The Magic Legacy

Scientific soil proved too alien for the Platonic episteme to flourish. It had been rooted in a rich and grand cosmology, but that had eroded away. In both music and art the passionate system quickly withered, becoming clichéd and trivialized. Hermetic learning, not so long ago a connection to real magic, was reduced to little more than stage magic--memory houses, parlor tricks. Lacking the context of a unified system, poetic furor became an instrument of the everyday world, a commodity. Nevertheless, there are three composers of the Baroque period who are often specifically associated with neo-Platonist magic: Claudio Monteverdi, John Dowland, and Johann Sebastian Bach.

The Last Magus

Perhaps more than any other composer of the early Baroque, Claudio Monteverdi embodied the shift from structural perfection to expressive force. His daring harmonies in support of textual passages generated considerable criticism, the most passionate from Bolognese theorist Giovanni Maria Artusi in a dialogue published in 1600, L'Artusi overo delle imperfettioni della moderna musica. This turned into a polemic that would last seven years.

"For [Artusi] there were only two justifications for human actions, the authority of past masters and logical or mathematical demonstration. Faced with Monteverdi's use of a melodic diminshed fourth, Artusi asked, 'Does he have the permission of nature and art thus to confound the sciences?' " [Tom1, p.23]

Further, Artusi argued, since concenti were, by definition, sweet sounding, and Monteverdi's constructions were harsh sounding, Monteverdi could not possibly have produced new concenti. In response, Monteverdi made a Platonic defense of his secunda prattica: his aim was "to make the words the mistress of harmony and not the servant." So, if the foremost goal of music was to stir the passions, then he was free to break the rules for expressive ends, to evidence divine frenzy, composing neither by formula nor by chance. The best composition was one that united semantic and syntactic elements so perfectly that the distinction between its musical and non-musical elements would disappear, and his spirit would thus be in tune--literally--with the cosmos. There is indeed magic in Monteverdi's music; he was a magician in the finest Hermetic tradition.

The Sorcerer's Apprentice

"Semper Dowland, semper dolens." More than any composer of the turn-of-the-Baroque period, John Dowland's name is linked with melancholy. He wrapped himself in its imagery, which drips from both his texts and the unusual cascading fourths of his melodies. It is inviting to posit (as Anthony Rooley does) Dowland in the magical world of Hermeticists John Dee and Robert Fludd, who were his contemporaries. And a circumstantial case can be made--Dowland's travels to Europe even brought him to the Palatinate and Hesse right at the time of greatest fascination with the Rosicrucian Brotherhood. But that is the best case that can be made. There is no evidence that Dowland ever met any of these magia or soi-disant Rosicrucians, and he certainly did not travel in their circles. Even cursory biographical information reveals an extraordinarily naive man, a convert to Catholicism surrounded by political intrigues he did not fully understand, and also a bitter man who felt that he was unappreciated, or more to the point, unremunerated, for his awesome talents. On the other hand, it is vastly oversimplifying the case to claim (as Robin Wells does) that Dowland's use of those symbols had no magical meaning. The works of Fludd and Dee were widely published; Agrippa had lectured in England, surely bringing copies of Ficino if by chance there had been none previously. The symbology was well known at least superficially. Most probably Dowland found the accoutrements of Hermetic melancholy a resonant and useful outlet for his malaise. Fortunately for posterity anti-depressive pharmacology was still in its infancy.