Rivalidad entre los competidores

One could begin to suspect, in the context of what is heard (and not heard) against what is understood, what is available to the senses and what is not, of the authenticity of the musical serata at the house of Antonio Goretti, for which no other record exists (see note 1, above). Neither of the Monteverdi brothers makes any reference to the event nor to how Artusi got hold of the unpublished music. In the dialogue, Luca says that they “were sung and repeated” [Fuorono Cantati una, et due volte], and he presents it to Vario: “[in] order that you may see the whole question and give me your judgment, here are the passages, scattered here and there through the above-mentioned madrigals, which I wrote out yesterday evening for my amusement.” […eccovi li Passaggi che sparsamente, sono sparsi per entro alli sudetti Madrigali; li quali distesi per mio diporto hiersera sopra questa carta.]30

How Artusi got hold of the music is an open question, quite interesting from a historical perspective, and even more important from the philosophical

perspective pursued here. At stake is the status of the musical object and the notions of listening defended by each camp, issues which lie at the crux of the controversy and

29 _{My spelling of “phantastic” aims to evoke the psychoanalytical theory of the “phantasy” as a} protective/productive formation for the subject, operating not so much as wish-fulfillment but as “the support of desire” through which “the subject situates himself as determined by the phantasy.” Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XI. The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, (New York: Norton, 1978), 184-6 and passim. In this respect, addressing the serata as phantasy aims not to cast doubt about the veracity of Artusi’s telling of the events, nor to offer an analysis of his psychology as subject. Rather, it makes the event readable as constituted in a broad field which also constitutes Artusi as subject and writer, thus broadening the perspective from where the controversy can be critically addressed. The phantastic scene locates that which the subject position occupied by Artusi lacks and everywhere desires, namely the self-coincidence of presence to itself and authority, self-sovereignty. It is, once again, not a psychological lack of Artusi as subject, but that which defines him as subject in its lacking.

30 _{L’Artusi, 39v. Strunk Source Readings, 394. Palisca assumes that Artusi knew the pieces from manuscript} copies, without making reference to the fiction of the musical serata, which he takes as part of the theorist’s attempt to “soften the blow” of his criticisms of Monteverdi. Palisca, “The Artusi-Monteverdi

Controversy,” 128. Ossi goes as far as suggesting that the criticisms in the dialogue in fact reproduce the discussions that ensued after the performance of the madrigals, with Vario standing in for Artusi, and Luca for other unnamed interlocutors. Ossi, “Monteverdi, Guarini, and Marenzio’s Cruda Amarilli,” 334. One problem with this interpretation is that Luca is the one who transcribed the music and issues the first concerns about their errors, yet he also voices some defenses of the passages—rhetorically presented to allow for Vario’s sharpest attacks. Once again, even if Artusi is no master of the Platonic literary form (and its paradoxical mimetology), as readers we should have learned by now to approach the dialogic genre as a means for the contestation of the historiographical presuppositions of accuracy, psychological

representation and not as a straightforward means of communication, of a writing that faithfully reproduces the author’s intention. From this perspective, the problems addressed in this chapter demonstrate what a rigorous criticism of mimesis contributes to the practice of historiography in general.

Second Origins—A Fantastic Musical Serata 131 which mark a historical transformation. In the dialogue, Luca, a musical amateur, hears the madrigals performed twice and writes them down afterwards. The verb is

‘distendere,’ (from the Latin extendere, meaning ‘to spread out,’ ‘to place upon,’ to ‘expand’ or ‘dilate,’ or even ‘to relax.’31

In the seventeenth century, moreover, it could mean “to elaborate,” “to explicate thoughts by means of writing”—not, however, in the sense of ‘copying’ or ‘transcribing’ (that is, from another manuscript source). It implies not only a re-presentation or making the music into an object, placing an idea upon a surface and in front of someone (obicere), but moreover a spatialization, an inscription that first and foremost inscribes its distance from its origin. The suggestion, then, is that Luca identified, analyzed, memorized and later transcribed all of Monteverdi’s “faults” that he heard and judged over the course of two performances during a social event.

The mode of listening imagined here highlights the relation between hearing and reasoning that forms the aesthetics, or better, the metaphysics, through which Vario criticizes the exemplars. For Vario, perception is deceptive and is helpless without the aid of reason. “Sense without reason, and reason without sense, cannot render an accurate judgment of any object that involves learning. They can only do so when they are joined together.”32

The new musicians, however, disregard reason and the rules it upholds, aiming to satisfy only the senses.33

Luca’s perfect hearing demonstrates—necessarily needs to demonstrate—that the ear of the theorist is a rational ear—a sovereign eye—that

understands in addition to, or instead or, taking delight on sound. He needs to prove that any transgression of the rational rules of harmony is already comprehended within a purely rational listening, such that he can understand it immediately.34 _{As we will see,}

however, this necessity leads him into an untenable position which exposes the metaphysics of the system he invokes and its limits. Not that its metaphysics is in any

31 _{“Distendere”, Vocabolario degli accademici della Crusca, First Edition (1612), 293;} http://www.lessicografia.it/ Accessed 14 December, 2015.

32 _{L’Artusi, 12. The translation is from Ossi, Divining the Oracle, 44. For an analysis of the relationship} between reason and sense in the controversy, see Ossi, Divining the Oracle, 36-57.

33 _{L’Artusi, 42.}

34 _{Carter, on a different context, uses the hypothesis of Monteverdi’s “aural memory” to account for a} misreading of the Rinuccini’s “Zefiro torna, e di soavi accenti” in the Scherzi musicali setting (1607). Carter, “Two Monteverdi Problems, and Why They Still Matter,” JAMS, (19:3, 2002), 422, n. 9.

way concealed: citing Ptolemy, Vario divides the “Harmonic faculty” [facoltà Harmonica] into two types of judgment, hearing and reason:

The sense judges those things that pertain to matter; reason applies itself to form. From this one gathers that since matter is given perfection through form, so judgment makes it possible that the apprehension of any object is made perfect by reason… What the sense knows in a confused fashion from unstable matter, reason judges in the abstract, divorced from matter.35

We have thus the metaphysical underpinning of the type of listening that corresponds to Artusi’s tradition: an Aristotelean hylomorphism which considers matter to be the

passive, irrational and unstable component in all substances which receives from form its principle and its telos: its ‘for the sake of which.’”36

The division of the senses

corresponds to a similar division in the musical object itself. Specifying what the “corpo sonoro” is, Vario sketches the division of sound into form and matter, citing Aristotle’s

Physics:

The musician calls sounding body that thing from which it is possible to have and obtain a sound apt for harmony. By this fundamental, we can say with Aristotle in the second book of the Physics: Ipse proportiones sunt forme, aut cause formales intervallorum, et consonantiarum. The proportions are the forms, i.e. the formal cause of the intervals and consonance. Thus every interval has its form, and those forms are different from each other, just like every interval is different in size from each other.37

35 _{L’Artusi, 44. Translation in Ossi, Divining the Oracle, 45.}

36 _{Ossi, Divining the Oracle, 45. Incorporating the previous discussions on the role of tradition and the} purposes of science in Zarlino, Ossi specifies that “‘form,’ in this context, is the aggregate of the principles derived by theorists from the natural laws that determine the basic materials of composition (pitches, intervals, etc.) together with the examples gathered from the works of past masters who, through

experimentation, have perfected the art of music.” As explained below, this interpretation fails to identify the crucial recourse to Aristotelean hylomorphism and its consequences, especially within the theoretical tradition of Zarlino. For such an analysis of hylomorphism in Zarlino, see Jairo Moreno, Musical Representations, Subjects, and Objects, 37-41.

37 _{“Chiama il Musico corpo sonoro, quella cosa, dalla quale si possi havere, et cavare suono atto} all’Harmonia. Stando questo fondamento potiamo dire con Aristotile nel secondo della Fisica. Ipse proportiones sunt forme, aut cause formales intervallorum, et consonantiarum. Le proportioni sono le forme, overo cause formali de gl’intervalli, et delle Consonantie; ciascuno intervallo adunque ha la sua

Second Origins—A Fantastic Musical Serata 133 The proportions are the form, or the formal cause of intervals and consonances, and each interval possesses its own form which differentiates it from others. As Chadwick Jenkins rightly points out, Artusi understands the consequences of this hylomorphic metaphysics of listening to be ethical, insofar as preference for the sensual aspect of sound—its irrational “matter” over the ideal aspect of intervals, its “form”—means abandoning the rational and scientific nature of music and the possibility it offers of reaching truth as the telos of the intellect.38

The necessity for a hylomorphic model is already posed by Zarlino, where it functions as the rational legitimation for music, it suffuses music with the “authority” of Nature and marks it with “the imprimatur of reason.”39

The new music, in Jenkins formulation, is rather “anti-music,” the aberrant product of the new musician’s vanity which threatens not only musical and scientific but also moral institutions by producing sounds that refuse to communicate rationally: as Vario says, the institutions ensure that “by not deviating from the principles and good rules one can understand what another says or does.”40

Such an emphasis on communication pervades Artusi’s theory of music, which places vocal music as the natural form of music, making all other forms derivate as imitations of it.41

Artusi’s “science of music,” presented in his L’Arte del contraponto

(Venice: Giacomo Vincenti, 1598), divides music into three kinds: 1) Music that moves the sense alone; 2) Music that moves both the sense and the intellect; 3) Music that moves the intellect alone. The type of music that “moves the senses alone” is called irrational insofar as it lacks any semantic content, it produces sound but not voice, which has sense in addition to mere sound. As is well known, the difference between sound and voice goes back through Zarlino to Aristotle’s division in the Politics between phonēand

forma, et sono differenti l’una all’altra; si come gl’intervalli sono differenti di grandezza al’uno dal l’altro.”

L’Artusi, 44v.

38 _{Jenkins, “Artusi and the Ethics of Musical Science,” 91.} 39 _{Moreno, Musical Representations, Subjects, and Objects, 45.}

40 _{L’Artusi, 41v. cf. Jenkins, “Artusi and the Ethics of Musical Science,” 91.} 41 _{Jenkins, “Artusi and the Ethics of Musical Science,” 92.}

logos, a distinction advanced to justify the notion of man as a political animal.42

The third type, which “moves the intellect alone,” stands in for the traditional musica mundana and

musica humana which it conflates. Of the three types of music, then, only one is “true music,” the one that moves both sense and intellect. This, however, under the condition that only the intellect might preserve the right and power to judge it.43

It is the “communicative nature” of this second type of music, which moves both the senses and the intellect at the expense of the sensual, what Artusi’s phantasy of perfect listening aims to secure: the capacity to understand and preserve the “form” of sounds and to protect the listener from their corruptible, sensuous, and deceptive—in sum, feminine—“matter.”44 _{By having Luca attend the musical serata and easily identify}

42 _{“For nature, as we declare, does nothing without purpose; and man alone of the animals possesses speech} [logos]. The mere voice [phonē], it is true, can indicate pain and pleasure, and therefore is possessed by the other animals as well (for their nature has been developed so far as to have sensations of what is painful and pleasant and to indicate those sensations to one another), but speech is designed to indicate the advantageous and the harmful, and therefore also the right and the wrong; for it is the special property of man in distinction from the other animals that he alone has perception of good and bad and right and wrong and the other moral qualities, and it is partnership in these things that makes a household and a city-state.” Aristotle, “Politics,” in Aristotle in 23 Volumes, Vol. 21, translated by H. Rackham (Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press; London, William Heinemann Ltd. 1944), 1253a10; Digital edition in Perseus Digital Library. 1253a. For a criticism of the philosophical and political problems associated with the distinction between voice and speech as presented in this passage, see Jacques Rancière, Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1999); Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998); and Mladen Dolar, A Voice and Nothing More, 2006. (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006).

43 _{This ostensibly simple division is as rich as it is problematic, and more attention could be devoted to it.} Of particular interest to our purposes is the claim that, as paraphrased by Jenkins, the first type “derives from the sounds of animals such as nightingales and blackbirds; it is irrational in that it owes its existence to irrational animals.” The theory that music’s origins are to be found in the imitation of birdsong go as far back as a fragment in Democritus, which states that “We have become pupils in the most important things: of the spider for spinning and mending, of the swallow for building, and of the songsters, swan and nightingale, for singing, by way of imitation.” DK 154. Lucretius echoes Democritus in De Rerum Natura, which Zarlino cites in his discussion of technics in the first book of the Sopplementi, 13. The Discorso Secondo Musicale (Giacomo Vincenti, 1608; rep. Forni 2000), Artusi’s last work involved in the controversy, issued under the pseudonym of Antonio Braccino da Todi in response to Monteverdi’s Dichiaratione, opens with the argument that “la voce humana fra quelle de tutti gl’animali, ottiene il primo luoco, et l’huomo solo propriamente potiamo dire che parli et Canti; è tutti gl’animali si dicono nell’esser su cantare, non che propriamente sia il vero che cantino, ma per una certa analogia, et similitudine.” Discorso Secondo, 3.

44 _{Cusick correctly identifies the opposition between form and matter as gendered (in the tables of gendered} oppositions, pp. 4 and 8), yet devotes to it little attention in her essay. In the passage in the Seconda Parte dell’Artusi where “Cruda Amarilli” is compared to a “monstrous birth,” which Cusick makes reference to (7), Artusi quotes Aristotle’s History of Animals, to hold that “more consideration must be given to form than to matter.” (Seconda Parte, 21). By pointing out the centrality of this hylomorphic metaphysics, this reading hones into a crucial issue in Cusick’s reading of the controversy. The problem is not only that

Second Origins—A Fantastic Musical Serata 135 and write down the music without even mentioning the manuscripts he in fact possessed, Artusi simultaneously aims to secure the phantasy of the sovereignty and incorruptibility of the musical institutions he seeks to defend as well as the sovereignty of the listening, rational subject that grounds these institutions.

This omission of the written, or better, its repression, fits squarely with the logocentric metaphysics he upholds and with the aversion to mediation he evidences elsewhere in the dialogue. For example, citing Aristotle in the “Ragionamento primo,” Vario distinguishes the objects capable of being perceived by the senses between those that can be perceived immediately, as in touch, and those that require mediation—air, in the case of hearing. Without mediation, the sense would judge accurately its object, but there always happens to be something that impedes truth, either in the sense, the sensible, or in the medium itself, such that the true cannot be immediately judged entirely.

music was gendered rhetorically—however seriously we take rhetorics as a means for the construction of

gender—but that in fact we can read such rhetorics as one side of a pervasive metaphysics that permeates even the attempts to transform such rhetoric, as shown below in the response of the Monteverdi brothers. For a classic account of the unavoidably gendered nature of hylomorphism, see Luce Irigaray, Speculum of the Other Woman (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985). Developing a point from Charles S. Brauner’s response to Cusick (JAMS, 47: 3, 1994), where Artusi might reveal a fear not of the feminine as such but of sexuality, Coluzzi’s reading of “O Mirtillo”, a tour de force of Schenkerian, new historicist, and hermeneutic analysis of the controversy, emphasizes Artusi’s reactions to the sensuality of performance, concluding that “more than the music itself, it may very well have been his precarious subjection to (and participation in) the open display of erotic-like passion and arousal, staged by adversaries of the papal regime from the Este and Gonzaga courts, that provoked Artusi to target Monteverdi, and not another moderno, as the figure of modern music.” Coluzzi, “‘Se Vedesti Qui Dentro,’” 37. However, this very rich analysis, to my mind, ends up missing the point of the gendered reading began by Cusick et al. by

excessively psychologizing Artusi’s response (as well as diverting the much-needed feminist critique of the values and discourses of Western European culture that their work continues to make possible).

Specifically, Coluzzi’s reading reduces the possibilities that an analysis of the controversy opens for a thoroughly critical reassessment of the values and power relations preserved in the several institutions engaged in the conflict by reducing everything to the reaction of a victimized priest by music that “threatened his own moral fortitude,” (30) “who must now separate himself from the ‘sfacciata meretrice’ through public chastisement, backed by reason and tradition, as a means of self-purification.” Coluzzi “‘Se Vedesti Qui Dentro,’” 37. If, in the terms I have been suggesting here, the Goretti event is Artusi’s

phantasy, this is not meant in a psychologizing sense of this type, but rather as a larger symptom of the crisis of subjectivity and institutionality of his time. From this perspective, the attacks to Monteverdi can be