of “musicking” to a broader sense of practices that includes that of} mousikē, Gary Tomlinson, A Million Years of Music: The Emergence of Human Modernity. (New York: Zone Books, 2015). On the “ethos theory,” see Warren Anderson, Ethos and Education in Greek Music: the Evidence of Poetry and Philosophy, (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1966); Wallace, “Damon of Oa,” and Peter Wilson, “Athenian Strings” in Murray and Wilson, eds., 259, 292.

Zarlino’s physiological account of the dynamics of musical affection also relies on the Ficinian account and thus traces accurately the pleats within the Renaissance

episteme. As Ossi explains, emotions depend on the variations on temperature (hot or cold) and humidity (wet or dry) in the corporeal and organic sensorial appetite. These elements may be changed through specific harmonies to which they correspond, “as a result of the similarity between these passions and certain Harmonies.”17

The Phrygian excites anger (characterized by heat and wetness), the Mixolydian produces sadness, while the Dorian mediates between the two.

When analyzing how, specifically, the miraculous effects of ancient music can be obtained, as Ossi shows, Zarlino sets up a fourfold set of requirements. These are the three elements that compose melodia, that is, harmony (of sounds or the voice), rhythm (numero or metro), and text (“oratione, overo il parlare”), plus a “sogetto ben disposto,” a well-disposed subject capable of receiving the affections.18

Zarlino presents them in additive form:no one will be moved by a simple harmony that does not express anything; the listener will find pleasure in the proportions, but he won’t be moved unless he is pre- disposed to happiness or sadness. But if rhythm is added to harmony, it suddenly gains great strength and moves the soul (“subito piglia gran forza, et muove l’animo”), as it happens with dance.19

Words come next:

Adding then to these two things the text [la Oratione, cioe il Parlare], which expresses mores by means of narration of some story or fiction, it is impossible to express how great is the force of these three things combined.20

Words then add something entirely lacking in harmony and rhythm. The structure is the same as the passage in Plato’s Republic quoted above where harmonia and rhutmos add nothing to logos that can be determined as content, but only a multifarious multiplicity

17 _{Zarlino, Istitutioni, 70. Translation in Ossi, Divining the Oracle, 52.}

18 _{Artusi makes reference to this passage, especially to a “soggietto secondo ch’egli è disposto à ricevere} cotali passione.” Seconda Parte dell’Artusi, 31. In the same passage, he argues that the similar has effects on the similar, the natural upon the natural, so that artificial harmonies cannot have natural effects. 19 _{Giulio Cesare Monteverdi, on his part, quotes this passage in the Dichiaratione. Monteverdi, Lettere,} dediche e prefazioni, 401.

20 _{“Aggiungendo poi a queste due cose la Oratione, cioe il Parlare, il quale esprima costumi col mezo della}

narratione di alcuna historia o favola; è impossibile di poter dire quanta sia la forza di queste tre cose aggiunte insieme” Zarlino, Istitutioni, 71.

Second Origins—Signor &c. 151 and heterogeneity that must be regulated. They constitute a mimetic supplement that, while adding nothing, complicates everything. Zarlino’s inversion ([harmony+rhythm] + text, instead of text + [harmony+rhythm]) changes nothing yet underscores the