Abstract
The philosophical background to music in the Middle Ages was ultimately derived from Classical ideas about music, its rudiments, and its place in society. The fact that early medieval thinkers in the West looked in the first place to ancient learning to codify their newly emerging ecclesiastical song (which would ultimately become known as by them as “Gregorian chant”) led to a conflict between the theory of ancient music and the reality of music in the Middle Ages. The uneasy cohabitation of ancient philosophical and cosmological thought with the new and different practical music of the medieval West is an ever-present feature of medieval theoretical literature on music. The extent and importance of this conflict varies from century to century and according to the aims of the theoretical literature in question.
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McCarthy, T.J.H. (2020). Music, Medieval. In: Lagerlund, H. (eds) Encyclopedia of Medieval Philosophy. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-024-1665-7_345
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